How To Write A Book That Generates Leads And SELLS Your Course On Autopilot

Getting people who’ve never heard of you to buy your course sounds pretty great, right? But how do you do it? In this webinar Julie Eason will show you the step-by-step process her company uses to write short, simple books that attract leads and convert them into sales.

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How To Write A Book That Sells Your Online Course

In this webinar with Julie Eason of Nonfiction Book Academy, ghost writer of Russell Brunson’s Expert Secrets, you will learn how to write a book that acts as a beacon for your online course. Julie walks through the three magic questions that defeat writer’s block, the funnel strategy that turns readers into students, the three ingredients every persuasive book needs, and the question-based outlining method that makes writing feel easy.

What You’ll Learn

• Why a book outperforms every other lead magnet for course creators, coaches, and experts
• The three magic questions that keep you focused from the first page to the last
• How to move readers from Point A to Point B so the book actually sells your course
• The four ways to weave sales messages into a book without sounding like a sales letter
• Why the old school writing rules were the wrong training and what to use instead

Key Takeaways

• Answer three questions on an index card before you write a single chapter: who is your audience, what is the purpose, and what is your goal
• Brainstorm the major topics that carry a reader from Point A to Point B, then break each one into small, answerable questions to build a question-based outline
• Give the book away with a free-plus-shipping funnel or as a lead magnet, and put every reader on a path to a course, workshop, or membership
• Publish in print on Amazon even if most sales are digital, since a print edition is what earns credibility
• Stop obsessing over whether to be an author and decide, then get a guide who knows the predictable places every writer gets stuck

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Meet Julie Eason, Ghost Writer Behind Expert Secrets

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this webinar training. I am super excited about this one. I am joined by my good friend Julie Eason. She is from nonfictionbookacademy.com, and you can check that out at nonfictionbookacademy.com/sales. Julie is an amazing person for a lot of reasons. The reason I want to bring her here in front of you all is because of her experience as a writer, as a ghost writer, as an organizer of thinking, and helping people get the mess out of their head and into books like she did for Russell Brunson, or I should say with Russell Brunson for Expert Secrets.

If you have not read this book and you are a speaker, author, coach, expert, or someone looking to build an online business around that, this book is a must-read. Julie is the mastermind behind that. When I found out that you wrote this book, I was like, oh my gosh, this is full. It is not just ideas but it is so tactical, so organized, it has all these concepts. We talked about it in the LMScast podcast episode that is going live right now, so if you are watching this live or on the replay, be sure to check out that podcast episode where we get into the story of this book. Julie, welcome to this webinar training.

Julie Eason: Thank you. If you are watching on the replay later, or on YouTube, I want to assure you that as much of a must-read as Expert Secrets is, you have just as much of a must-read in you. I know you do. If you are already working on courses or you already have courses and you are trying to sell them, you have a message, you have a mission, and we are going to get to the bottom of that. I am going to show you exactly how to lay a book out that will bring people to your courses and into your business, because that is what it is all about.

Your Book Is A Beacon In A Sea Of Noise

Julie Eason: I want to kick this off with a little story from the Coast Guard. I heard this story in a marketing conference years ago and it really stuck with me. There is a saying in the Coast Guard that when you are out in a helicopter and you have one basket to save a whole sea full of drowning people, people who are thrashing around after a shipwreck, imagine it is dark and stormy and there are waves everywhere and there is this helicopter with a tiny little raft to lower down and save some people.

When they are asked the question, who do you save, the answer they give is, you save the people swimming toward you. That makes sense, right? If people are swimming away, if there are haters or people not paying attention to your marketing, you do not worry about them. You worry about the people swimming toward you. My question was, how do they know which way to swim? Because in the world of marketing, it is dark and there are waves and there is noise and you are terrified. Whatever problem you have, you are getting divorced, you are losing your kids, you are sick, you are overweight, your Forex is gone haywire, you do not know where to look. All you see is little flashes of light everywhere. Five thousand marketing messages bombard an individual’s brain every day between Facebook, media, TV, and every way marketing gets to us.

What if there were a safe harbor? That is your course, your business, your consulting, whatever it is that you do. There is a safe harbor for those people. All they have to do is know which way to swim. What we do is build your book in the right way so that it becomes a beacon, shining the light out as far as it possibly can, so that people can ignore all the flash and the noise and swim toward a light that is steady, that is bright, that does not go away, and that does not move. A book is permanent. It does not move. It is like a lighthouse sitting on a rock saying, hey, come this way. There is safe harbor here.

The whole point of having a book, you can throw words around like lead magnet or top-of-funnel offer or whatever the fancy marketing names are. I want you to think of it as a beacon that is going to serve you for the next hundred years, fifty years, ten years. It is not going to be a Facebook ad that flashes and goes away, or a YouTube channel that stays around for a little while and then people get distracted and it goes away.

Why A Book Gets 100 Percent Reader Engagement

Julie Eason: Why should you invest all this time and energy and money into a book? We just talked about the fact that it is a solid structure, a beacon, drawing people to you. One of the biggest things I love to tell people is that you get one hundred percent engagement with a book. If somebody is choosing to sit down with your book and read it, there are no flashing lights, no ads, nothing to click, no going off the screen, no scrolling. It is your words and their brain. That is one hundred percent engagement. As long as you write it correctly and well enough to keep their attention, they are going all the way through, and they are going to do whatever you ask them to do next, because they are dying for somebody to trust and a book engenders trust.

That is why a book has a higher perceived value, especially a print book. Print books, ebooks, and audiobooks are the three main versions, and each carries a different perceived value. Why are books so great? Because we were taught in school that the answers are in the book. Where are the answers? They are in the book. That was our first big-kid job growing up, learning how to read, because reading is key to a successful life. That is why books are ingrained in our subconscious as important, and they have a higher perceived value than anything else you can possibly put out there as a lead magnet.

You also have options for upsells across formats. Give away the digital book, upsell the print. Russell gives away the print book and upsells the audiobook for around thirty dollars. Audiobooks are more expensive, even though they carry a lower perceived value, which is bizarre. Psychology is weird. You have a lot of ways to use the book, and we will get into funnels in a moment.

The Status Of Being A Published Author

Julie Eason: You also get to be a published author. Once you are a published author, you are a published author forever. It is a status point that you do not lose, and it is a status point almost everybody wants. Somebody did a survey years ago that said around eighty percent of people believed they had a book inside them, and less than one percent ever write anything, and far fewer sell it, get it out there, and actually have something happen with their book. Lots of really good reasons to invest time and money and energy.

Why Writing A Book Feels So Hard

Julie Eason: Writing a book is so hard. Why is it so hard? If you have tried to write a book, you sit down with a great outline and think, I am going to write an hour a day until it is done. That never works. It is like I am going to start Monday on my diet. Willpower does not work. There is a reason you are struggling with your writing, and the way you were taught has handicapped you your entire life and you do not even know it. It is not your fault, and not really your teacher’s fault, because they do not know any other way to do it.

When you were in school, from grade school through college, you had a teacher who you had to impress. They were the only reader for whatever you were writing. They told you what to write, they told you how long it had to be, and they told you why you were writing this term paper, so you could get a good grade and pass the class. That is what was at stake. In the grand scheme of your life, getting an A in English class versus making a million dollars in your course, the stakes are different now. Your teacher gave you certain parameters and boundaries, and it was assumed that you already knew who you were writing for and why, so you only had to fill in the information.

All you were taught to do was regurgitate information. You were taught to spit out in words the socioeconomic implications of the French Revolution in 800 words or less. You practiced the five-part essay: introduction, tell them what you are going to say, say it in three things, and wrap it up by telling them what you already said. That does not persuade people to take action. That does not make them change their life or buy things. All it does is show that you know stuff. The biggest problem with books, especially non-fiction books by experts, is the first thing they do is think, what do I want to write? They are inside their own heads, and that is completely backwards. All you are doing is regurgitating what you know. You sound smart, maybe, but it does not keep the audience’s attention because it is not about them, it is about you. We are going to learn how to go from the outside in and reverse-engineer a book that actually does what you want it to do.

The Three Magic Questions That Defeat The Blank Page

Julie Eason: I have been professionally writing for thirty years. It started as journalism, moved into copywriting for twenty years, and then all my clients wanted books, so I started ghost writing. Then they started messing up the publishing, so I became a publisher because I did not want them to mess up a great book I just wrote for them. We came up with new rules, because the old way of writing a book does not work. We were not taught how to write a book. We were taught how to write papers.

There are a lot of new rules I teach, but the one I want to share today is the three magic questions. These three questions are going to help you defeat any blank page. You know where the cursor is blinking at you and going, come on, I dare you to write something. I hate the blank page. He is such a bully. We are going to turn that blank page into a co-collaborator, actually a partner in self-expression, because when you learn how to do it with the new rules, suddenly the blank page is like, all right, let’s go, what you got. It flips the frame around. These three questions also make any writing you do more persuasive, from an email sequence to a landing page to your course notes, any kind of funnel copy, any articles, any keynote speech, any webinar.

The First Magic Question Is Who Is Your Audience

Julie Eason: The first question is, who is your audience? Who are you talking to? It sounds obvious, but there are problems. It is your avatar, the people going to buy your course, your students. When you were in school, the audience was the teacher. If you had a great teacher, like my sixth grade science teacher Mr. Brocco, who forced us to do Friday stand-up oral presentations, then maybe the audience was your class. But most likely it was your teacher. You added certain things to impress them and keep their attention. They were looking for certain things. Well, your audience is looking for certain things too.

The problem with everything you know is that it is too much. You know too much. That is why we get writer’s block. You are an expert with so much information in your brain, and you are a giving person who wants to share it all, so you try to jam it all into a book. Readers say, what is this, it is too confusing, or it does not keep my attention, or I do not need this. That is how people give up. It is too much. Figure out who your audience is, and we will refine it in question two. Some people say, but I have more than one audience. When you are online, what do you do? You make a different landing page, you write a different email sequence, you customize the message.

You have to do the same thing in a book, but it is hard to do that in an easy way. Most people say, I just want to write one book, I do not want to write fifteen books. You could write fifteen, and many people will, but figure out which of your audiences you are most frequently speaking to. Write down what you know about them. How old are they? What is their education level? What is their income level, if that matters? All the things you need to know. Write it at the top of an index card. The answers to these three magic questions go on an index card, and staple it to your computer. Do not forget these things. When you forget the answers, that is when you get lost and stuck. It happens every time, in between your start and halfway point on your first draft.

The Second Magic Question Is The Purpose Of Your Book

Julie Eason: Question two is, what is the purpose? Why are you writing this book? Some people call it the big promise. What are they going to get out of it if they read the book? Are they going to lose weight, learn how to do Forex, sell their house, teach their kids how to read? There is a purpose. It is not to tell them everything you know about your topic. If that is your purpose, you are going to bore them, confuse them, and they are not going to buy your course. What it does is make the reader feel inferior, like you know too much, you are above them, and they will go find someone more accessible, which is your competitor. We do not want that.

Figure out the purpose by asking, where is this audience at Point A? Where are they when they start reading? Most importantly, what do they believe that is wrong? What objections do they have? Where are they in their minds? If you are in weight loss, where are they physically? Let’s take weight loss. They have one hundred pounds to lose. They have given up all hope of ever losing weight. It is my genetics. I have fibromyalgia. There is no way I can ever lose weight. That is Point A.

We wrote a book that took a lady from thirty thousand a year to ten million in three years, because that was Point A for her people, and her Point B was, I think I can do this. That was the only purpose of the book, called Code Red Revolution. The only purpose was to get them from I give up to I think maybe I can do this. If you have a Point A and a Point B, you have a book, because the book is everything in between. Anything else you know about the topic does not belong in the book. This is setting your parameters, the way your teacher told you the top three reasons slavery was bad. This is you setting the parameters, because you do not have a teacher and you know the topic better than anybody else. What is Point A? What is Point B? The only thing that goes on your index card and in your outline is the stuff in between those two points.

The Third Magic Question Is Your Goal As The Author

Julie Eason: Finally, what is the goal? Why are you writing this book? What do you want to get out of it? Do you want to sell a course, have people hire you to consult, get booked to speak? Maybe all of those. Do you just want them to change their lives, donate to your non-profit, plant a victory garden? Put that at the bottom, because if people forget the goal or do not think about it up front, they write a great book, but the action they want does not happen. They do not sell a lot of courses. They say, but I wrote a great book, everybody loves it, I have three million five-star reviews on Amazon, why does nobody buy my course? Because you did not know that was a goal in the beginning, and you did not include the things that need to be included to make that happen.

Everything has to be aligned. Write those three things down, answer the questions first, then start at the bottom and work back up to make sure everything aligns, starting with your goal, because you are the one putting in the blood, sweat, tears, and money. Start with your goal. Go up to the purpose. If I take them to Point B, will they be ready to convert, ready to buy my course? If yes, that aligns. Then check, am I talking to the right person? Yes. You have a book. That is the hardest part, and it is the thing you have to remember all the way through your book, your course, any piece of sales copy. Same three questions: audience, purpose, goal. The problem with writing is you could write anything and write forever. You want things to happen, so we put guidelines and parameters in place.

Serving Multiple Market Segments Without Writing Fifteen Books

Chris Badgett: Stephen is talking about different market segments. He has second-income earners, homeworkers, new-career people, covid-19 homebound. How do you focus the person?

Julie Eason: For covid-19, that is a blog post. You could call it an emergency situation. You want this book to last. You want it to last fifty or a hundred years, with truths that stay relevant. If you wrote about covid-19, by the time it got published it would already be irrelevant. Write a short article or an ebook for that.

For the others, you can do it a few ways. Write different books. Write different chapters. Write the overall frameworks, but one of the keys to a successfully converting book, where readers go from the book straight into your course, is having free resources available. Lead magnets in your lead magnet. Say, hey, I have a great interview series about this particular subject. If you are in this audience, go check it out, because we are going deeper into what you need for that market. That takes planning. If the goal is to get them on your email list, add value with the book, and sell them the course or membership later, you need to plan that out and route them to your website to get resources.

One ninja trick I tell people is that instead of a PDF or blog post, make the free resource an audio or a video. People have a subconscious reaction to a PDF that they could have had in the book. If it is an audio or video, they say, oh, here is my email, all day long. Give it an obvious reason for being outside the book.

Purpose Explained Through The Story Of Expert Secrets

Chris Badgett: Jose wants to hear more about the purpose. Using the book you wrote, Expert Secrets, what is the purpose of that book for ClickFunnels or Russell Brunson?

Julie Eason: We wrote DotCom Secrets first. The purpose of that book was to get people to understand what a funnel was. ClickFunnels almost did not make it because people were not getting it. They did not understand. Russell was doing webinars and trying to teach people, and they still did not get it. He said, oh, that is because they do not know what a funnel is. The purpose of that book was to get them from Point A, I have a struggling business, to Point B, you are struggling because you do not have a funnel, so go buy ClickFunnels.

In Expert Secrets, the goal was to expand the market to experts, to people who knew stuff and wanted to share it in the form of courses and webinars, and the only way they were going to be truly successful was by building a mass movement. Point A was, I have this knowledge. Point B was, here is why and how you should build a mass movement, because that gives you tons of people who come into your funnel. If Chris had written Expert Secrets, Point A would have been, I have this expertise, and Point B would have been, here is why and how you should have your own course. Then go buy LifterLMS. The purpose is really for your audience, and the goal is for you. The goal and Point B are the same. That is the conversion point.

Writing About Fast-Changing Topics Like SEO

Chris Badgett: Deborah is asking about how you do this with a fast-changing topic like SEO.

Julie Eason: A friend of mine wrote one of the first books about Facebook, and she wrote every little thing about Facebook. She wrote that book eight times, because every time she released it something would change. You do not want to do that. My friend Rich Brooks wrote a book called The Lead Machine and had that exact problem, because he runs a digital marketing agency and SEO is a big part. He said, I cannot talk about super-specific tactics, because they will be outdated by the time it is published, and even if not they will be outdated in two years.

He had to go broader. He looked at it from a bird’s-eye view. What are the truths about SEO? Search engines are here and they are real, and it is not just Google, it is Amazon and YouTube and everything else. You should not try to game them. Keywords are important. What is backlinking, what is anchor text? Those things do not change even though algorithms change. Step back a little and look at a magnified view rather than the tactics. Go for strategies. Say, oh, by the way, if you want to learn the actual tactics of getting more backlinks, I have a course. Your course sells the tactics. The book explains the how, moving readers from, I do not even know what SEO is, to Point B of, oh, now I get it, and I need to be able to do this myself or hire someone.

If you have a membership going with your site, you can have a monthly report about what is new. That is recurring revenue. A paid newsletter is great. One thing I would caution you about is the anytime-there-is-an-update-on-this-topic-I-will-update-this-webpage approach. That works for about two months, then you get tired of it or the audience forgets about it. Get them into your world. Get them to opt in for something they can actually buy and stay in your world.

People Still Read Good Books

Chris Badgett: Saleem is asking about the perception that reading habits are going down. How do we get past that concern?

Julie Eason: First of all, I do not believe reading is going down. People do read. There are a few reasons. Part of the reason the act of reading looks like it is going down is that the quality of books being published is abysmal for the most part. People pick up bad book after bad book after bad book. They will read a book that is good and captures their attention and is focused on them and their problem and getting them from Point A to Point B. Even if it were true that no one reads, the perception of a published author does not go away. That is more important than ever. There are a lot of things out there like guaranteed bestseller status, but the bestseller status thing is not as important as having a book that people consume, read, love, and immediately go and buy whatever it is you want them to buy.

Whether or not someone reads your book, if they come in contact with it, they know you are an author, which immediately puts you above your competition. They are going to judge you based on what they see when they look at the book. Is the cover professionally designed? When they look inside on Amazon and flip through a few pages, does it make any sense? Is it well written? Is it well edited? Does it have halfway decent reviews? All of those are trust signals that people are judging whether or not they ever read your book. It is important that if you decide to do it, you do it well. It is so easy to publish now. A million books get published every year, and 99.9 percent of them are terrible. The good books get talked about, and word of mouth carries them.

Using Your Book Inside Your Sales Funnel

Julie Eason: Let’s talk about how to use your book inside your sales funnel. I use the word funnel because I have been indoctrinated by Russell’s world from writing his books, but you do not have to have a specific piece of software. You can build a funnel on Shopify, in WordPress, in anything. All it means is you are getting people in the top with a low-cost or free lead magnet and progressing them through a buying journey rather than asking them to click around and hoping they find something. It is just leading them down a path. You clicked on this button, therefore this is the next thing, this is the next thing. It is just a word. It does not mean you have to buy certain software.

Once you have your book, what do you do with it? Everybody thinks, I am going to sell it and make a million dollars. You do not make money selling your book. You can make some, and if you are Brian Tracy or Seth Godin or Russell Brunson, you can make decent money on the actual purchase. But more often, especially if you have a sales funnel and online courses, giving away your book at the front end is more lucrative in the long run.

Where To Sell Your Book Beyond Amazon

Julie Eason: There are pricing strategies I cannot get into now, but here are a few ways to sell your book. You sell it on your website. You keep one hundred percent of the profits. You do not keep one hundred percent of the revenue, because you have to pay for printing and shipping, but you get one hundred percent of the revenue.

Then you have Amazon. You absolutely want your book on Amazon, even if you plan to give it away, because that gives it legitimacy. People get interested in a book and the first thing they do is check it out on Amazon. They look at the reviews, look at the description, use Look Inside. You need to be there, because if you are not, they think, oh, it is not a real book. It is not hard to put it up there. You do not have to print a million copies and stick them in your garage.

You can also sell your book through other people. Who do you know with the same target audience? What companies do you know with the same target audience? What physical products would benefit from your book alongside them? Any major appliance that is trending, like the Instant Pot or the George Foreman grill, has an entire army of books written to supplement it. The appliance companies put out books that go with them, and every other internet marketer has a book on Amazon about how to use the George Foreman grill and what recipes to use. You can piggyback on other people and other companies and other products.

You can get your books into bookstores. Bookstores are the worst places to sell books, because the system is rigged, and has been rigged since the nineteenth century, to favor big traditional publishers. You can get in if your book is a mainstream topic that someone browsing a bookstore might buy, or if it is professionally produced. You can self-publish and get into a bookstore, but it has to be done a certain way and available through certain distribution channels. That is a whole other webinar. People used to say you cannot self-publish, no bookstore will touch you. That is not the case anymore.

You can also do non-retail special sales, which are any places besides a traditional bookstore that sell books. A university bookstore is one example. A military base is another. I have a book called The Work at Home Success Guide, and we are trying to get it into PX’s, because there are so many military spouses sitting at home who want to work but move around too much for traditional jobs. There are gift shops, libraries, schools, homeschool suppliers. Libraries are actually one of the biggest buyers of books. If you have a mainstream topic, like the how-to-teach-children-to-read example, that is a no-brainer for a library to buy many copies of that book and the whole series. Homeschooling is popular right now, so it is a great time to have those books available.

The Free Plus Shipping Book Funnel

Julie Eason: Giving your book away is more effective in most cases for online-savvy audiences, mainly because of the psychological trigger of the word free. Oh, I got a book for free. If it is a great book that people really want to read, they read it. If it is not, they say, great, now what do I do with it? We are hardwired not to throw books away. I have books from conferences that were terrible, but I could not physically throw them away. You just do not throw away books. So we pass them on or put them on our bookshelf, where the brand is looking at us in the face. Ten years later, I find it and think, oh, this was not such a bad book after all, or oh, I was going to hire that person to speak. Books have long tails.

A free-plus-shipping funnel is very popular right now. You have probably seen it. Buy my book, I already bought the book for you, all you have to do is pay shipping. You give the book away and have them pay a 7.95 or 8.95 shipping and handling charge, which most of the time covers the shipping. You are still down three or four or five dollars for every person who takes you up on the offer. But immediately after that, you have an upsell for your course or an introductory level of your course, sometimes two or three upsells, sometimes an upsell and a down-sell. Russell ends up with a two hundred dollar purchase at the end of every book he gives away. That does not count monthly recurring on ClickFunnels.

He gives away as many books as he possibly can, because he has that kind of return. He gets to pay JV partners and affiliates. When we were doing DotCom Secrets, he paid every single person who sent someone to the website where he was giving the book away twenty dollars per book. A free book, and he is giving twenty dollars to the referral source, plus paying for printing and shipping. It looks like he is down forty bucks, but he is actually up one hundred and fifty. This is popular in the digital marketing space and might be getting old. Most niches do not see much of it. If you are not in the digital marketing and make-money space, you are probably fine.

Giving Your Book Away At Keynotes And Trade Shows

Julie Eason: Another way to give your book away is at keynotes or presentations. Back-of-the-room speaking. Hey, I have a gift for you. Or put a book on every seat in the room that they get to keep. It is a huge sales piece they take home no matter whether they were listening during the presentation or not. If it is interesting, they read it.

You can give it away at trade shows. This is one of my favorite ways. Everybody gives away pens and candy and hats. If you give away your book, that is something that is actually going to convert them into a customer. It is far more valuable. It also lets you be at multiple trade shows without a massive sales force. Buy a spot in the trade show’s goodie bag and put your book in there. You can be at every trade show across the country. You can also put your book on other people’s thank-you pages, other people’s funnels, do email list swaps. There are many ways.

Why Airport Bookstore Placement Is Pay To Play

Chris Badgett: One question I was always curious about, what is up with the airport bookstore? They are super small. Where do those choices come from?

Julie Eason: That is a pay-to-play. It is set up for the traditional publishers. The books you see there are participating in what is called co-op marketing. The author pays around twenty-five thousand dollars to have a few copies of their book in that store, as part of the advertising budget. It is a weird system set up long ago, before digital publishing existed and before we had other ways to get our books out. Everyone says, I want to be in the airport bookstores, and it is like, okay, great, that is really hard to do and really expensive. Even the books you see from traditional publishers, those authors have paid ten, fifteen, twenty-five thousand dollars for that placement. Any book you see in a Barnes and Noble that is face out, that author paid for that placement. Anyone you see on the table, all of that is paid. It is not based on merit. It is not a democracy. There are mechanics in place, money is there to make money, and the margin is tiny, so they have to know it is going to sell.

The Three Things Every Persuasive Book Needs

Julie Eason: There are three things you have to have in your book if you want it to convert into a sale for something else, or even to convert into reading the book in the first place. Buying the book is a conversion point. Deciding to want it for free is a conversion point. Opening the first page is a conversion point. Every page they turn is a conversion point, and you have to keep up that pace. People think the only conversion point is at the end, when they buy the course, but that is not true. You have to keep getting them to commit.

The more micro-commitments a person makes, the more likely they are to make a big commitment. That is persuasion research. In the case of a book, just opening it and scanning is a micro-commitment. I am willing to spend five minutes skimming through this. Then, oh, this table of contents is amazing. Table of contents is your best sales tool, by the way. It looks really interesting, I have to see what is in chapter seven. Another micro-commitment. Then they read chapter seven, another micro-commitment. Then they go back to read the first six chapters. Then they sign up on your website. All of that is micro-commitments building trust. This is the person I am trusting with this problem.

Inspire Readers So They Believe They Can Do It

Julie Eason: The first of the three is you need to inspire. You have to be inspirational in your book. Not woo-woo kumbaya, unless kumbaya is your business, in which case go for it. The whole point of inspiring people is to help them believe they can do it. They have to believe that whatever you are sharing is possible for them, because the first thing they will do is say, well, that is great for you, Russell Brunson, you are this digital marketing god, you have been doing this forever, I could never do that. That is a huge objection. People automatically assume an author is a superhero with special powers, so you have to inspire them with stories of when you were not a superhero, of clients and their journeys, of other people in history who had similar journeys. You need to inspire with stories so they say, oh my gosh, I can do this.

The Code Red Revolution was all about that. She has seven really simple rules, and her ten million dollar business is built off of drink water, eat real food, and sleep. That is basically it. How do you write a book about that and use it to make a difference in people’s lives? We had to inspire. We had to put in a ton of success stories. When you are reading a weight loss magazine or a fitness magazine, what is the first thing you do if you are a woman? You go to the success stories. Oh my God, I am just like her, I can do this. Success stories work. There is always a before and an after. The power is in the during, but most people do not show the during. They just show: before I was one hundred pounds overweight, after I am surfing. Readers need to see they can do it.

Educate Readers So They Know How To Do It

Julie Eason: The second thing they need to know is how to do it. You have to educate them. It is no good for them to believe they can do something if you do not tell them how, because they will find someone else who will, and they will buy that person’s products and courses. Educate so that they know how to do the thing.

Sell Additional Resources So They Actually Do It

Julie Eason: The third thing, and people do not always like this word but I love it, is you have to sell additional resources and support. Otherwise they will not do the thing. They believe they can do it. They know how to do it. But when was the last time you believed you could do something, knew how to do it, and said, I am going to write a book, oh never mind. It gets hard. It goes on the back burner if there is no accountability, no continued guidance. That is why I guide people on how to write their books. If there is not something like that inside the book, and you do not have a way to get people to your website, they will never do the thing.

Maybe they will never do the thing. Maybe they will. A really good book will help people even without your help, but then they want to share the book, because they had success and want to talk about it, and people ask them about their success, so they connect with you anyway. It is called the ripple effect. Christy, the Code Red Revolution author, built her entire business on this ripple effect, because people have amazing success. Some buy her program, some do not, some do her online challenges, some do nothing but read the book, and they have amazing success. Selling in a book is about support, resources, and additional ways those people can connect with you, because they trust you now and they want you to help them.

Why A Book Is Passed Around Nine Times

Julie Eason: One more thing about selling. It has been studied and proven that a book is passed around about nine times before it dies. You might know who bought your book. You probably will not, but you might, if they went through your funnel and you have their email. You do not know if they left it on an airplane and somebody found it and read it and hired that author for twenty thousand dollars. That has happened to one of my clients. You do not know who gave that book to their friend. You do not know who bought it for everyone they know for Christmas. That is why your book is a beacon. It is pushing out the light and doing the work for you. People halfway across the world who may never see your Facebook ads in a million years got your book because they found it on an airplane. You cannot do that with digital marketing.

Four Ways To Sell In A Book Without Sounding Like A Sales Letter

Chris Badgett: Deborah says she needs to sell more. In this audience there are people who are too focused on selling and people who are not selling at all. If somebody has an adverse reaction to sales and marketing, how do you wiggle them loose?

Julie Eason: Oh man, I wish I knew. When it comes to books, people fall into one of two camps. They are like, this is a sales letter, this is a two hundred page sales letter, and I am going to write it that way. There are a lot of books out there like that, but people see through it. They know what a sales letter is now. It is really obnoxious most of the time.

I teach four ways to put sales messages in a book without saying buy my stuff. Expert Secrets is full of sales messages, but you do not realize it. What you are doing is breaking false beliefs, reframing, inspiring, doing it in ways they remember. You are dropping dopamine and serotonin into people’s systems. Part of our framework in Nonfiction Book Academy is how to get people addicted to your content using brain chemicals, because every feeling you have and every experience is just a chemical that drips out of your brain into the rest of your body. If you know how to drop the chemicals, you get them addicted to continuing to read, buy, and consume. That is why gamification works in courses. Every time they hit the next level and get that little bing, subconsciously they are hooked, like Pac-Man eating the little things.

The first way is what I call 3D calls to action, which is bringing people from the book to a website with resources and support. Hey, I have a video on this. Hey, I have an audio on this. Put them at the end of every chapter, or on one big long page at the back, or both. The second is seeding. Russell seeds like a crazy person in all his content. Our inner circle member Liz Benny did this thing in blah blah blah, and this is her success story. He drops seeds inside sentences. His client so-and-so did this. My client Christy. My client Russell. That plants, oh, she has clients. In your course teaching five-year-olds to read, mention this was a success story we had.

The third is advertising in the book itself. Every book on your shelf, especially fiction, has advertising. Look at the back. Here are other books by this author. Here are ways to get in touch with the author. Here are other books by this publisher. Some books have ten pages of advertising in the back. It is your book. You are the boss. Put whatever you want in there. People expect ads in the back. Having a big ad for your course in the back of your book is not a big deal. The fourth is having a companion resource that has more value than the purchase of the book itself, like a workbook, a quiz, or a video series.

Turning A Book Into A High-Ticket Workshop

Chris Badgett: Douglas says one or two seats in one of his workshops could generate as much revenue as the book would in a year. How do you make the turn from the book to a high-end workshop that may require travel?

Julie Eason: Offer a high-value bonus in the beginning of the book, like a companion workbook, a quiz, or something they opt in for that has more value than the purchase of the book itself. I helped a friend write a chapter for The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords back in the day. Every copy has a big banner that says fifty dollars in free Google ads. It is twenty-five to buy the book and fifty dollars of free Google ads to go get. Set up your system, your conversion point, and your funnel so they go to that event. Lead them in a little at a time with something relevant that lives between Point A and Point B.

Get them on your mailing list, then send them through the sequence. One thing you could do is a video hot seat with someone who went to the event, interviewing past attendees about their success, results, and what they learned. Offer that as a free video series. Hey, I have this video series you would love to watch. You do not have to mention your event. Say it is all of our most successful students giving away their secrets. They will go check that out, and it is, oh, by the way, this was filmed at such-and-such event. Want to come?

Handling Negative Reviews On Amazon

Chris Badgett: Deborah is concerned about authors ending up with negative reviews on Amazon. How do people accidentally end up with overwhelming negative reviews?

Julie Eason: Either you have a competitor hiring people to do that, or you wrote a really crappy book. In Nonfiction Book Academy we have a whole module on market research. One of the first things we have people do is look at all the competing books in the same market. We want your book to stand out. There are probably two hundred books in your market that are exactly the same and do not do anything. If your book stands out, you win over everybody else. Go look at the negative reviews and write down everything they are complaining about. If every one of those fifteen reviews says it reads like a sales letter, there is a clue. Do not make it sound like a salesman. If it says, yeah, this is great for so-and-so because she is a millionaire but I could never do that as a poor person, then write in a specific story about how to do it as a poor person. Use negative reviews on other books to make your book better. Do the same with courses.

Realize negative reviews is a tactic competitors will use against you. It is harder to do that on Amazon now than it used to be. The best thing is to write a really good book and get the people you know loved it to leave a review. Every time someone says they loved the book, say, hey, would you put that on Amazon? People do not think to put reviews on Amazon. In your book, say, did you love this book? Go give it an Amazon review. Ask them, and do it regularly. The only thing you can do about bad reviews is push them down with more good reviews. If you only have good reviews and no bad reviews, sometimes that hurts trust, like she got all her friends to give good reviews. A couple of three or four stars actually adds legitimacy.

What Publishing A Book Really Costs

Chris Badgett: Jose is asking about the cost of the whole process from start to finish.

Julie Eason: It depends. How are you going to publish it? How many pages? What trim size? Hardcover or softcover? There is no way to guess exactly. The price range could go anywhere from two thousand to two hundred thousand dollars if you have a really good ghost writer. Doing all the writing and publishing yourself is not free, and going super cheap is going to hurt you in the long run, because you will miss things you do not know. Every time you see 9000 on a barcode on the back of a book, or if there is no barcode, that book cannot be scanned. That means you will never get a proper rating. Every time somebody scans a book through a properly done barcode, it gets reported to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks numbers for bestseller lists. Depending on your goals, you need certain information in that barcode.

Little things like that, or starting your chapters on the left-hand side of the page. Never do that. It subconsciously triggers people to think, this is not right, I do not know why, something is off. It lowers trust and lowers the professional quality of the book, just because you started chapter two on the left-hand side. A poorly designed cover will kill you. People judge by the cover, judge the back cover, which is where your sales copy is, and judge the table of contents, which is your best selling tool. If you use the table of contents like a piece of sales copy, that will make readers buy right there, if it is the right audience. Self-publishing is not free. It will cost a few thousand dollars one way or the other. Your best bet is guidance, so you keep costs low and do not hurt yourself in the process.

Why A Kindle-Only Book Hurts Your Credibility

Chris Badgett: Stephen is asking if publishing Kindle-only, digital-only, is a big disadvantage.

Julie Eason: Yes, absolutely. People say, I just want to write an ebook. That phrase alone says it is not as valuable. Print books are where the value is. Audiobooks are where the money is. Digital books are where the attraction is. Being able to offer a digital book cheap or free is a great way to attract people. But you need to have a physical book. Even if you do not have them pre-printed, and they are only available on Amazon as print on demand, you need to have it available as a print edition. If not, people will not think it is a real book. We have been in this digital world for twenty years. People know it is oh, it is a free report they are just calling an ebook. The perceived value is not there. You really want to have it available as a print book, which means, going back to the previous question, it has to be formatted a certain way and have certain things in place.

Why Now Is The Time To Write Your Book

Julie Eason: Right now, most entrepreneurs and business people are redoubling their efforts. Most are paying more on Facebook ads because they want more market share, or their competitors are pulling back and they are pulling back too, afraid to act. If you are pulling back, you are out of the race. But if you are putting money, effort, and time into a lot of short-term content and Facebook ads, all you are doing is adding more flashes in the night. Quick little flashes in the pan. Even a podcast you start takes time to build, and guest posts are flashes. Not a beacon. You could be spending this time writing a book that will bring you clients and customers for the next fifty years. It could completely change your life. The next Facebook ad you do is not going to change your life. It might bring you money short-term, but it is not going to change your life.

Now is a unique situation time-wise. People always say, I will do it later, there is always more time. And yeah, or you may never do it. Either way, your audience needs you right now. We talk about urgency and scarcity in marketing circles, and so much of it is manufactured. Countdown timers, only four left, on a digital course. There are not four left. There are as many as you want. People know that. The real urgency is that you help parents teach their kids to read, and for God’s sake they are sitting at home and their kids need to read. You are solving real pain. You are teaching people how to invest properly so they do not lose their entire life savings. You are helping keep people away from drinking. One of our authors has an amazing book that helps people quit drinking. She is literally saving lives, helping parents stay together, keeping people from losing their kids. It is urgent for those people.

When I started my career, I read a book called The Well-Fed Writer by Peter Bowerman, all about freelance copywriting. I did not know that existed. I would not be here talking to you today if it were not for that book. If he had not written that book when he did, I may never have found it. So how many students and customers might you have with a book, and if you put that book off by six months or a year, how many people may never find you, or who are already gone and solved their problem somewhere else with a competitor?

Why Accountability Is What Actually Gets Books Finished

Julie Eason: You can try to write it on your own. Watch a million YouTube videos of mine. But you have to have accountability in place and guidance, because you are going to get stuck. Every single author, myself included, gets stuck in very predictable places. The benefit of having a guide is having someone say, okay, author freak-out number three, here is how you fix it, go finish it, just move on, this is what is going on, here is how you fix it, keep going, do not stop. Relentless support. Someone who believes in you. Someone who is not going to let you give up on yourself. That is what we do in the Academy, and I would love to have you, because I genuinely love books and I genuinely love entrepreneurs. It is my honor to help as many people as I possibly can.

Book Development Comes Before You Write A Word

Chris Badgett: How do you talk people off the ledge? I have tried and failed, written really short books, and I am doing exactly what you are talking about, focusing on disappearing content that scrolls down into the abyss of social media. How do we pull back? A book takes a lot of effort.

Julie Eason: Right, and that is why people will sell you the quick tactics. They will sell you the book in a box. Write a book in a weekend. Write a book in a day. Write a book in an hour. It keeps getting smaller. At what point does this stop? It takes time. It does not have to take ninety days. We have had people go through the Academy who finished in twenty-two days. That is our record. When you have the right structures in place, when you learn high-level topics, question-based outline, Point A, Point B, all the things we teach, and I have designed this course to be work-as-you-go. The reason people get stuck is because they learn the stuff and then try to do it. No. Let’s do it as we go along. Watch the video, do it, watch the video, do it.

Most of the teaching content is spent on book development, which is the early stages before you start writing. When you learned how to write in school, you learned step one, write an outline, step two, write the draft, step three, if you have time, go back and revise it, but you probably will not because you are writing really fast. They completely skipped Step Zero. Step Zero is book development. Step Zero is what is your audience, what is your purpose, what is your goal, what are the high-level topics that are going to get people from Point A to Point B, what is the conversion point, what are the sales pieces I need in place, and most importantly, how do I write my outline so that it pulls me forward, so that it uses my brain the way my brain naturally works.

The Question-Based Outline That Pulls You Forward

Julie Eason: Your brain is hardwired to answer questions. It cannot not answer a question. If I say, Chris, why should I have an online course, do you have any trouble answering that question? Not at all. You rattle it off because you are an expert. If I ask, how does a beginner get started in Forex on day one, what is the very first thing I need to do, you are not going to have a problem answering that question. But if I say, the benefits of having an online course, which is how you would normally write an outline, you put bullet points with sentences with a period at the end, or worse, just keywords, like benefits, problems. That is hard. It gets stuck in your brain. You think, but there are so many benefits, which one is first, oh my God what if I forget one, oh crap that one should have gone number two not number one, and I have to rearrange. People spend years writing an outline just because of the way they were taught under the old rules.

They were taught that the format and the Roman numerals and the big A’s and little a’s were more important than what the outline is supposed to do, which is pull you forward and make the writing easy. We create your entire outline in the form of a question after question after question. You can go ten minutes at a time. You are picking up your kid from soccer, they are running late. Great. I can answer a question and move forward in my book. I do not have to go from page one to page two hundred. I can jump around. Oh, I am really on a roll, and I just talked to a client about the main problem with beginners in Forex, so I am going to answer that question and write it down. You just worked on your book. You cannot not answer questions. As long as everything in your outline is asking the right questions, you are never going to get stuck that way.

How Much Of The Process Is Outlining Versus Writing

Chris Badgett: Real quick, one question before we open it up to the audience. How much of the process is outlining versus writing? Is it a third, a half, a tenth of the whole thing?

Julie Eason: When I do book development one-on-one with clients, it takes two to three hours, and I basically do it for them. I ask about their goal, their audience, their Point A and their Point B, and we build it together. When people go through the course and do it on their own, the outline development part can take anywhere from a few days to a week. I do not want it to go longer than a week, because that means something in their brain is stuck. Either they are not clear on Point A or Point B, or they are trying to talk about a topic that is not aligned with their goal.

The process itself does not take long, and once it is done, the writing goes so much faster. I wrote a book in a week once using this exact question-based outline, because a client needed it ready for a radio show and I did not have the luxury of getting stuck. That was possible with thirty years of writing experience behind me. That is the whole point of having a guide. You lean on a process instead of inventing one from scratch. My goal is for you to have your book, because there are people out there who genuinely need it. It is not an ego piece. If you are an actual expert, your brain is focused on the people you serve, and those are the people I help.

Traditional, Indie, And Hybrid Publishing Paths

Chris Badgett: Brevi asks, what happens once the book is finished on your platform or inside Nonfiction Book Academy, do you assist in the publishing process?

Julie Eason: There is a writing master class and a publishing master class. Before you get to the publishing one, the last thing we have you do in the writing master class is figure out the right publishing avenue for you. You may be one of the three percent of people I recommend go to a traditional publisher. It depends on your platform, book topic, and a lot of things. There are a tiny few reasons you would want to be traditionally published. You may want to go with a hybrid publisher. We have a publishing company that will do it for you, and we have another course that walks you through screenshot by screenshot how to do it yourself.

The options are self-publishing and traditional publishing, with subtopics. Traditional publishing gives you massive distribution but no marketing. They take all the control and ninety percent of the profits. You have to really need that distribution to go that way. Some of our clients, including Russell with his most recent book, self-published and later bigger publishers came in like, oh, let us publish for you, we will help you get into bookstores, oh let us give you an advance. You can be self-published and then become traditionally published later. Under self-publishing, there is do-it-all-yourself, and there is Indie publishing, where you set up your own imprint, meaning publishing name, and buy your own ISBNs. In another country like Canada, they give you one for free. You publish it as if you were a publishing company that just happens to publish your books. That is how Hay House started. Louise Hay could not get her book published, so she did it herself, and now they are the biggest self-development publisher in the world. Then there is hybrid publishing, where you split the profits differently. They do the work but take a percentage. You pay up front, usually five to ten thousand dollars.

The Truth About The New York Times Bestseller List

Chris Badgett: What are the options to become a New York Times bestselling author, only through traditional or Indie?

Julie Eason: Here is the dirty little secret behind the New York Times list. It is a curated list, which means they put whoever they want on there. It has nothing to do with a democratized meritocracy. People think there is one list of sales and whoever sells the most gets on it. That is not how it works. If it is an Amazon bestseller, and any publisher promising bestseller status is really just using a big mailing list, Amazon has thousands of bestseller categories and changes the bestseller every hour. You have tens of thousands of chances to become a bestseller if you know how to work the algorithm.

USA Today and Wall Street Journal are a little more legit. The New York Times, I know for a fact, has invisible rules. My friend Chris wrote a book called Chris Beat Cancer, put out by Hay House, fantastic book. He worked really hard because he wanted the New York Times bestseller title. He sold fifty thousand copies in a week, which is a huge number. They said, sorry, most of them were on Amazon, so we are not going to count it. They have a weird ratio, they want geographical diversity, they have all these rules. Nobody really knows. If you make New York Times, kick-ass, good job. If not, do not obsess. Just serve your customers. Russell Brunson has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made hundreds of millionaires, and that is his focus. My personal guess is the bestseller list thing was invented to promote traditional publishers, because there was nothing else when it was invented. Now marketers know how to game systems, work algorithms, sell books, run pre-order campaigns with bonuses. Traditional publishers have no clue how to do that, so they get annoyed and do not want it to be a level playing field, which is sad. Whatever, just keep serving your people.

What’s Included Inside The Nonfiction Book Academy

Chris Badgett: Another question coming in is about what is inside Nonfiction Book Academy. Are there templates?

Julie Eason: We do not have a template for your book, because your book is unique and we want it to be the beacon in your industry. Half the books in your market have probably already been written on a template that is easy to spot, and I am not going to hand you the same one. What we do have is a step-by-step way to develop your book, plan your publishing route, and get it written so that it stands out. We do market research, then walk you through the book development process so you finish with a real outline before you write your first sentence.

What we really have is accountability, and that is where most people actually get stuck. We run a Facebook group where authors check in, and we hold weekly coaching calls where I or my managing editor answer questions live. There is a Successful Author Dashboard that tracks your word count and turns red to green as you hit your pace. Set a deadline for when you want the book done, and it reverse-calculates how many words a day you need to write to get there. We also have a manuscript template covering everything that has to go into a manuscript before you publish it, front matter, back matter, the copyright page, all of it. And we keep a black book of every contractor and every piece of software we use at Planet House Books, so if you want the same cover designer we use, her name and contact are right there.

Second Edition Versus Writing A Brand-New Book

Chris Badgett: Stephen wrote a book in 2011. Should he do a second edition or start over and write a new book?

Julie Eason: Start a new book. A second edition is technically ten percent or less different content. You will get more bang for your buck writing a new book even if it is similar. You could do both, write a second edition and something else. If your first book sold well and did what you wanted, the people who bought the first will buy the second. It is a continuum, so you have a bigger reach for your ripple effect. We are doing this for Christy right now. She said, we could do an updated second edition. I said, let’s write a second book, because everybody who bought the first will buy the second, and new people who buy the first or second will go back and buy the other one. Another stream.

How Long Your Non-Fiction Book Should Be

Chris Badgett: Douglas asks about the appropriate length of a book that serves the purpose. He is thinking fifty pages seems short.

Julie Eason: Fifty pages is way short. The average non-fiction book is about two hundred pages, which is about fifty thousand words. When we ghost-write books for clients, we shoot for between forty-five at the low end and sixty-five at the high end thousand words. If you divide word count by two-fifty, that will give you roughly your page count, unless you have a lot of characters. It really depends on the trim size, meaning how big the book is, how much white space, how many pictures and diagrams. The size of the book should feel valuable. I bought a book on Amazon once because the sales copy was really good. It arrived and it was a fifty page little paperback and I thought, seriously? It did not feel valuable. Choose your trim size appropriately and make sure it has enough white space but not too much. A hundred pages is about as low as you want to go on a normal size, eight and a half by five and a half book with mostly text.

Simon Sinek is a famous author and people love his books. He wrote Start With Why and other dense heavy business books, and he also wrote a comic book called Together Is Better. It is a parable, all pictures, like a children’s book, but it sells for twenty-eight dollars at Barnes and Noble. I bought four copies. It is a brilliant book and it is tiny. The Go-Giver is another example, a tiny little parable book that sells like crazy and keeps my friend Bob Burg working and doing well. Who Moved My Cheese is another. They tend to have an intro that explains the book, then a tiny story, then discussion at the end, because otherwise there are only ten pages. It really depends.

Getting Your Own ISBN And Understanding Barcodes

Chris Badgett: Deborah is asking, can self-publishers get an ISBN that does not start with nine?

Julie Eason: The nine thing is a barcode, not an ISBN, but the ISBN needs to go into the barcode. We show you software that will generate that. Barcode is not an issue. You do buy your own ISBN, and this is the difference between self-published and Indie published. Self-publishers go to Amazon, and Amazon says, hey, let us give you an ISBN for free, we are so happy that you are on our platform. Technically that means Amazon published it. They are not going to tell you that. That is their ISBN. If you are in the United States, you go to bowker.com and buy a block of ISBNs. They are expensive for one. We tell people to buy ten, because if you have an ebook and a print book, you need two. Audiobook, three. Workbook, four. Every format has its own ISBN. In Canada and Germany, they are free. Each country distributes them differently. One is about one hundred and twenty five dollars, but ten is around two hundred and twenty five. Buy in batches. The actual website you buy from is myidentifiers.com, and that is only for US people.

How To Ask Better Questions For Your Outline

Chris Badgett: How do we increase the quality of the questions we ask to build the best outline?

Julie Eason: Remember Point A and Point B. The first step before doing the questions is to brainstorm all the major topics that get people from Point A to Point B. You inspire with stories. You educate with frameworks. You have to have certain frameworks in place. Whatever you teach, you have frameworks. You have your six-step system or your five pillars or whatever. Those go in the chapter-level heading. Then underneath, you ask questions.

When I was writing The Profitable Business Author, I needed an example, so I pretended we owned a dog spa and were dog groomers. I do not have a dog. I am a cat person. I have never been to a groomer in my life. But I wrote an outline using this process and people were literally emailing me asking where they could buy the book. I told them, it is not real, I made it up. I asked myself, what would my target audience want to know about starting a dog grooming business? I would want to know where to learn how to dog groom. That is education. I would want to know about location, business licenses. Those are major topics. Then, okay, location. What do I want to know about location? Why is a good location important? What makes a good location? What if I live in a rural community? How do I get people to come to my location? How do I advertise at my location? Break the questions down underneath the chapter heading.

A rule of thumb, if it takes you more than ten minutes to answer the question, you probably need to break it into more questions, because it is too big. Make sure your questions are small enough and simple enough. Remember, your audience does not know what you know. You are the guide. You are the Yoda. They need to know the stuff you take for granted. Everybody knows how to write an outline, right? No, they do not. You need to ask simpler questions than you think. You do not need to prove how smart you are. You need to help them understand. But if your target audience is advanced, ask advanced questions. One of the steps in the process is getting beta readers. There is a very specific process around which people you want to read your book first and what you want them to tell you.

Just Decide To Become An Author

Chris Badgett: If somebody has been on the fence, or tried to write a book for five or ten years, what do you have to say to that person, and if they are ready to move forward, what should they do?

Julie Eason: Do not think about the writing part or the publishing part or the distribution part or all the hard parts. All you have to decide is, are you going to be an author or not? Are you going to help people with a book? Are you going to build a beacon for your business that is going to last way beyond all these little flashes in the night, or not? If not, that is totally fine, go do something else, but stop obsessing over being an author. Do not say, I am going to be an author someday, because we do not know how much time we have, and the people who need you right now need you right now. There is no time. If you decide, I want to be an author, I want to finally get this book out of me, then you need a guide who will help you do that, because if you have been trying for ten years, you cannot do it alone. Russell tried for nine years. He is a great writer. He already had a publishing contract nine years old. He said, Julie, I cannot do this, I need you. Just jump in the pool. Stop thinking about how cold it is. Just jump in. Say I am going to do this. I am going to commit to doing it. Now is an amazing time. You will make it out the other side as an author as long as you really put yourself into it.

Chris Badgett: Julie, thank you for coming. This has been amazing. If you like what you saw here, go to nonfictionbookacademy.com/writing and check out the LMScast podcast episode we did with Julie.

Julie Eason: You are so welcome, and thank you all for hanging in there. I am happy to answer questions. There are emails on the website. If you have a question, just email me and I am happy to help.