Jim (http://www.thejimedwardsmethod.com) and Stew discuss the recent book launch of Copywriting Secrets https://copywritingsecrets.com. Anything that you do in business, there should be a moment where you assess your performance, your team’s performance, and the performance of outsourced services. What can you do better? What went better than expected? What curve-balls occurred the required you to act fact with a contingency plan? What are the next steps and how can you avoid any issues already experienced with the initial launch?
These and many of these types of questions Jim and Stew discuss. In the Navy we called them After Action Reports / Lessons Learned and it helped other people learn from other’s mistakes as well as a new innovative way to accomplish a task.
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Transcript…
Jim Edwards: Hey guys, Jim Edwards here along with…
Stew Smith: Stew Smith…
Jim Edwards: And today we are here for the Sales Copywriting, And Content Marketing Hacks Podcast, episode 44 and I can’t think of anything that rhymes with 44…
So…
Stew Smith: Doing more with 44…
Jim Edwards: Well, it’s better than when I came up with so good jobs Stew…
Stew Smith: There you go.
Jim Edwards: So today we are actually going to talk about the book launch…
The reason the book launch of copywriting secrets, which we’re still kind of in the middle of the launch.
And then there’s some things that are going to be coming up that are pretty cool…
And Stew tells everybody the idea that you had and why we’re talking about this.
Stew Smith: Well, I will say this is something that we always did, no matter what we were doing, whether it was a training exercise…
Jim Edwards: We who?
Stew Smith: When I was in the Navy.
This is where I learned this, and it’s just called lessons learned.
So what did we learn from this scenario?
What do we learn from this training?
What did we learned from this book launch?
What did we learn from this product launch?
Right…
Jim Edwards: Okay…
Stew Smith: So yeah, what could we have done better?
What screwed up?
How did we adapt in the middle of it?
So you kinda think of it almost like a little mission and then like every phase of this process…
What could we have done to make it run smoother?
Jim Edwards: Okay…
So the only thing that I’m going to do before we launch into this is…
Because this is so cool…
So I can make this like a marquee thing and even lights up…
Is that cool, or what?
Stew Smith: Okay, I like that!
Even came with the emojis so I can have like my own marquee.
Stew Smith: Huh?
Can you make some changes to that?
Jim Edwards: Oh yeah, dude…
I got him taped on the edges cause they’ll just fall out…
Stew Smith: Okay…
But yeah, I got like 200 letters, emojis, and stuff that I can slide them in and out and make it say anything…
Stew Smith: I love it…
Jim Edwards: Is that cool or what?
Stew Smith: That is cool…
It’s a little thing I got that at Ollie’s, which is like a Big Lots…
Stew Smith: Yeah, I know where that is, we have one of those…
Jim Edwards: And it was $8.
Stew Smith: Genius.
Jim Edwards: It was eight bucks at Ollie’s man…
Stew Smith: That’s a good lesson learned right there…
Jim Edwards: And they even have a mini one too.
They sell those for eight bucks, so…
Stew Smith: Okay…
Jim Edwards: Anyway, just totally sidetracking you, but that’s cool, right?
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: Okay, so I’m ready.
What do you want to know?
Stew Smith: All right, so you obviously did a really good job a month out from this book being able to be purchased…
Right?
You wrote this thing a long time ago…
Jim Edwards: I wrote this thing a year and a half ago…
Stew Smith: Right…
And then you got a whole bunch of them sitting in your carport…
Jim Edwards: Well, no, I didn’t do that…
Stew Smith: Hahaha, just joking…
Jim Edwards: No, I mean…
Yeah, I had some in the garage, but that was for different reasons…
So I’ll explain to you what I did…
Stew Smith: Yes…
Jim Edwards: Okay…
So the whole reason that I wrote the book was ultimately to create a funnel that led people to Funnel Scripts.
That’s just honestly why I wrote it, to give me credibility and get people to Funnel Scripts.
So what happened was I wrote the book, I finished the book, and then I was hoping that we would create the funnel on that the Russell in the Click Funnels guys would get behind it.
And so, but they’re super busy…
They’re super, super busy operating on a whole different level than the rest of us…
And so they came out with a program called 10 X…
Was about how Russell’s sold from the stage and how he does the Perfect Webinar…
And so what I did originally…
The book was done, but I wasn’t sure when I was going to release it.
I offered the book as a bonus for people who bought his 10 X thing through me through my affiliate link.
And I ended up being the number one affiliate for that launch…
Like crushed it.
So I had thousands of them printed up, and we sold the majority of them…
So I had some left, and we sent those to the fulfillment house…
Well, then I just kind of sat on it cause I’ve been getting busy, busy, busy, just busy with everything.
We relaunched, Funnel Scripts, all this stuff happen…
And then finally people kept saying, when are you going to release the book?
So in August, I was sitting here, I had the book, I’m like, damn, got to get this book out.
So I took a picture…
You know how you do stuff, and you look back, and you’re like, dang, and you know when you did it…
I’m going to pay for this later…
But I apparently I grew web balls or something, and I’m like, okay, this book will be available no later…
Then the end of September, and I did this big thing about it, which entailed posting a picture and posting it in one spot on Facebook…
That’s what I did…
Well, all these people were like, yay…
Finally, finally, I’m like, Oh wow…
So I’m going to have to do this…
And we had to get everything all set up, and we finally got it all set up, and we released it on the very last day of September.
And I had ordered another thousand copies, and they were at the fulfillment house…
So we had like, I don’t know, 1300 copies, there’s call it that…
And I said, okay, I know I’m good, I’m going to be good…
And so I launched it out to my list, but as I’m launching it, I didn’t even launch it out to my list…
I launched it out to a pre-notification list…
People who signed up…
Hey, let me know when you’re gonna release the book…
And then I released it to my group…
(Little did)I know we’d had a malfunction in our autoresponder…
So really the launch only happened on Facebook, like 70 people got an email out of the hundreds that had signed up wanting the email…
So it was all happening on Facebook…
So this was Monday two weeks ago yesterday, its or day before yesterday…
Whenever this is…
And so I got a call from, Dave Woodward, who’s the, I’m not sure what his title is…
He’s like the second in command over at Click Funnels…
And he’s like,
“Hey man, we really want to get behind your book, and we’ve got time, and we’d like to pull it into our affiliate program and set it up. So it truly is the front end for Funnel Scripts.”
And I was like, yeah!
But I can’t do it today cause a gotta get this thing out, or people are going to say,
“Oh, Jim members is full of crap.”
He said, okay…
So while we’re launching the book to my list, behind the scenes, we’re scrambling to totally redo everything mechanically to get this thing over into their system in Click Funnels.
We had in click funnels, but there’s all this behind the scenes stuff with getting people into the membership and other things…
And it wasn’t as easy as just cloning a funnel and opening it up…
So while we’re launching the book and dealing with all that stuff, I’m making my team do all this other stuff, and we’re all working with the Click Funnels people while we’re launching the book.
And you’re talking about 16, 18 hour days the year that we’re doing over this three, four day period…
So on Thursday at the end of the day, everything was set, and we had done close to 800 sales to my list…
But it wasn’t even my list…
I’ve never announced the book out to my list yet…
It was just 800 from my Facebook list, which is actually amazing to think that we sold that many books just based on Facebook with no paid ads, just building excitement…
So I take it back?
And they’ve heard about my book in my weekly update, but I’ve never sent…
Anyway, I’m going to….
My big list.
So what happened was I called Dave, and I said,
“Hey man, how many books you think I should order?”
He said yeah, get a thousand…
I said, okay…
So they send an email on Friday…
By Saturday morning, we had sold 5,000 books.
Like, Oh my God…
It was very stressful…
Stressful in a good way, but still stressful…
Stew Smith: Sure…
Jim Edwards: The only thing more stressful than waking up and having no orders is waking up and seeing,
“Oh, there’s 5,000 people around the world, literally around the world who want this book and are expecting it to show up now.”
So, as we’re watching this thing go by, I’m ordering these books on the Saturday…
Well, you ordered books, they gotta get printed, they gotta get shipped…
I mean, it’s not cheap either.
Stew Smith: That’s a lot of manual labor too to get that done.
Jim Edwards: It’s expensive.
Stew Smith: Yeah.
Jim Edwards: So I ordered 2000 books in the morning, then around lunchtime, ordered another 2000 books…
Then I ordered another 2000 books…
So I’m ordered 6,000 books on Saturday…
And, I’m paying for two-day printing and then expedited shipping.
So even with two-day printing and expedited shipping, it still takes about seven business days for the books to show up…
So more keeps selling…
So I’m ordering more, and I’m ordering more, and I’m like…
Hey Terry, you gotta pay off the American Express cause I gotta order more…
And she’s like…
What are you…
It was very stressful…
So now we’re up to, as of this moment, I got to figure this morning we’re up to 9,386 books sold since in basically two weeks…
Stew Smith: And that’s in the Click Funnels.
Jim Edwards: That’s total.
Stew Smith: Okay.
Gotcha.
Jim Edwards: So, the point is that I just ordered another 2000 books yesterday to try and get ahead of this, and then I had this other order where you can order them on a slow boat from wherever, and they cost like a third of what they cost expedited.
But you got to wait 21 business days…
So I ordered them way back, and they’re working their way along…
So by the end of next week, or by the middle of next week, I should have like 2000 extra books sitting there to deal with demand.
And you know, when we started doing advertising and other stuff, so it’s been really cool.
And the coolest thing has been seeing people’s reactions, seeing people pose them with the book going like this…
And even saw somebody had that cutest little girl, man…
Stew Smith: Yeah, I saw that…
Jim Edwards: So just the cutest little girl and she’s like…
Doing that…
And people are posting pictures of the book when they get it, and they’re all excited in there…
They’re loving the audiobook that you and I did.
People are really digging that format…
I was not 100% sure.
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: I know we put value into it, but I wasn’t 100% sure.
You know how it is, man.
You do your best, and then you hope like it, and you just don’t know.
And so people are digging the book.
They’re posting pictures of it.
I think we’re in front of it now because I think it’s like 7,000 books are being delivered to the fulfillment house today and tomorrow…
So, they should be getting them out.
And by the end of this week, they should all be in the mail out to everybody.
And I feel really blessed and happy and the, I will feel more blessed and happy when everybody’s got their book.
And, people really do seem to be enjoying the book and liking it, and it’s helping them, and it’s accomplishing my purpose, which as I told you way back when I did not write this book to teach copywriters the finer points of copywriting.
This book is intended to help normal people like us who are not professional copywriters, know how to put words on paper words on a screen and have words come out of their mouth to get their target audience to buy from them without having to become a door to door salesman in the process.
Stew Smith: Right…
Jim Edwards: So that’s, is that kind of the upfront summary you were looking for?
Stew Smith: Yeah, exactly…
Yeah…
Well, now let’s take a look, step back and just say, all right…
At prelaunch, your original goal was to write a book for Funnel Scripts, be part of your affiliate…
That was accomplished.
Mission accomplished.
Went really well.
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: (I grew, I’ve got a nice) old plaque back there…
Right…
Jim Edwards: That’s not a little plaque…
That’s a big ass plaque…
Stew Smith: I know that’s pretty impressive…
And that means a lot.
So it worked…
Jim Edwards: Right…
Stew Smith: Then you decided to take that content and use it somewhere else?
An official book launch for yourself…
A podcast and for your social media and everything like that…
For your list…
Jim Edwards: Right…
Stew Smith: For your list of Jim Edwards method and that one, I get it…
I get the fact that you had to rush and added a lot of stress to yourself because you don’t really know what the demand is until you see what the demand is.
Jim Edwards: And that’s hard…
Cause on the flip side I could have ordered 10,000 books, and we sold 500, and I’m sitting there paying warehouse fees on 9,500 books going, how am I going to sell this for?
Stew Smith: And people do that.
Jim Edwards: Yes.
Stew Smith: People have done that.
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
You know that stress dude, you sell real books.
Stew Smith: Yeah, it’s tough.
How do you think you could in the future when you do this again.
Jim Edwards: When I do this again?
Stew Smith: If you do this again, avoid that high mark up when you had to scale up so quickly…
Jim Edwards: I don’t know if you can…
Honestly, because it’s the thing I should’ve to have a couple of thousand books sitting there waiting…
But I had 1400 sitting in there…
I don’t know if you can, you just don’t know…
And moving forward, I just don’t know…
Stew Smith: This is every publisher’s dilemma…
Jim Edwards: Right?
Stew Smith: That they have, they don’t realize the demand that they are going to be experiencing.
Jim Edwards: You don’t know until it happens…
Stew Smith: And whether or not they want to invest that money upfront.
Jim Edwards: Right…
Stew Smith: I will say this just as a sidebar, guy looking up from the side, I would say, I think you underestimated yourself…
On that obviously…
And though, you obviously were able to adjust on the fly, make quick decisions and get things done…
So mission accomplished.
But I think in the beginning you underestimated the value of this product.
Jim Edwards: And you’re probably right.
You’ve known me for a long time now…
And you’re right.
And the thing is, I put more work into this book and yes, I know.
And I’ll tell you right now, there are seven typos in this book.
So for those of you who read the book and find the typos, congratulations, you found the prize.
I’m not concerned about that, but, and I’m not worried about that, but I put more work into this book than any book I’ve ever written.
And so I guess I had more, I don’t want to call it ego.
I don’t know what the right word is.
But I had a more emotional investment in this book and, I was scared that people might not like it, even though I know that this really…
I mean, this is what I got…
I really didn’t hold anything back…
You’ve had the book read to you…
Stew Smith: I know you. It’s great.
Jim Edwards: You didn’t even have to read the book…
But it still, I’m always careful…
Somebody told me one time, never believe your own press releases…
And I’m glad people are enjoying it, and I’ve been thinking about what would be the next book…
What’s the next level for this?
But yeah, maybe I did underestimate myself a little bit, but I don’t know…
I’ve always thought it’s better to underestimate yourself a little than overestimate yourself a little bit…
Cause then you’re always hungry and striving to do better.
Stew Smith: Right.
Well, my lesson learned for folks is if you have this situation occur, right?
I agree, I don’t think it is very valuable at all…
In fact, it’s a big waste of money if you overestimate yourself.
Jim Edwards: Right.
Stew Smith: You buy too much, then underestimate yourself.
So I think the conservative approach is the better approach, but you have to have those contingencies that you had to be able to on the fly quickly adjust your supply to meet that demand…
Jim Edwards: Right.
And the one thing I will say that I probably should have done three or four days ago was come out.
And I did it yesterday.
I did a video, and I explained exactly what was going on.
It’s in a lot of respects.
It feels like every day has been two days as far as just the way things have been going.
But I probably last week I should have done a video and just explain,
“Hey, we’ve sold a lot more than we thought we would.
I’ve been ordering books every day…
Here’s the reality of it…
And I just didn’t know we’d sell this many books.”
I probably should have done that sooner, but I was so busy trying to get the books out and keep everything else going then…
I just didn’t, and I should have.
Stew Smith: Is this on Amazon yet?
Jim Edwards: No,
Stew Smith: You’re going to put it on Amazon?
Jim Edwards: Well, it’s funny you should ask because I had a long conversation yesterday with my publisher, and we are going to do what he is terming the worldwide book launch for this, I believe, on December 12th.
Stew Smith: Good.
Jim Edwards: And what that’s going to entail is that’s when we’ll blow it out on Amazon, Barnes and noble, all these different distribution channels and stuff.
Stew Smith: Yup.
Jim Edwards: That’s when we’ll do that.
Stew Smith: Okay…
Jim Edwards: So we’re going to do a quote-unquote launch party as opposed to what we’ve been doing, which is more like a funnel launch.
Stew Smith: Is more of an internal.
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: Your internal system versus going out.
Jim Edwards: Just the world and just putting it out there to the world and stuff…
And I’ve talked with Russell and told him what was going on…
He said, yeah, that makes sense.
That’s cool…
Because quite frankly, I make more money when people buy through the funnel…
I would rather give people the book, just to pay shipping and have them see the onetime offers, which are amazing.
There’s one, one time off.
I’ll tell you guys, we have ordered bump for the audiobook for 27 bucks, which is awesome…
Oh, and we’re going to get the audiobook on Audible dude, so we’re going to be on audible with the audiobook.
Stew Smith: Nice…
That was my next question…
My next question was Kindle and Audible…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
It’ll be on Kindle…
It’ll be on audible…
We’re gonna do it like we’re real book…
Stew Smith: Yeah, of course…
Jim Edwards: So I’m excited about that…
So we’re going to do it with different…
There’s different avenues, but still gonna keep advertising the free plus shipping, advertise the crap out of and on YouTube and Facebook and anywhere else that we can run ads and stuff…
Stew Smith: There you go.
Well good.
Last question, anything that you could have done better at any phase of this process?
Jim Edwards: The one thing that was holding me back from launching it sooner, because I’m looking in the book here and the frickin copyright date on this is 2018.
So, we’ve had it done for a while.
Stew Smith: Yeah.
Jim Edwards: I was hoping that the Click Funnels gang would get behind it…
And so I was waiting and pushing it off and waiting and waiting because it was worth it to me for them to get behind it.
They had some internal things that changed.
And I had to push ahead with it, and I wasn’t nasty or anything.
I just said,
“Hey guys, I got to move ahead with this.”
I got to get it done.
And in a way that took the pressure off of them because they had so much other stuff going on that I kind of took back control of it and they gave me a hand with the design.
Their lead designer there is amazing…
So he helped us get the look and feel done…
He had some time on a Friday…
It’s weird how everything just kind of came together also…
Stew Smith: Right.
Jim Edwards: I had some other things happen.
I had a couple of appointments cancel on me that I wasn’t out of the house when they contacted me, and I wouldn’t have talked to them right then.
It was weird…
It was like the woo woo woo thing…
Stew Smith: It all worked out…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
But the big thing was that by taking control of it, I made it easier for them to say yes.
Because we got it all done…
So all they had to do then was just say,
“Hey, we’d love to push this.”
And giving myself a deadline and my team a deadline was how it got done.
In the end, the only time stuff gets done is if there’s a deadline and having a deadline that I was out there…
That I was gonna embarrass myself in front of my followers…
If I did not do it, there was a public consequence.
So could I have done it sooner is usually my big thing is…
I should do things sooner, but I don’t think that’s the case in this…
I think everything came together at the right time in the right place with the right folks…
And at one point, I felt like I was really being kind of led through the process.
It’s hard to explain, but it was (coming) together…
Stew Smith: I would agree…
Because the neat thing about having a product that someone else is now going to endorse and put it in as part of their package, they almost need to see it in action.
Jim Edwards: Right.
Stew Smith: Meaning it produced really well for you with your original intent of the book with the book Funnel Scripts affiliate process…
So they’ve already made money…
Jim Edwards: Yes…
Stew Smith: Because of it…
So they’re happy, and it just was a natural progression…
So I get it!
Jim Edwards: Right…
The big thing I would…
The kind of some takeaways, I don’t know if we’re in takeaway mode right now…
Stew Smith: Let’s do it!
Jim Edwards: But the big takeaway I would tell anybody is if you’ve got a book in you and we’ve talked about having books for different purposes in the past.
We’ve got the three hour Kindle book wizard we’ve got all that where if you need a book for a specific purpose, like as a lead generator or something like that, definitely want to do that.
There’s also something to be said for taking the time and sitting down and really creating an amazing or as amazing a book as you can on a topic that just becomes your Opus, and this really is kind of my Opus of 22 years of selling online.
What you need to understand is once the book is done, it’s kind of like Stew’s philosophy of his process of explaining stuff of To, Through, and After.
Okay…
You wrote the book that got you “To”…
Stew Smith: Yeah, yeah…
Now the Through is getting it set up to sell, getting it out there so people can get it doing whatever kind of launch you can do with the resources that you can harness and then the After is where all the work really is.
Because if you do it right, you should be able to sell this puppy for years…
Stew Smith: Right?
Jim Edwards: Not just for a month, but for years…
You sell this, and you really want to create a book that’s evergreen.
This book is evergreen this book will be as valid 5, 10 years from now as it is today.
I did it that way on purpose.
So, that’s really the big takeaway for me is that To, Through, and After create the best book you can that gets you to get it launched, get your sales process up and then understand that the real work If you do it right, this thing can pay dividends for years.
Most people just throw their book out there, and they’re like,
“Well, how come I’m not rich?”
They don’t give awards for best writing author…
They give awards for best “selling” author.
The key there is “selling”…
You’ve got to transition from being the writer to being the seller of your book.
So those are my takeaways.
What are your takeaways from the sideline?
Other than the original, just underestimate yourself, but you progressed very logically with the way it evolved from its original intent into what it is now.
But then there’s also another progression coming with the next level.
Jim Edwards: Yeah.
Stew Smith: Making it more externally available.
I think that’s a win.
Jim Edwards: Cool.
Stew Smith: Yeah, I think it was a long progression, but in some ways, I think it needed that to get to where it is now.
Jim Edwards: Yes.
This was not an instant pot.
This was all day, Crock-Pot…
Stew Smith: Right.
Jim Edwards: It’s had to cook for a while.
Well cool.
I would just leave everybody with this call to action…
Go get your copy of funnel of a copywritingsecrets at copywritingsecrets.com;
You will enjoy the book, and hopefully, you will get some cool stuff out of it…
And even if it just taught you two or three cool things that would help you to sell more than it would definitely be worth it.
So thanks, Stew!
Stew Smith: You’re welcome.
Jim Edwards: You guys, if you’re not already members of the Sales Copywriting Content Marketing Hacks Podcast, you should be, and you can check that out…
Also, head over to theJimEdwardsMethod.com…
You can check out my blog…
You can check out links to the podcasts, past podcast episodes, and all kinds of cool stuff…
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