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Writing a book about your business, industry, or professional expertise will immediately provide you a new level of credibility. As an author, you’ll get asked to speak more often, get calls from journalists looking to speak with an expert, and be able to close more deals.

But how do you write this book? How do you get started? Get published? What are all the things you need to know along the way?

In this episode of Fast Forward Maine, we talk to Julie Anne Eason who has helped dozens of business owners turn their know-how into books that attract and convert customers.

Rich: Our guest today helps experts, speakers and entrepreneurs write and published nonfiction books that inspire, educate, and sell. She has been a professional writer for nearly 30 years. She’s the founder of Thanet house publishing and the author of the profitable business author, how to write a book that attracts clients and customers. She has ghost written New York times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books for top business leaders, including Russell Brunson, founder of click funnels. We’re very excited to have with us today, Julie Anne Eason. Julie, Welcome to the show.

Julie: Thanks so much, rich. I love being here with you, thanks.

Rich: And we just found out that you’ve ghost written some of Yuri’s favorite books.

Julie: Oh, yes. I love it when people recognize titles.

Yuri: That was a moment of celebration and I was about to start snapping selfies but I’ll leave it for after the show.

Julie: After the show.

Yuri: Thank you. So Julia, a quick question, how did you get started helping business owners write and publish books?

Julie: So I started as a copywriter, actually I started as a journalist and I quickly figured out that there was better ways to make money and business owners needed me more than magazines, so I stayed copywriting for a really long time, for about 20 years. My clients just figured out on their own that they needed books and they would come to me and say, “Hey, can you write a book?” And I’d be like, “Yes, of course I can.”, And then go figure out how to do it. That’s what we do. So I started writing for them and then they decided that they would self publish because that was what made the most sense for them, and they would mess it up. I would look at the book and, and I was like, “Hmm, yeah, we could have done that better.”

Julie: So I learned over the past 10 years I’ve learned how to publish, I’ve learned how to create professional covers, I’ve learned the right way to self publish and the wrong way to self publish. So now what we do is we have all kinds of boutique services where if you need the writing, if you need the publishing, if you need just help, if you want to do it yourself and you want to learn, we can help you learn that too. I just want business owners to realize that their expertise can take their business away beyond where they think they can go, and a book can help them do that. so whatever means we can help them get their books out there is what we want to do. Awesome.

Rich: Okay. And to be transparent, I’ve hired you in the past. So, I mean, I was excited to bring you on the show. I know why I think it’s important, and you kind of touched on this, but why do you feel that writing a book is so important for business owners?

Julie: For the business owner themselves? It totally transforms the way that they think about their business, the way they talk about it, the way they think about it. Rich, when we were working with you, we helped you develop your framework and how you wanted it to talk about; to customers, to other businesses, how and what you do. So in, in terms of the internal, like what it’s going to do for the actual business owner, it does that. In terms of how it helps them position themselves in the marketplace, books are invaluable. The word authority, I mean that’s what an author is, they are the authority on a subject. So what it does is it positions you, it gives you additional credibility, it really sets you apart as the expert in your industry and your field, and that’s why we work so hard with these authors is we want to make sure that their books are truly, truly helpful, inspirational, educational, and they actually do build, build an expertise platform for that author so that they can truly be the expert that they are.

Julie: A lot of people don’t think that they are experts or they think, “Oh, everybody does what I do, it’s nothing special.”, and the truth is that, that they are special and what they have in their heads should be shared with their customers, with other businesses, with people in their communities. So the book helps do that. Another little known fact is that books get passed around, they get passed around nine times before they die, is the average. So, you know, you might know who bought your book, but you don’t know who left it on a plane, who gave it away as a gift, who, you know, donated it to their library. You just never know where your book’s going to end up. We’ve had clients come back to us and say, “Oh my gosh, like I don’t know where this client came from, but we just, you know, had a fifteen thousand dollar contract come in because of our book and we have no idea how they got it.” I just love that because you just don’t know, your reach extends far beyond what your normal marketing can do.

Rich: I’ve got some success stories and one of which, actually, when we started working together. I had just come back from social media marketing world, a big conference in my industry, and I had spoken there before, but they had basically moved me to track leader. Which is a lot more work and not necessarily as much prestige, and when I looked at all the other people who were speaking, I noticed one important fact, it was: author of, author of, author of, author of, and I realized, and I talked to Mike Stelzner who runs a social media examiner in the conference and he gave me the things that they’re looking for and one was that you had written a book and I called up Julia at that point and I said, “okay, I give in like let’s do this.”. I’m not saying that the book is the only reason I got a speaking gig there the next year, but I did, and I’m now coming back for the fourth year in a row of presenting there, on the topic that I wrote on the book. So it really does make a difference in my opinion.

Yuri: You know, when we think about, you know, writing a book, is it more about like self actualization or is it like a modern version of like your business card or it’s just like a true genuine desire to share your insights and help other businesses succeed, or individuals who may be interested in the, in reading it?

Julie: Yes. Can I be succinct? Yes. No, it’s all of those things. In every author, whether they realize it or not, they go through a self actualization journey. They start with, “I want to write a book.” Most people start inside themselves and “what do I want to share with the world? What is my story? What are my experiences that are going to help people with whatever they help them with?” That’s great, and that can go, really, it can be an amazing book. Not necessarily going to be the best book for you to write at that particular time, not necessarily the best book that’s going to help your business goals. So the reason I love working with business owners is because, I have fallen in love with all my clients. Like I just love working with them, I love their missions, I love their enthusiasm for what they’re doing and they want to use a book to share that with the world, share that with their clients, their customers.

Julie: So what we do is we work backwards. So rather than starting with what you want to talk about, which often gets people stuck. It gets them like, “Oh my gosh, I have so much to share and I…”, You know, you probably have 15 books in your head, you don’t need to write it all in one thing. So we work backwards, we start with what is the goal that you have for this book? What do you want it to do? Do you want it to sell? Do you want it to raise money for a charity? Do you want it to help people get over their own personal beliefs about themselves? And so that they will be ready to buy from you? What is it that you want this book to do for you?

Julie: Then we go to, “what do you want this book to do for the reader?”, because that’s how you formulate your content and organize your thoughts. Then we worked backwards from there. There’s a whole lot of steps that we go through, but rather than it being a journey of, “what do I want to share?” It’s, “what do my readers need to hear? What do they need to do in order to take the steps that I want them to take?” Which is usually sign up for a mailing list, buy my products and services, hire me to speak, whatever.

Rich: And my experience was, I came to you and that there were two books I wanted to write, and the first one that I was more passionate about was how business owners can put on events like agents of change. The other one was about boring, old digital marketing, and you were like, “You are going to first write about digital marketing and then you can write about your passion project.” That turned out to be some of the best advice that I got, even though there were thousands, tens of thousands of books already on there. There’s something about putting your expertise on the line and having something physical that you can hand off to somebody that really makes a difference for a business owner, in my opinion, in my experience, I should say.

Julie: It totally does, and you’re right, every author has a passion project that they really want to do. A lot of times I have to be like, “Okay, well, what’s the goal? What’s it really mean?” You can do your passion projects at any time and maybe your passion project is the right book to start with, but usually for a first book, you really need to get into the things that are so mundane for you.

Julie: For me, it’s really mundane to talk about how to write a book. I mean, that’s what I do all day long, I love it. I enjoy talking with people, but my book had to be… I had to give myself the advice, my book of the profitable profit- I really picked the wrong title because it’s really hard to say on podcasts. The profitable business author, was the mundane topic for me and it was not, you know, exciting and glamorous and I thought, “Oh, I have so many other things I want to share, but this is what they needed to know.” They needed to know how do they start a book, why should they do it? How do they make it profitable? You know, because most books never, never sell, you know, and you’re actually going to be more profitable if you give it away.

Rich: I would definitely agree with that, I mean, it’s nice, I get a check anywhere from thirty to fifty dollars a month, from my Amazon sales.

Julie: Wow, you are rocking those Amazon sales.

Rich: But the other day, at the beginning of this year, I got a call from a company in Canada that the guy had gone on to Amazon and he was looking for a book cause he was starting an eCommerce site and he found the lead machine, the small business guide to digital marketing, which is my book, and read it from cover to cover and called me up and started doing business with us with a twenty thousand dollar contract, so even though, I may be make forty to fifty dollars a month in residuals, it’s those kinds of sales, and now, I’m telling this to everybody, obviously, I’m very excited about this, very passionate about this. Anybody who comes into my office, who I think is a good prospect, I give them a copy of the book, because I’m like, You know, it costs me five bucks to get it printed, Right? And I just hand it… It’s a $5 business card and all of a sudden it’s like, even if they don’t read it, they’re like, “Oh, these guys literally wrote the book on digital marketing.” It makes a difference.

Julie: And you say, even if people don’t read it, it’s a really big misconception that people don’t read. People do read, and even more importantly, people judge. And so if you have written a book, they’re going to judge you based on number one: “Oh, he wrote a book. Oh wow, that’s really cool. I wish I could write a book.” You know, it automatically puts you above. And then they’ll look at your front cover and they’ll look at the title, and the subtitle, and how it all flows together, and if it’s professionally done and wonderful, and they’ll be like, “Oh, wow.” This immediately bumps you up another notch. They turn it over, they look at the copywriting on the back cover, they open it up, they look at the table of contents. All of those things work together to bring you a relationship with a reader that will eventually translate into a return on your investment of time and energy and money, and all the years you put into it. I mean, you got that great contract and I’m sure you’ve had many others, but you also have… What is this? The fifth year you’re going back to speak? I mean what kind of, you know, what kind of value is that? That’s huge.

Rich: Well, exactly when we’ve started tracking internally what jobs we get from different things, and one of them is what jobs are we getting from the social media marketing world, and over the last few years we’ve gotten in another thirty to fifty thousand dollars worth of business from those, and those are ongoing projects. So that’s why I don’t know the exact number and I don’t know when it’ll end. So Yuri, why haven’t you written your book yet? I think this is an intervention between Julie and myself.

Julie: I didn’t know that was what we were here to do, but I’m really, I’m all in with ganging up on people.

Yuri: Thank you guys. Well, sounds like you know, I’m going to put it on my to do list and hit the ground running. Well, speaking of writing books and exciting business opportunities, Julia, I know that you created the nonfiction book academy. What is it all about? Can you tell us a little bit?

Julie: So that is my attempt to spread my brain out in digital ways, basically. We work with so few people, individually, I can’t help everybody I want to help. So it’s a digital program, and it actually is for entrepreneurs who want to write the book, but they also need to know the rest of the process. They need to know the editing, they need to know, you know, how do they decide whether they should traditionally publish, or whether they should self-publish, or whether they should indie publish, and what is a hybrid publisher, there’s so many things and if they decide they want to self publish, how do they do that? There’s so many ways that you can find out about that, I mean, you can Google self-publishing and you’ll get information that goes back to like, you know, 1972 and some of it might be great, some of it might not even be like viable anymore.

Julie: So I tried to like distill everything that I possibly could into a digital course and that’s what the online or the version of it is, the nonfiction book Academy. And then I have a Facebook group that goes with it where people can ask questions, they can get help, and really what it does is it, it kind of forces you to be accountable to get it fricking done, because I don’t know, how long did you, and how did long did I bug you about getting your book done? Even his… Even Rich’s dad was like, “come on, let’s do this. Get your book done.”

Rich: I think the first year I put it on my to do list was twenty ten and I think it was like five or six years before I finally just called you up and said, “Yeah, let’s just do it.”

Julie: Yeah, and every time I saw you it was like, “Come on rich. So how’s that book coming?”

Rich: Yeah, and you know what it was, it wasn’t until I really started to invest. For me, sometimes I have to put money where my mouth is and for me it was like hiring you and then suddenly it became real for me. To be honest, we didn’t even work together that long, but you pointed me in the right direction, I just needed a kick in the pants. You provided that, but we had had this model for years around, we’d call it different things. One time it was the holistic approach to web marketing. When we sat down to write the book, you know, I said one thing I do want to include is building a website.

Rich: We never really talk about that, we talk about the other pieces, and that’s when we started to come up with: build, attract, retain, evaluate. Which I wouldn’t have come up with, without your help and mentorship. That then became the process for almost everything we did at the company. So it was really, one of the things that you haven’t really mentioned is, clarifying. Like all of a sudden having to take everything that’s in your head and teach somebody else about it makes it much clearer. Cause a lot of times we have ideas in our head, but they’re muddy and when you have to speak it, or you have to write it, it becomes a lot clearer for us and we’re able to get that into somebody else’s head.

Julie: Right. And that makes you a better speaker too. Yeah, you have to be able to clearly and concisely talk about what you do and what you’re… Having a framework like bear is amazing. We went around in circles with that for a little while, there was some back and fourth.

Rich: We spent a couple of sessions, yeah. So, you know, I’m sure there are people listening right now at this say, “yeah, that’s great for digital marketing where you have to educate people, but it would never work for my industry.” What are some of the strangest or most likely industries or companies that you’ve helped write a book for?

Julie: Most likely or least likely?

Rich: Most unusual. Unlikely.

Julie: Most unusual? I’ll tell this story, I love this story. So one of clients that I did copywriting for, his name was Dave and he ran a company. He was a locksmith. I’m like, “A locksmith. Okay, groovy.” Well, I found out that he wasn’t just a locksmith, but he was actually a security expert, he had helped design the locks… It’s like hardware, we’re talking about lock hardware here. We’re talking about like keys.

Rich: Not cyber security.

Julie: No, we’re talking about keys and locks, and door jams, and automatic openers, and panic bars, and things like that. That’s what he sold online with an eCommerce business and he was very successful with it, but it also helped to design and create the locking systems and the hardware mechanisms for like the Olympics and all the military installations in places in Saudi Arabia, and so, he knew his stuff.

Julie: He was really, really good at it. It’s kind of a sad story how this book came about, but when Sandy Hook happened, when the shooting happened at that school. He called me up and he said, “Julie, I can’t even believe this, this is breaking my heart. All the experts on the news are talking about putting security guards in the schools and doing all of these things and they don’t have to do that.” Like they can do that and it’s fine, but, you know, there’s so many solutions that are cheaper and that are more effective and that can be put into place really fast. Like electrified lock systems. Like, you know, having, having a system where one person in the office has a button they can push and that will lock the doors to any, you know, there’s so many solutions.

Julie: And he was like, “And I want to share this with all the schools and churches and daycare centers.” And I mean, like, Virginia tech happened a little while after that and he had been invited to go on and talk about this on a radio show and he was like, “I need to be able to get it out to more than just this radio show. I need a book.” I was like, “Great. Let’s write a book. This’ll be awesome. I have no idea how we’re going to do this, but it’ll be great.” He’s like, “and I need it in a week.” It was like, okay. I planted my butt at Barnes and Noble. We wrote a book, we wrote a book called we can protect the children and it is still available on Amazon today, as far as I know. In that book he explained like these are the solutions that can be put into place and Oh, by the way, if you sent… There is.. we always put offers in our books, because we want the people to who are reading it to actually engage with the business owner.

Julie: So he said, if you send me a picture of your doors, I will tell you the right locks to use. Now, that was free consultations, he didn’t have to do that. You know, any church, any daycare center, any school, anybody who needed this could just send pictures of their doors. Like that’s all they had to do. He didn’t care where they got the locks, but how many people do you think went to his site to get the actual locks? Of course, it helped him, but also, you know, he’s a deeply Christian person and he really genuinely just wanted people to stop shooting kids. I mean, it was terrible.

Rich: I think we’re all for that.

Julie: Yeah, I think we are all for that too. So it was really an honor to be able to write that, and yeah, we busted it out and it had to be short because it was such a short turnaround, but the opportunities in self-publishing allowed for him to be able to do that. Get up, get it ready. So that when he went on that radio show a week later, he had a book.

Yuri: That is a fantastic story. So Julie, when someone hires you in similar situation, I hope it’s not necessarily just one week, but what does the process look like? You know, how do you help them to get started? Where do they get started? And you know, what’s the timeline?

Julie: Right, so people tend to think, “Oh, I can just write a book in a weekend.”, Because there’s a lot of digital marketing products out there like that say, “Hey, let’s write a book in two days. Let’s write a book in an hour.” Like the time keeps getting shorter and shorter. The truth is that it really does take some time to figure out what you’re doing and if you write something, what we call it, a book development or book treatment where it’s basically, you’re laying out, what is the goal? What, for you, what is the goal for the reader? Who is the audience? Exactly, who are we talking to? And we lay out a question-based outline, which is a very special kind of outline that you did not learn how to do in school, but you should have, and we just build this document.

Julie: It’s usually twenty pages or so of all the things that you need so that you can write. Rich used the question-based outline, he can totally talk to how easy it is to write when you know what you have to say. You didn’t have to think about what to say, you just had a question there, and all you had to do is answer it. So there’s this book development process that we’ve distilled down into a program that people can just buy by themselves. Just do that and then they go off, and they write it, or they hire a different ghostwriter, or sometimes they go into the digital program, whatever, but we make sure that they have the solid base that they need to have a successful book that’s actually going to do what they want it to do. Then from there, that usually takes a few weeks to really nail that down.

Julie: And then after that, if they’re hiring us to ghostwrite, that can take anywhere from, I mean a week to a few years. It just depends on their availability. These business owners are also busy, that’s why they hire ghost writers in the first place, because they don’t have time to write. So sometimes it just takes a really long time to for it to happen. The thing that can happen really quickly though is when you have a good book development, and a book treatment, you’re able to go, “Okay, I can write this.” Then it’s the revision, and the editing, and the back and forth thing that happens, that takes some time. The publishing itself can take a few months at the minimum, it can take years. I mean traditional publishers, if you handed Simon and Schuster a book that was done, and edited, and ready to go, it could take two years before it ever saw the shelves.

Julie: I mean, even if they really wanted it. Now if you’re, you know, Hillary Clinton or somebody and you’re like, “I need this book out now.” They’re going to, of course, you know, put you ahead of the line and do that, but for the most part it does take some time. So you really want to allow that time for the book development process, for the writing, for the editing, to make sure that you have a really good book. It’s more important to have a super high quality book than it is to have something that you just put out really quickly and throw it up on Amazon. I’ve seen people take transcripts from webinars and put them on Amazon and say, Oh, I have a book and it’s a bestseller in LA, LA, LA, and I’m like, no, no.

Rich: So you talked a little bit about the editing process also coming. What are some of the things, like, let’s say we’ve written the book, we’ve got it edited. What are the next steps to actually turn into a physical product?

Julie: A physical book.

Rich: Physical book.

Julie: Physical product, in my head I’m thinking like, Teddy bears? What are we talking about here? So the next steps, if you are self publishing, would be to get it designed. You have to have a cover design, which is one thing, and the cover, it really is the most important. Honestly, it’s almost most more important than what’s inside, because if the people can’t get past-

Rich: Are you telling us we should judge a book by its cover?

Julie: I am saying everybody does. That’s what I’m saying. Everybody judges books by their cover, because if it doesn’t look professional, they’re not going to, you know, they’re watching. They waste their time. People are so busy and they need to actually buy the book, sit down with it, read it. Even if it’s digital, even if it’s audio, they still have to spend time to digest that information and if the cover wasn’t done well, why should they bother?

Rich: I think, because it’s so easy to get a book published these days, because of self publishing. I think you have to take that extra step to make it look like this would have passed the editors at Wiley.

Julie: Exactly, exactly. It has to be a professional cover. It has to be a professional title and subtitle. That makes sense. That scan well that have musicality to the ears that don’t… There’s the way that I write is based entirely on musicality and scanning and like how well does this sound?

Julie: Even though I’m reading it silently, because when you are actually… And this is… I told you this all the time. I was like, read your stuff out loud and you can tell, you know, did you run out of breath? Well, maybe your sentences are too long. You know, do you stumble over the words? Well, maybe you need to rearrange them or maybe you need to use a different word. You know, because you want people to engage in the book and you want them to feel like, “I just read an entire book and I have no idea where the night went, it’s six o’clock in the morning and I just read through the night.” That’s what you want, but if you’re not writing in a way that helps people do that you’re trying to show off your vocabulary or you’re trying to, you know, look very academic or whatever like that just stops people from reading. So you don’t want that. we’ve totally gone off track of your original question. Something about book covers and then we were going to talk about something else.

Rich: Yes, well, we’ll just talking about the process, so we get somebody to design the book cover for us and then we also get somebody to lay it out for us, which, some people don’t know that’s an actual step.

Julie: Yeah, the interior is very important and you want it to look like a credible book. You want there to be, what they call, running heads. Those are the little things at the top of the page that say what the book is and what chapter you’re in, because people use those. They don’t think they use them, they don’t think about them as anything, but they’re important. The page numbering needs to be right, the table of contents needs to match the actual pages. There’s all of these little things. Maybe you have some photography or images. Do you have the copyrights for those images? Things like that. There’s a lot that goes into the design phase and then once the design phase is done and there’s a proofing, there may or may not be an index that needs to be done, that is done by a professional who has special software.

Julie: No one is sitting there looking at your words and going through and finding all the pages. There’s a special industry called indexing and you may need that. So, there’s other pieces like the advertising, we try to put some advertising in the front of the book that leads people to your website right away. And there’s a specific reason for that, which is that when you look at a book on Amazon, what do you do? You click on look inside, right? And the first thing you see if it is like, Oh, there’s a free companion workbook I can get on their website, let me go check that out.

Rich: Oh, that’s a good tip.

Julie: They might never even buy the book. Who cares? They’re going to go to your website and they’re going to be like, “Oh, nevermind, I don’t need the book. I need this person.”

Julie: Right? So we try to put advertising in the front that doesn’t look like advertising. And then we put, you know, blatant advertising in the back, which is like, here’s my program. Or here’s, you know, the services we offer, or here’s a coupon or whatever. So there’s a lot of pieces that go… And then the actual publishing part that people think is publishing is really just an upload process, where you upload it to Amazon, or you upload it to any number of printers. Or you go, if you know that you need thousands of books, you can get them done much cheaper by using offset printers. So we have to help you decide where you want to go with that, but yeah, it’s a process.

Yuri: So Julie, now we have the book. You know, we, we got it index, you know, we, we placed it on Amazon, we got our offers all squared away, but how do we actually promote our book outside of the mains where people can buy it? How can we drive the people to the destination?

Julie: Right? So first of all, let’s get bookstores out of the way because that’s the worst place to sell books ever. I love bookstores. I love bookstores. I spend so much time and money in bookstores, but for business people, unless you are trying to have or you already have a massive, mainstream platform, you know, where you’re Oprah Winfrey or your Hillary Clinton or you’re somebody who is actually like… and you don’t have to be that huge. Those are just people who came to my head. Unless you have that or you’re driving for that, you don’t need traditional publishing. Traditional publishing is going to take all of your profits. They’re going to take a lot of the control of your book.

Julie: They decide on the cover. They decide on a lot of different things, but what they give back is that they get you into bookstores. You can get into bookstores other ways, as an independently published author, it’s not impossible, but that that is just not the best bang for your buck. If you are trying to get your business and your expertise out into the world there are so many ways that are way, way, way better than that. One is to send to your mailing list, right? You, you have a mailing list. People are presumably on there because they like you and they love what you do, they want it, they want to support you, get your book. The other way is social media. You can do organic advertising or you’re just talking about your book and you’re blog posts and you’re posting pictures of your book.

Julie: Things like that. Rich did a great job with his cover when he was trying to decide what cover to use. He… And this is something I tell people all the time, it’s like take all the different covers you have. Even if you have a favorite, put them on social media and let people vote on them, because they feel like they’re part of the process and they get excited about it and then they’re like, “Oh, when is that book coming out?” And then they’re like, “Oh, that was the one I picked.” You know? And it doesn’t matter which one you choose, really it’s important that they are part of the process. You can also do paid advertising, do some Facebook ads about your book. You can put LinkedIn ads. It depends. If you’re B to B, B to C, where are your people hanging out?

Julie: Right. The other thing you can do is get sponsors to help promote your books. I have a book out right now called the work at home success guide, and I am going to speak at a freelancer conference, and we’re talking with banks there. There’s banks that are specifically for freelancers, and they’re just getting started. So it’s really cool that they could take a book, that’s specifically for freelancers, it’s going to help them have a better career and have more money. How nice is it that, that marries with their mission of helping those people manage the money. So they can give it away as a thank you when someone signs up, they can give it away on their website in return for, you know, just as a lead magnet, in return for email addresses. The beautiful thing about a physical book is that not only did they get an email address, they get a direct mail, address because you have to mail it somewhere, right?

Julie: You have to. So there’s a physical book, it makes sense, “Oh, we also need your mailing address.” Then, you know, you are able to market to them in other ways. Anyone who’s ever done direct mail knows that, you know, you’re paying for the postage no matter how much is in there. So you put the book in there, you can also put some information in there about your programs, your checking accounts, whatever. There’s just a lot of cool ways that you can do that. You can do it with sponsorships. We also have white label books, private label books where we’ve already written the book, and we’re happy to co-brand and we can either have our name on it with your branding on it or “Hey, let’s just make it your book.” So we’re doing that in the senior care industry right now with a book that we wrote called the caregiver’s companion.

Julie: And totally honest, I wrote it because I had a nightmare with my mother trying to get information about how to take care of her better, and you know, I was like, “Why does nobody have a book that I can just read” There was nothing. There was like, Oh there’s websites and Google and blah blah blah. So we wrote the book and now we’re out there, you know, finding places that want to sponsor it and want to put their name on it as a lead magnet for their businesses, because in my opinion, I just want people to get the information. I don’t care if my name’s on it or not. So, tons of ways.

Rich: There’s obviously so much going on here and you know so much about all the ins and outs you offer a course in how to write a business book. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Julie: So nonfiction book Academy is, is our flagship course. It is wonderful and I love it, because I get to interact with the people who may not be working with us directly. So I get to help them answer their questions. We have coaches in there, we have an editor who checks all the editing questions, we have a director of publishing who goes in and helps people with their self publishing. You can get to it at nonfictionbookacademy.com you can also just get it through my book, which is available for free on our website. Thanet House Books and people can go download it and learn more about how to write their books, and get everything that they need.

Rich: Perfect.

Yuri: So this is the most exciting part of the show outside of all the exciting things that we already discussed.

Julie: There’s more excitement? I can’t wait.

Yuri: I can’t wait, call now and… So here’s the question. If you could change one thing to improve the business ecosystem here in Maine, what would it be?

Julie: Rich sort of gave me a heads up on this question and I’ve been thinking about it for a few days and honestly, I can only answer for myself because I’m a freelancer or I was a freelancer, and now, not anymore, but I’m very insulated and I live, you know, up North in the woods. I had to come down here to Portland to do this interview?

Yuri: Thank you for traveling.

Julie: Oh absolutely, I love any excuse to get to where there’s people. I feel like we Mainers do a really great job connecting personally one on one with their consumers. Like businesses are great at helping their customers, and interacting with them, and creating relationships and all. I feel like the business to business aspect, at least in my part, and it literally is like me, I need to get out more and talk to my businesses, because I’m so used to being online and there’s so much in my world, there’s so much emphasis put on digital marketing and online marketing and “Oh, you have to go to these conferences that are halfway around the world and you have to have all this grand stuff.”

Julie: And there’s plenty of people right here in Maine who could absolutely benefit from writing a book and I think it’s my own blinders that I feel like I have to be online all the time. So I think that that being able to connect personally and supporting other businesses in Maine and just having a nice community network of businesses here would really be beneficial for me, anyway.

Rich: All right. To wrap up, you’ve got a book, the profitable business author you’re giving away for free, if people just pay for shipping and handling?

Julie: Yes, and it’s honestly, I’ve even gone a step farther than that, if they want the digital version they can get without the shipping and handling. They do have to leave an email address and yes, I’m going to help encourage you to write a book, and encourage you to join me in the nonfiction book Academy with that email address, but yeah, it’s-

Rich: theprofitablebusinessauthor.com.

Julie: Yes, and you can also get it at Thanet House Books. It’s also there.

Rich: Fantastic. Julie, this has been great. Besides theprofitablebusinessauthor.com where can people find out more about you online?

Julie: Thanet house books. We are all over the place, we were on LinkedIn. That’s my favorite place to be. We’re on Facebook, we’re on Instagram, but I don’t really, I never go there. I should. People say, “Oh, you should be there.”, But it’s like, i like to spend my time on LinkedIn, so that’s a good place.

Rich: Sounds good. We’ll have all those links in the show notes. Appreciate your time today.

Julie: Thank you so much.

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