Writing a book is beneficial for more than just your normal fiction author or traditional novel enthusiast. In fact, publishing a book can be one of the most advantageous steps for business owners and entrepreneurs. So, how exactly can an entrepreneur benefit from writing a book?
Podcast host Sandeep Mallya is joined by Michelle Vandepas on his podcast, “Marketing Mantra”. In this episode, Michelle helps shed a light on just how helpful a book can be for entrepreneurs. Furthermore, she shares some practical tips on how to jump start the process and integrate your book into your business model. Michelle has made her career helping people write and publish books to help them grow their personal or business brand, and therefore is one of the most qualified individuals to speak on this topic.
Sandeep Mallya is an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. He founded his own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, and now shares resources about all things marketing, entrepreneurship, and business on his podcast. Join him and Michelle in this insightful conversation here, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Don’t forget to follow him and GracePoint Publishing on all of their social medias listed below to stay in the loop with everything we have going on!
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Full Transcript
Welcome to the Marketing Mantra podcast brought to you by 99signals.com. A place to find top notch content on a wide range of marketing topics, including SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, blogging, and more. Take your blog to the next level and achieve massive traffic growth by learning top blogging strategies discussed in the marketing manager podcast. And now here’s your host, Sandeep, Malia.
Hey everyone, this is Sandeep Mallya from 99signals.com. Thank you so much for joining me today. In this episode of The Marketing mantra podcast. I want to get right into today’s interview with our special guest, Michelle Vandepas, co-founder of GracePoint Matrix Publishing, Michelle has made a career helping people write and publish books to help them grow their personal or business brand. She’s a leading expert for entrepreneurs who want to share what they’ve learned with the world by becoming an author. As a book coach and publisher, Michelle has worked with thousands of authors over the past 20 years to publish and promote their books and their work. She has been featured in numerous media outlets speaking about her passion for purpose and profit. And she’s going to be featured in an upcoming documentary called Wisdom From Thought Leaders alongside the Dalai Lama and Sting. She’s also an esteemed TEDx speaker and TEDx speaker coach. You’ll find lots of great information in this episode, including different ways you can publish your first book and the mistakes first time authors should be avoiding. Michelle also revealed some of the basic things first time authors should know before they write and publish their first book. You can learn more about Michelle and Michelle bandpass.com. And you can also visit her publishing website Gracepointmatrix.com. And finally, you can watch her TEDx video on procrastination, which I highly recommend. You will find links to all these resources in the description of this episode. Thanks to all of you for tuning in. And now let’s get to the interview.
So happy to welcome you to the marketing mantra podcast. Michelle, really appreciate you spending the time with us here today. I love this we can connect all the way across the world at a time when we’re supposed to be distancing you and I still get. Thanks for having me. Great. I read a lot of books at least 100 books a year, both fiction and nonfiction combined. But I’ve never really been serious about publishing my own book. So I’m really excited to learn more about the publishing side of the business. And I’m sure our listeners are too. And given your experience and expertise. I’m sure you can share a lot of insights with us today. Yeah, I’m looking forward to sounds like it’s time for your books Sandeep.
Yeah, I hope so, too. Before we get started, I just heard that you’re going to be featured in an upcoming documentary called Wisdom From Thought Leaders, which will also feature the Dalai Lama and Sting. So can you tell us a bit about this project and how you got involved in it? Oh, well, it’s so interesting, because I don’t know now exactly what’s happened to the project. I heard it sold, and then it sold again. And so I think we’ll all wake up from this pandemic, and things will have changed. But it was one of those instances where I met somebody who knew somebody who invited me to come film for this project. We were all interviewed separately. So I didn’t actually get to meet Sting, which would have been very cool. But we were all interviewed. And it’s going into a documentary about thought leaders about what we think about money and manifestation and how to create a successful business. And what does it mean to be successful? Because obviously, the three of us and all the other leaders would have very different takes on that. And I, you know, I’m hoping that it can it goes, after we wake up from this slowdown on the economy, I hope it picks back up and actually goes, yeah, I hope so too. Sounds like a really interesting documentary. And I was really looking forward to seeing what it was all about. So hopefully, fingers crossed after this pandemic is over, we’ll get to see the documentary on Netflix or prime. Yeah, thank you. So for those of us who don’t know much about you, for those of my listeners who don’t know much about you, or haven’t seen your TED talk on procrastination, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do? Yeah, so I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life, I’ve really started way. I mean, really, I I’ve been on record saying I started when I was like seven, but mostly since my 20s. I’ve been an entrepreneur. And I’ve been doing online business from the very beginning, not in the same way some other people do. I’m not a big affiliate marketer. I’m not a big blogger. But I’ve had my business online, connecting with clients doing Skype calls, doing Zoom calls, all of that from the beginning. So I understand how that world works. And because of that, I’ve been able to shift every time the economy shifts or every time there has been some ups and downs. I’ve been able to shift a little bit I could because I I’ve always had online clients. But I’ve also had a manufacturing company. I’ve also owned a restaurant. And I published my first book about marketing 21 years ago now. And because of that, I learned so much about publishing, right? This is way before the days of Amazon and, and, I learned a lot. And I started helping other people understand what it was to publish, and how to market and I checked all my marketing expertise and my intrapreneurial and true expertise, and started consulting with other authors. And that morphed into a publishing company. So now I have a publishing company with a partner. And we’re a traditional publishing company with the Library of Congress number, and, you know, have distribution channels and all that. But I still work as a consultant for people who prefer to self publish, or want to go a different direction. There’s so many options these days. And but that’s how my story started. Thank you for sharing that with us. And obviously, we know there are different options, and we will cover that in this episode. But before that, what I would like to know is you work with so many entrepreneurs at your publishing business, right? And entrepreneurs, like you said, who come from all walks of life? What do you think is the number one reason all entrepreneurs should write a book? Well, it’s instant credibility, it forces you to really explain and understand your own expertise. In the process of writing a book, you get really clear about what your own expertise is, what you’re willing to stake your put your stake in the sand, on write what you’re willing to say, this is what I really believe this is what I know, this is who I am, this is what I’m here to teach. And in the process of writing, you can clarify your own message, become even more of an expert, because you’re gonna go deeper into what it is you’re here to share. So you become even more of an expert. And then when you write it, you have that foundation, where other people also see you as an expert. It’s a great lead magnet, it’s a great way to market yourself. But it also helps you transform internally and to step into your own expertise at a much higher level. Once you’ve written a book, there’s no going back, you’re like, Oh, I’ve published a book. I’m an author. Now I do you know this, because the process of going through and writing and editing makes you really look at everything that you’re writing in a new way, and be willing to publish that. And so you do become you’re an expert in in that material. And what do you think are some of the basic things entrepreneurs should know, before they write and publish a book, they should know who the readers going to be or who they hope their readers can be. You can’t write a book for everybody. I say that as you get to be a better writer, it’s easier to write for a bigger audience. So your second, third fourth books may be, but when you’re starting out, as a writer, it’s much easier to be very specific. And I encourage at least first time authors to write a book for their target market. We’re talking about entrepreneurs here, write a book for who you hope will buy from you who you hope will be your, your client, because that’s going to be the easiest, fastest book for you to write. And that’s going to attract your clients that’s going to bring in the clients because you’re writing specifically to them. An example I gave as I was looking at hiring a PR agency last year for one of my authors, and we were having a phone conversation. And then a week later, I got her book in the mail. I didn’t know I was gonna get it. It just came. And as I read through the book, it was literally what does a PR agency do? Why you might need one what to think about before you hire one, and how we’re different from the others out there. It was literally her sales copy. But it was interesting to me because it was all the things I needed to know to make a decision about hiring her. So it was it was perfect. It was exactly her longest form sales letter out there. But it was exactly the information I needed. So it was a perfect match. And that’s a great example of an entrepreneurial book.
This is again, from my personal experience. I have a blog. It has a decent readership I know about my target audience. But my fear has always been that if I publish a book, no one is going to buy it and it’d be just like lying in
The shelf and like you said, my garage will be full of copies there. So do you have any suggestion for someone like me, who has this fear? Who has to deal with this fear that though his book may get published, self published, or through traditional publishing route? What if there are no copies that are sold? Do you? Do you have anything for this kind of fear?
The first thing is you don’t have to have copies in your garage anymore, right, you can buy 10, 20 copies at a time. And you can sell print on demand, to Amazon through smashwords, to ebooks, all kinds of other outlets. So that’s the first thing is you don’t have to invest 10s of 1000s of US dollars, like you used to have to, I would say, if you have a well edited, well published book, and that’s key, so that it’s readable, you’re going to sell some copies. We don’t know, as a publisher, I never know if somebody’s going to sell 200 copies, or 200,000 copies, we just don’t know. And even the big traditional publishers say, you just never know what’s going to take off. It’s a little like the music industry, you think someone’s really good. And then a different song totally takes off. But you can make some educated guesses. And if you have an online audience, you can use some numbers in urine, urine marketing, Sandeep. So you know, there are like, click through rates and numbers. So if you send out a sales page, if you do an email, you know that maybe 20% of those people will open and 3% will click through and 1% will require that right, whatever the numbers are. So you can sort of figure out ahead of time, especially someone with your expertise, how many copies you might expect to sell just on an email, then there’s some other things you can do, you can give away copies to potential clients, like the PR agency did with me, you can offer copies on social media for free in exchange for shipping and handling. We’ve all seen marketers that have done that. You can discount a book on Kindle or ebook and, and give it at a lower price. You can do Amazon ads. Facebook ads don’t work so well for books. But they work really well to send people down a funnel that may internally to a book, you can do podcasting like this, I do lots of podcasting, which in turn brings me clients, right, so all these things build. And you got to have a little bit of a long haul, if you don’t already have a name out there in the in the world, you have a big audience. So you’d probably sell some books, right?
Is to make sure that your book has some value for your reader, it’s got to have value for your reader. And if the book has value, if you’re teaching something, if you’re sharing something that your potential client needs, you will sell some books, right. So I have a lot of ebooks published on my blog, and they deal with a specific topic. In most cases, I’ve been using them as lead magnets to grow my email list. But I’ve never been serious about publishing a book like what Tim Ferriss has done, or what even Pat Flynn has done, where they share their own experience first where they talk about their experience with entrepreneurship, and then go on to impart life lessons or something of value. So I’ve never really been serious about that. On the other hand, I have a lot of ebooks at 99 Signals. And you can see a lot of opt in banners here and there. So I’ve been able to grow my list that way, I have a list of more than 20,000 people in my email list who are pretty active, I engage them with new posts and new tools and all that. Thanks for sharing that. I mean, if you have an audience, I guess it’s much easier for you to know who your target audience is. And then you can even zero in on a topic that you are serious about when you write a book. What I wanted to ask you next was what’s the best way to publish a book because we have three types of publishing, right? We have the traditional publishing, we have self publishing, thanks to kindle and Amazon. And we have something called hybrid publishing. So can you tell us a bit about the difference between these three types? Yeah, so self publishing is exactly what it sounds like. You could take all your ebooks, put them in one file and put it up on Amazon and sell it and that might actually be a really great idea for you.
And that’s self publishing, you go through the process yourself. You may or may not get an ISBN which is the identifier that shows who owns the book. Now talk about that more in a minute. You You may hire someone like myself as a consultant, you may hire a designer to do inside layout, you may hire someone for a book cover, you may do it all yourself. And then you’re 100% responsible for all the marketing, but you get 100% of your royalties. So the royalties would be the money after Amazon and other distributors take their cut. Amazon’s the most common, we talk about Amazon because it’s where most of the books are sold. But it’s certainly not the only place. But we’ll just use Amazon as the example for today. Then there’s a traditional publishing, which is you turn your manuscript over to a publisher, you sign a contract, the publisher has final say on book covers layout design, when it gets published, how it gets released. As an author, you may have some input into that. But basically, you have signed the project over doesn’t mean you’re lost your copyright, you still own your copyright, but the publisher takes that material and goes and produces it for you. The good piece about that is you don’t have to worry about all the details like what is an insight gutter? What does my layout need to look like? How do I get my ISP ends, and then the publisher is responsible for selling books. When we work with authors, we always say though, if you want to sell books, you got to go to your audience. So you also have to mark it, and we will help you we’ll do combined marketing, we’ll support each other, we’ll do dates when we’re doing launches and those kinds of things. So we’d like to work together with authors, some publishers do, some publishers don’t, then the third piece is is hybrid. And that’s fairly common these days. And that’s where the author pays the publisher to publish the book. And then the publisher handles all the details, and the author gets a higher royalty. So usually in traditional publisher, publishing royalties around 15%. In hybrid publishing, it may be 2030 40%, sometimes even 50%. And so the royalty goes up, but the author’s paying some upfront to handle all those details.
See, which according to you is the best in 2020, which mode is better, I do all three, I like to really talk to my clients and my authors and find out what their goals are. So here’s, here’s the real key for somebody who’s a good writer, but does not really want to spend a lot of time online, you really got to go either hybrid or traditional, because you’re not going to have the motivation or the expertise to do a lot of online promotion yourself. For somebody who’s speaker, or has an online audience, self publishing may work because you will get more royalty, and you have a place to sell, you have a way to sell. If you don’t have an audience of self publishing, it’s really tough to sell books. So you got to have some kind of audience to self publish, or you’ve got to be willing to learn how to market online, which is, you know, is is easier said than done, you know, you can buy, you can buy all the courses, you’ve got lots of ebooks and resources to help people but it takes work. And it takes some dedication, it’s just like starting a new business, right. So if you already have an audience, or you’re willing, or you’re excited about learning that self publishing is a great way to go. If you want to just turn over details, hybrids, the next way, where you can turn over all the details still keep more control of your work, and have a higher royalty, and you work more in partnership. traditional publishing is great to turn it all over. But it’s harder to get those deals.
Right. Most of the business books that I’m reading these days, they’re always backed by these well known publishers right. And rarely have I come across a self published book, which has made it big. Do you think traditional publishing is still the best way to be recognized and build a reputation?
So I want to say a couple of things about that. I bet some of your traditional books that you’re reading are actually hybrid, you’ll be amazed at even the really big publishers have hybrid arms these days because they don’t have big marketing arms anymore. So behind behind the scenes, what’s happening is even some of these really big authors are paying their publishers to help market and promote so that’s the first thing is you got to pull back the curtain you got Gotta pull back the curtain. So this industry just like any industry, has things happening behind the scenes that the average person doesn’t see, going back to self publishing. And I think to answer your question, if you’re a speaker, though, and in when I say a speaker in the traditional world where you’re traveling the world, and speaking to an audience of 500, or 1000, people, you may not see those books hitting New York Times bestseller, but those authors are making a lot of money because they’re selling 500,000 books at a time, with maybe $5 profit on each book, maybe even $10 profit on each book, depending how much they’re selling it for traveling the world selling their books, they’re doing quite fine.
I see. You spoke about ISBN briefly now, like you said, all the books we read have a unique number and barcode on the back. And it’s called the ISBN number. I don’t know much about this number and what this signifies. So can you explain the importance of ISBN? And do you need to have an ISBN when you publish a book? Is that is that mandatory?
No, it’s not mandatory, and you can publish on Amazon without an ISBN. If you want to publish and get distributed into libraries, and bookstores and gift stores and other places, then yes, you need an ISBN. If you’re going to publish on Amazon, it’s recommended that you do not need one you can publish on Amazon, it’s not a problem, you still own your copyright. If you self publish, you just make sure you still have a copyright page with your name on it. It’ll go up on Amazon, no problem, what an ISBN does, and there’s you can look it up online. For the people who really want the details, it’ll tell you what each number in that ISBN number means and what it stands for. But generally, an ISBN who owns the ISBN owns that the package of the book. So, if we were to take your ebook, Sundeep, you own your copyright for the words, but when I take those ebooks and package them together into a paperback or a bigger ebook, you and I do design and layout and assign at one of my ISP ends, I own that package of the book. And I own that for our contract, if it’s three years or five years or 10 years. So you could not take those words and go repackage them in any other way during the duration of that contract. If you own your ISBN, you are allowed to take your work and republish it. However, it would have to be republished in a, in a substantially new way. Because the ISBN, holds together the package of the book. So if you have a book, and there’s an ISBN assigned, that ISBN says this book, this is a package that holds together the way it is, and this is how we’re going to go sell it. That’s how its registered with the Library of Congress and, and with Bulker and other places. So if you wanted to say, Oh, this book, I’m going to rewrite it, then you have to dismantle that whole package, rewrite it and assign it a new ISBN. You can’t just change the cover, right. So that’s a mistake new authors make they’re like, well is covered didn’t work, I want to change the cover now and they put up a new cover, you’re not actually able to do that without assigning a new ISBN.
Well, then there’s so many things involved here, because I always thought it’s a random number that is generated on the back and to know that ISBN, has so much significance. So even to change the cover, if you change the cover, you will get a new ISBN right, that’s what you’re saying you. If you publish on Amazon, and you don’t do AI spins, you don’t need to worry about that if you’re self publishing. Generally speaking, if more than 20% of the book changes, you need a new ISBN. So if you just change a word on the cover, or just change something simple on the cover, technically, you probably don’t need a new ISBN. But if it’s a major, a major change, we recommend doing it. And if you’re rewriting a book, we recommend doing it. Especially because the ISBN again is I’m trying to keep it simple for the audience. It just represents the whole package. So think of it like I want to say an album because I can’t think of the new word like a CD is a package of music. Songs, right so the album’s are the candle my mind I think but you have you have, you know, an artist who releases songs, they can, they can use a song with permission on a new album or on a new release, or redo do a remix or a new arrangement of that song and re release it. But if that song is released under a producer on a specific album or on this specific playlist or on a specific release, they can’t just take that without permission from their record label. Right. Okay. Right. So it’s got a UPC or something, right.
A UPC, UPC is related to the price slide.
Right. So yeah, let’s say we are going ahead with the publisher, and what are the things we should keep in mind before choosing the right publisher? Is there a screening process that is involved?
So from a publisher standpoint, what I’m looking for, as an author, that’s pretty easy to work with. I’m looking for good writing. And I’m looking for an author that fits what we sell, right? So we don’t do fiction, we don’t do horror stories. You know, we have a certain genre, some most publishers have a certain genre that they work with. We work off pretty much exclusively with like self help kinds of books can mean a lot of things. It can mean faith based books, it can mean healing books that can be entrepreneurialship books, but generally nonfiction right? Our publishers, most publishers have certain areas that they work with, because that’s how they market. So that’s the first question, is it a match, right? Is my book a match for this publisher? Then you want to find out what a publisher is going to do to help you sell books. And you’ve got to ask enough questions to go to pull back the curtain. So if a publisher says, oh, yeah, we do press releases, and we’ll promote you like crazy, what does that really mean? So you and I know that a press release is going to be really great for SEO, might get you some online distribution, might be good for promoting your work if you foundation gives you credibility, but it’s probably not going to get you on Oprah’s book list. And so, I think you just have to be, you have to talk with a publisher, and really understand what they’re going to do for you. And, you know, I try to be honest with my officers will do our best. And then we all meditate and pray and send out a wish and, and hope we put the best book out into the universe of trust, it’ll get in the right people’s hands. And we will promote and do our best. But I think a lot of authors have have expectations that may or may not come true. They may and they may not. And so we all do our best and then let go and give it up to God as they say, you have worked with a lot of first time authors, right? And what what are the common mistakes that first time authors make when writing and publishing their first book, they talk too much about themselves, and not enough about what the reader should get. And what I say is write all that stuff about yourself, write your memoir, write your story, write your experience, some of that will end up in the final book, some of it will, author’s first time authors get very attached to their words, and have to have a ruthless slash and burn editing session. And it’s not about you, it’s about what’s really going to help the reader the most. So write all that stuff, because it’s important for your own process. And to get deeper at the other side about what a reader really needs to understand for them. So keep in mind, it’s about your reader, not about you. Right. Second thing is really understanding the ISBN I’ve had authors come to me after publishing with a hybrid company or publishing with someone else and say, my book didn’t do anything. I want to republish it, and my hands are tied, we can’t because some the other publisher owns that product. So then we say let’s work on your second book unless you’re under contract for your second book with that publisher. So the second thing to really understand is, what are you signing? Just understand that there’s no good or bad it’s just understand it, just make sure you understand what you’re signing or what the process is, and who owns the ISBN. And then I think the third thing is write the very best book you can write and do the very best you can and then put your head sit down and start on your next project. And you really got to understand that you may sell 1000 copies, you may sell 20,000 copies. And as long as it all fits under your vision for your life and your entrepreneurial world and your business, your success, it will lead to the next thing. So don’t, it’s part of your process, the book is is not the be all and end all for your business. It’s part of your process. And so make sure you keep it in perspective.
Those are some really good tips. So let’s quantify this whole creative process. You know, since you are an expert in procrastination as well, I saw your TEDx talk, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say good things about procrastination, the whole talk is called in honor of procrastination. So it is a very different perspective. But I guess we can’t procrastinate all the time when we are thinking of publishing a book. Right? So what are your tips for anyone who’s writing their first book? Can they can they write a book in in 90 days? Or do you think they should take more time with it?
Every author is different, right? It’s like every artist is different. Here’s what I would say, I wrote a book in six weeks once, if you are clear about what you need to say, who your reader is, and especially if it’s a business book, yeah, you can write it 90 days, it’ll be pretty quick, because it’ll be, let’s say, Sandeep, you want to write a book about creating your first online funnel, you could totally write a book in 90 days, you know, that world inside and out, right? You’re gonna say, Get clear on your offer, here’s how you write your sales page, you want to have, you know, what’s your clients biggest fear, you’re gonna write the whole process of a sales page, you’re gonna write down how to what an opt in is how to write an opt in, right? You can write that book in 90 days. If I said to you explain how to start an online agency, you might be able to write that 90 days, but that’s a bigger topic. If you want to teach someone else how to start an online agency, then you have to, I think address things like fear, being an entrepreneur, running a business, it’s a much bigger topic. And there’s gonna be some creativity there that gets included in what, why did you want to start an online business or start an agency business rather? And and what was your process and how other people can do that. And it feels like there’s going to be more creativity that goes into that book. And that may take you longer, because it’s a bigger topic. Right? To go back to the procrastination piece, I think it’s really interesting internal discernment that we need, where we have to be really super honest. And it takes some time to understand even if we know ourselves really well, when are we in procrastination? And when are we in creative percolation mode. And that’s what my TEDx talk was about. Because sometimes I see people saying, I know I have to write a book, I know I have to write a book. And let’s face it, maybe they’re it’s a young mom with three kids at home and looking and a full time job, or whatever it is, and they just don’t really don’t have time to write. Maybe that’s percolation time, where you’re just writing down lots of notes, where you’re thinking about what’s going to go in your book, right. And maybe there’s other times where you’re still learning what it is you want to teach, or maybe, for other reasons, it’s just not a fully fledged idea yet. So what I say is right through the process, be creative. Do something besides writing to help your creative muse, maybe go out for long walks, take up painting, learn an instrument, learn a different language, something else is creative, that gets the part of the brain going, that allows for inspiration. And don’t focus on the books so much because you’ll find it as your mind opens up to more inspiration. The book will come at some point though, at some point. You got to sit down and write the book, and that’s the hardest part for everybody. So when you feel like you’re in fear, or you’re in avoidance, like you would rather clean the cat litter box and sit down and write when you would rather do your laundry than sit down and write, then we know it’s procrastination because then you’re just avoiding it. And it’s a different energy. And most people have to feel that for themselves. So when it comes to that, what I recommend is you write bullet points, you write notes, you speak into a microphone, you find every podcasts, maybe that you’ve ever done, you get them all transcribed, you throw it all into a doc. And then you pull things out and say, well, this could go on chapter one, this could go on chapter 10, you write two bullet points, and you just start organizing book coach can help someone like me might be able to help a really good editor can help. And at that point, you might want to pull someone else in to help organize all these thoughts and actually pull it together into a manuscript.
Thanks for sharing those tips. And I’m just making notes here as you speak. So I’m sure our listeners are to anyone who wants to get their first book published. Finally, the last question I have for you is, what are the three business books that you consider must read for entrepreneurs?
I’m so glad. So I do a lot of these podcasts that Sandeep and you sent me that question ahead of time, and I’m so glad you did. Because it really stumped me. I read a lot of books. But I gotta tell you that I think the books that helped me the most are the ones if we go way, way, way back a while and get out of all the noise of what’s new. So yes, I read a lot of books that come out all the time about success in marketing, business, and so forth. But the three books I chose for, for you are thinking Grow Rich by Norman Vincent Peale, which is in an old type book is just about mindset. Right? See, see at the top by Zig Ziglar, which is, I think, from 85, who talks a lot about sales and success principles. And again, it is taking some principles, that is before the internet. And I think we got to go back to basic principles. And then the third book that is just one of my personal favorites is illusions by Richard Bach. And it’s a little bit about just pulling back the veil and seeing what’s on the other side. And I chose those because I think if we, especially in this time of so much noise online, if we can go back to some basic mindset, success principles that have nothing to do with how big your OPT in list is, and start there. Then we can move forward in building our online business and in doing online ads, but we have to start with Who Who are we in? What do we want first? So that was three. Thank you for these recommendations. Thank you so much, Michelle, for having spent time with us here today really enjoyed our conversation. And I’m sure our listeners got many insights about writing and publishing a book, any final message you have for our listeners, for all the entrepreneurs out there who would like to release their first book in 2020.
If you have a thought about writing a book, if it’s been nagging at you for a while, this is a great time. It’s a great time to get that book written to publish a book. And if you’ve got the thought, then it’s yours to do. Don’t, don’t wait. Don’t procrastinate. start formulating your ideas. And if you’re if you’ve got the thought then it’s yours to it’s yours to write.
Yeah, thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for being a part of this podcast. And hope we can do this. Some other times in the future when you know, COVID-19 crisis is over. I would really like to have you on the show again.
I love that. Thanks Sandeep.
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