Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - How to Actually Sell Books - 074

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

Being experienced enough to write your own book is one thing, but knowing how to sell tens of thousands of copies of that book is a whole ‘nother ball game. In this episode, Bedros Keuilian reveals how he sold 20,000 copies of his book, Man Up, in just 2 months. That’s right, he’s literally handing you the sales strategies he used to sell bulk orders of his book and make it to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. Watch or listen now to discover how to influence your friends into becoming your book’s biggest advocates. “YOUR BOOK AND YOUR WRITING MEAN NOTHING IF YOU HAVE NO ONE TO EXPOSE IT TO THE WORLD.” – Bedros Keuilian Here’s what you’ll discover: 1:35 – How Bedros built an army of affiliates to promote his book for him. 4:36 – Why you need to decide on your core message before writing the first word of your book. 5:57 – How Bedros gave away a $2000 course for free…and sold more books because of it. 11:30 – How to sell people bulk orders of your book so you can get on the bestseller list. 19:55 – Are you even ready to write and sell your own book? "IF YOU DON’T HAVE A ‘LIFE’S WORK’, YOU SHOULDN’T BE WRITING A BOOK YET.” – Craig Ballantyne Follow us on Instagram: @bedroskeuilian / @realcraigballantyne Buy Man Up and get my High Performance Leadership Course for FREE: https://manup.com/ Make sure to review us on iTunes: http://bit.ly/theempireshow

Who's got my customers? Who's got my future book buyers? Well, Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone, Andy Fasilla, Lewis House. Well, these are people that I follow and look up to and consume their content and product. What if I could start adding value to their lives? I came with a giving hand, made goodwill deposits in the bank account, and then was able to ask for a withdrawal this one time. Welcome to the Empire Show.

I'm Bedros Kulian, here with my co-host, Craig Ballantyne. Here on the Empire Show, we help passionate and purpose-driven entrepreneurs like you turn your idea into a business and your business into an industry transforming empire so that you can grow your income, impact, and influence. If you're a new listener, then welcome to the show and be sure to subscribe to our podcast. And if you're looking to dominate in business and in life, then this is the show for you. Hi, friends. This is Crocodile Craig Ballantan here, and I'm sneaking up on Bedriff's Coolian here in his natural environment. And we're going to try and steal all of his tricks and tips for selling out on Amazon. Oh, hey, Badros, how you doing, man?

Craigie, what's up? Well, you really snuck up on me here. I know, I know. I am very sneaky man. So listen, you just sold tens of thousands of copies of your book in three weeks. I see it in airports. This is amazing. So congratulations on selling man up. And for our Empire podcast fans, some of them are writing books, some of them have books. They want to know how the heck you did it. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So I've been really fortunate enough for in the last three and a half weeks, I've sold almost 20,000 copies of my books. This wasn't a free plus shipping offer where people just pay a trivial amount. Like they paid full price for the book.

Right, real book. Yeah, real book from like Barnes & Noble, chapters, indie stores, Amazon. Hudson News in the airport. Hudson News in the airport, exactly. So let's talk about how we did that, yeah? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, first of all, you did this podcast tour. I mean, 18 months of podcast after podcast after podcast,

talking about Man Up before it was even available for pre-order. Tell us how, why, the importance of that. Yeah, so I'll even go a step before that. Most people think that I've got this great idea for a book. Guess what? I really believe that every single human on this planet has some, as you call it, stupid human trick, right? Or a talent or a gift or a purpose. We all have at least one book in us.

Oh, absolutely. Many of us several, but we all have at least one book in us. The problem is when most people go, you know what, I've got a book idea and I'm going to start writing and they start writing. They might take two, three, four, five years. They might do it in six months. What they don't realize is your book and their writing means nothing. if you've got no one to expose it to the world. Because if you're writing a book,

I'm guessing it's because you've got information to share with people that's going to be transformational in their lives. So we get so selfish in my information. Let me do a dump of information on this keyboard, get 60 to 100,000 words on a book. Who's going to share it? So I started the opposite. Before I even started writing the book,

I knew what the book was going to be about. But I said, I want to first get known, and I want to start building allies. You have a great saying, which is friends making money with friends. You and I are friends and we're friends with Joe Marion and all these affiliates who have mailed out for info products, et cetera, that we've launched. Well, it's always been friends making money with friends. So I spent 18 months doing 276 podcasts from small podcasts to medium podcasts. Never really got onto the big podcasts until the last, let's say, 12 months.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, right? But 18 months doing over 200 podcasts helped me refine my stuff. story. I was just going to say that. My talking points. Yeah. Your jokes. My jokes. You know when the interviewer react in a certain way and all of them react a certain way, you go, shit, I got to keep refining this piece of the story. Yeah. And then you know when they're asking for clarity, you go, oh, I better, I better be more clear on this message the next time I do it. Yeah. So it's really sets and repetitions. So I did that. And what I was really doing is, one, I was crafting my skill

and fine-tuning my message, number one. Number two, I had 1,800, or I'm sorry, for 18 months, I had over 270 people that I could reach out to and go, hey, can you promote my book? Or can you talk about, hey, when your book comes out in 2018 of September, right? September 2018. And so that was the whole goal. When they said, hey, why are you doing this?

How can we help you? I said, well, I've got a book coming out September in 2018. Sometimes this was like two years before, right? But do I look at it is that podcast is out there, And maybe this person is a small-time podcaster now, but two years from now, five years from now, they might be the next Tom Bill you, the next Lewis House, the next Ed Milet. And if that's the case, you're going to go back and consume some of their old content. And when you do, you're going to hear about man up.

So I was really planting that seed. So one, I was building an army of affiliates who can mail out for me. Absolutely. And I love that part. And it's really, really important for people that haven't written the book yet. You have to do these shows because, as Pedro said, you're going to vomit all this information. out, but it's not going to make sense. The stories have to be really refined and crafted. There have to be jokes. There has to be entertainment in there. You have to get the wording

down, the particular articulation of things. In fact, I spent two years coming up with nine words. The nine words that I mentioned that one gentleman's already painted on his house, another person has already got tattooed on themselves, and it's these nine words, action beats anxiety, motion beats meditation, work beats worry, are in my new book and so many people have already already resonated with those. But it took me two years to figure out how those nine, you know, those nine words came together. And so that's a sure, I'm sure it was the same with you with man up in some of the stories.

It's funny you say that because I don't know how many words it is, but it's man up, stop making excuses, take control of your situation, rise to your potential. It took those 18 months and 273 podcasts to be able to go, what am I trying to say here? I'm really, the message I'm trying to say on all these podcasts, and I'm going to put in my book is, stop making a question. excuses, take control of your situation, and rise to your potential. And sometimes it takes hundreds of repetitions to be able to come up with your core message. And once you've got your core message, your nine words or my nine words here, whatever, how many words they are, that

becomes your core and you build your book around it as you're building an audience, an affiliate army who wants to promote it. Yeah. Right? Because they're so clear on what your message is. Absolutely. And that allows you to go into the next thing that you did, which is not only do you get the book, but when you buy the book, you get access to a bonus set of recordings, which is going to get anybody off the fence who's thinking, oh, I've got like, you know, five or six books on my list, but yours is the only book that came with a $2,000 course for free, video course, that you figured out what was important to say. And I believe that that particular $2,000 gift that they got when you buy the book from Amazon or Barnes & Noble,

you forward your receipt to orders at manup.com, we will send you a $2,000 peak performance and leadership course, this brand new that I did. I got the idea of that from our friends Chris and Lori Harder. Oh, cool. So talk about friends making money with friends. I had the good opportunity to go and speak

at their mastermind in Santa Monica. And as we're walking out there, and by the way, guys and gals, I need you to do this for yourself. Proximity is power, environmental exposure by speed. When you are around,

you know this, when you're around other people who are high performers, it doesn't just, it's not small talk, like, hey, what's your favorite basketball team? It's, dude, what did you do to move books?

What did so and so to do? Who do they have that's a great affiliate? Who's their affiliate manager? Who buys traffic for them? Those are the conversations that happen when you're in proximity of powerful people. And so I spoke at Chris and Lori's mastermind, and they're like, man, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. And Chris is walking me out to the valet.

And he goes, dude, what could I do for you? I go, well, you know, I've got Man Up coming out in a couple months. This was just like literally three months before Man Up was going to launch. And I go, you know, I would love it if you guys would get behind it and promote it. He goes, well, you know what we did for Lori's book? Let's say if Craig Ballantyne is going to promote it, then Lori and Craig would get on the phone and they'd create a little mini course. And then Craig would say, hey, guess what? If you buy the book, Lori's book, you also get my $900 course for free.

Just send him the receipt. And then Lori would go and partner with someone else and they'd create all these mini courses. I was like, I got an idea. What if I take the six pillars of entrepreneurial leadership from Man Up, do a whole workshop on it where people paid to attend? record that and then give that away, like give away one big mega course so that you and Joel Marion and Ed Milet and everyone who's going to promote this thing can say, look, when you buy man up from anywhere, forward your receipt to orders.com and Beidores is going to give you a $2,000 peak performance leadership course for free that he's going to launch in January, right?

It's like eight hours of training for free. And so I created this mega course and I decided that that's the big, the mother of all bonuses, right? Like the Moab, mother of all bonuses. We talk about this in info marketing. Well, you're going to buy a $25 book and get a $2,000 course. And now everyone's talking about that. Like, dude, you'd be nuts not to buy the book just so you can get the course because you can't buy the course for $2,000 yet. It's not even out.

That became the hook. That and also the fact that I spent over two years building relationships. You've been upstairs in my office. I've got a marker board. I've got 13 names on there. Really big people. Tom Bill Yu, Andy Fersilla, Ed Milette, Lewis House, Randall Pitch, Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone, the list goes on.

There's like 12 or 13 people. I only knew one person, Lewis House, off that list two years ago. I decided that, because I always listen to what you say, and you're a great mentor to me, who's got my customers? Who's got my future book buyers? Well, all these people that I just named off, Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone, Andy Fricilla, Lewis House. Well, these are people that I follow and look up to and consume their content and product.

what if I could start adding value to their lives? I spent two years adding value to their life. And before you note, I was invited to go on Andy's podcast and Grant Cardone's podcast and Ed Myled's podcast and Lewis House's podcast. And I helped Randall pitch with his LiftFit brand, right? And I just came with a giving hand. And then Ed Milet and Andy Frasilla were like, hey, we're starting it. We're thinking about starting a mastermind. Can you teach us how to run a mastermind?

Yes, come on over to the office. Let's get on the phone. Teach you how to run a mastermind. No cost. I came with so much giving hand and so much value, and our friend Frank Kern talks about this. I was making goodwill deposits in all these different bank accounts of people who already had my audience, right? Massive audiences. Joel Marion, for years we've been friends, never asked him for any money and just try to support him and everything he did with his supplement company.

Same with you, right? And so if you're making all these years of goodwill bank account deposits and you've got a $2,000 killer course, Now when your book's coming out, people go, well, dude, how can we help you? And you go, well, here's a copy of my book. Can you promote it to your email list and let them know that when they buy the book, they can forward the receipt to orders.com and get a $2,000 course for free. And oh, by the way, I'll go the extra mile. I'll write the book recommendation email for you so that you don't have to type it.

So make it easy for people to promote. Send them the book, send them the hats. I sent them the water bottle, the man-up shirts. And you and Joel were in Africa. Right. On a safari. On a safari with Mannaup book and Mata hat and Man Up T-shirt. And I'm so grateful for that because you guys have such an audience.

And that audience was seeing Man Up before it ever came out. And they were chomping at the bits. Right. Right. So we created the tsunami effect because I came with the giving hand, made goodwill deposits in the bank account, and then was able to ask for a withdrawal this one time. Yeah, absolutely. Now, I have a quick question.

I bought a thousand books. And if I get a $2,000 bonus for each one of those books, Does that mean I get a $2 million gift? I'm just going to write you a $2 million check and be done with it, yeah. All right, all right, all right. Well, go on. I was going to say we should talk about the 1,000 books, right?

The bulk orders. Yes, okay, for sure, because I bought 1,000 books, not just because I wanted to support you, but because, first of all, you know, if I could have persuaded my business partner and let me buy more, I would have because this book is needed. I read the first version two years ago when you sent it to me, and I was like, man, so many people need this.

They need to overcome their excuses. They need to man up, you know, cut the BS and all that stuff. So I bought 1,000 books. I sent them out to my top clients. I'm giving them away at my event. And I was not the only person who did a whole bunch of bulk buys. So talk about that. In fact, of the nearly 20,000 copies that we sold over 7,000 copies were bulk orders.

Awesome. So, again, here's another great lesson. If you're going to do a book launch, right? And yet another reason to do two, three, four years in advance, get out there. Build your social media following. start making goodwill deposits with people who already have your customers, try and get on their podcasts, because when you do, and I got on almost 300 podcasts before the book even came out,

I had people asking me for speaking, hey, what do you charge for a speaking? Can you come speak at my event? Can you come speak at my event? So we created a page on manup.com that said, want Baderos to coach you or your team for free or to come and speak at your event for free? If so, fill out this form. So it was an inquiry form.

Now, people know that I charge $50,000 for a speaking event. So if I charge 50 grand for a speaking event, and now I'm offering to speak at your event for free or to coach you and your entrepreneurial team, your leadership team for free, you're going to fill out that form. And when they did, that form went right to Sean Mabry. Yep. One of my content writers who also, I just taught him some sales. Yeah. Right?

And he said, look, you can absolutely have Baderus at your office or at your live event for free. He'll waive his $50,000 speaking fee if you just buy 500 or 1,000 copies of his book. Yeah. Right? And so they were buying bulk orders. And we were saying, look, pass it out to your audience ahead of time. And now Baderus is going to speak. Then he'll get off stage and hang around in autographed books.

It'll have a much more bigger impact on your audience. So it was a win-win. Instead of paying 50 Gs for my speaking gig, they were buying 500 or 1,000 copies at a time. And we sold over 7,000 copies that way. And I still have speaking gigs lined up. I got one in Dallas. I've got one in Miami still coming up. I've got your event coming up.

And so don't forget the value of bulk orders. And bulk orders are great because they're still buying it at full price. You can hire a guy like Daniel Decker, and there's a pitch for Daniel Decker. If you just find him on Instagram, he will make sure that, like, let's say, your 1,000 orders didn't come from the publisher. Your 1,000 orders, and let me explain how this works, because if you're trying to hit the bestseller lists like I did, right? And you want to get on the bestseller list for Barnes & Noble, New York Times, Amazon, et cetera, then you want the book orders to look like they organically came from many different areas, stores and online services, et cetera. So your 1,000 orders were probably sourced from many different places. Guys like Daniel Decker are experts.

There's another guy named Michael Drew who does this. And they are experts at taking bulk order money and then sourcing out those books to make it look like that it's coming from many different purchases. You still get a big box of 1,000 books. But as far as Amazon is concerned and all these lists, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, they go, oh, wow, look at this. like a thousand books just got sold like overnight. Yeah. Right. So anyway, so that's a big important lesson there as well.

Were you also doing some phone coaching and stuff for like 50 books at a time and stuff like that? I mean, it's really just every single way you can sell bulk orders, right? Yep. Going back to how you always say like find many ways to skin the pig, right? Use every part of the pig. Yeah. So I realized, look, not everyone can afford a thousand copies because a thousand copies like you bought is $25,000, right? Half of that is $12,000.

And so not everyone can afford that. So we were doing buy 100 or 250 copies, and I'll do a half hour or an hour and a half Zoom or webinar coaching for you. Right from my office and the comfort of my own office. But I can do that. So people were buying 50 to 150, 200 copies at a time as well. And all that added up. And imagine when the book launches and literally the first few days of the book launch, there's already 7,000 sold. Well, what does Amazon do?

They start restocking. They start giving it more press. Well, you sold them out. Yeah, actually, we sold out Amazon, Barnes & Noble all because of that, yeah. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Anything else to that speaking offer there that's just like, that's the system. You make that offer, you have it go to one of your team members, there's an inquiry form. Is there anything in the inquiry form just to like, hey, you know, this is not going to work for you?

No, we kept the inquiry form very simple. We didn't even qualify people by saying, look, even though he's going to speak for you for free, you have to buy books. We didn't want to pre-qualify them at all. Got it. It literally said, find out how Bader is going to speak at your event. for free or coach your employees for free. And then they'd get on the phone with Sean. And then Sean would say, look, 1,000 copies gets Spadros there, 500 copies, gets them to

your workplace for half a day. Yeah. Right. And then, you know, here's the smaller ones if you can't, if you can't do those two bigger ones. Awesome. And inevitably, people bought something because at this point, you've been on so many podcasts and whatever in shows and you've done your job on social media, that now you're a hero to people

and they want to invest in you. They want to get your knowledge. They want to be a part of this big thing that's happening. Yeah. And that moves into, I want to talk a little bit more about the partner mailouts in that, you know, these people are mailing out for this book, and it's not an affiliate offer. It's not a free plus shipping offer with upsells on the back end. It was really just these people felt like they owed you, but at the same time, they felt like me,

whereas, man, I got to get this book out to my audience because it would create goodwill with them, and they'll be grateful for it, and that's why people mailed out. Anything else did the partner mailouts there? Yes, I got to tell you this. One, write an awesome book. Like, you owe it to your partners, right? Your friends, your podcast friends, your community, to write an awesome book. Because if I wrote a crappy book and I just wrote it just to be able to write a book,

the knowledge in it is very shallow, it doesn't really give any how-toes, it's vague. You're not really going to get behind it. You're not going to say I'm going to buy a thousand copies and give them out to my best clients because your clients are going to go, what the hell was Craig thinking? Yeah. Right? So you have to take the time to write an awesome book. So I wrote an awesome book based on my experiences of going from a failure, from a crop duster to a fighter jet.

And then I took that awesome book and I reached out to you. I said, Craig, I've got an awesome book, but I realized it can still be awesomer. How do I get in contact with Ryan Holiday? And Ryan Holiday is a ghostwriter for many awesome authors and he's a great author in his own right. And Ryan Holiday charges $30,000. So I took my book, see, I was willing to invest in my product. So I took my book that was great and I made it greater through Ryan Holiday. holiday who rewrote it, sent me some questions and said, hey, just record your answers in this

voice recorder. I want free conscious thoughts flowing. And then I'll take your energy and your answers and I'll put them in the book in the right structure because the man is a professional author. I know how to write promotional emails and blog posts. I write in 1,500 word chunks. That man writes in 60,000, 100,000 word books, right? And so be willing to invest in experts, whether it's mentors, professional ghost writers, people who can go and promote Daniel Debt. $25,000 to engage him to do the whole bulk bulk buying for us, right? I've invested more money in this book launch because I'm looking at the long game. I've already invested about a quarter million dollars in this book launch because I look at the

long game of I've already sold them as 20,000 copies. In the next six months, I'll probably sell another 50,000 copies. So when we have all those copies out there, people are reading the book, talking about it, posting about it. Again, here's another thing. All you need to do is sell seven franchises from it and you're good. That's it. That's it, right?

So can I get seven franchises? Can we get at least 20 Empire Mastermind members from it? Can I get equity in other businesses in the future? Can I get more speaking gigs? Can I get a second offer for a book to write? I mean, look at how, right? It's a snowball effect. And so what most people forget that if you're going to ask people to mail out,

you better write an awesome book. You better come with so much goodwill deposits for your affiliate partners that even though they're not going to make any money from it, they just want to mail out. It's a great product, and they believe in you want to support you. And anyone that says, yeah, but I don't know how to build the social media following like you did. You and I built a social media following on Instagram from scratch. We started, what, two years ago? Right. Right. And we've got a pretty sizable following that

gets more engagement than people that have half a million followers. And we haven't spent a dollar on it. No, no. I mean, it's just all because of the goodwill, the great content, the focus, focus, focus. So someone out there is thinking, but I don't have any money to invest in a writer or this, that, or the other thing. They need to be resourceful. What do you say to them? I say go and sell something, your product or service or franchise coaching, go sell something then you shouldn't be writing a book. Because everyone wants to take the fun way because it strokes the ego,

man, I'm an author, you know, I have an ICPN number, you can find me on Amazon and in bookstores. Who cares if there's only one copy sitting in Amazon and one copy sitting at Barnes & Noble because no one has known of you and no one cares about you and therefore the bookstores don't want to invest in you? I say put the book on hold.

Right. Go and sell products and services, raise the capital to get the army of affiliates. to get behind you and then have a proper book launch like I did where you can actually move the needle of income and impact. Yeah. I always say, perfect a formula, it is my life's work in a book. Man Up is your life's work in a book.

If you don't have a life's work, you shouldn't be writing a book yet. Go create a life instead. Exactly, exactly. Man, that was amazing. Now I know how to go and launch and sell my next book. Anything else you want to say about going out there and being a bestselling author? You know, here's the other thing I will say is you have to just be freaking awesome. And what I mean by that is not enough people hone in their craft.

Everybody wants the book. They want the 100 million, 200 million YouTube videos watched or whatever. But no one is delivering their message so clearly. What are your nine words again? Action beats anxiety, motion beats meditation, work beats worry. How long did it take you to come up with those specific nine words? Two years. Two years.

In that order. To make it where it's just like everybody gets it right away, hearts, loves, likes, shares, tattoos, all that stuff. There you go. And it took me 18 months to come up with stop making excuses, take control of your situation, and rise to your potential, right? Up until then, I kept saying that story, but the long way possible. Right now, my elevator pitch, someone goes, hey, what is your book man up about?

It's how to stop making excuses, take control of your situation and rise to your potential in life and a business. Oh, I got that. Right? I got that. Exactly. And same with your nine words. And so spend the time to make the money to be clear on your mission and your vision

so that when you write the book, you have people who can mail out for it. Be awesome first before trying to launch a book. That's what I want to share. Man up. Hey, thank you so much for joining us on the Empire Podcast Show. The best way you can thank us is to leave a five-star review on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform. And of course, leave a comment and share this podcast with a friend.

And if you'd like to grow your business to the highest level of success, go to bedroscuhlion.com forward slash empire and fill out the application where you can join myself and Craig Ballantyne in the Empire Mastermind Group.