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In this episode, Barbara and Steve discuss:
- How to write, publish and market your book
How to be an author, and how to succeed in the process
How Thriving Best Seller can help you in creating the best book.
Key Takeaways:
“There is somebody who needs who you are what you do in the world, your specifics, your specialty, they need you to be the one that does what you do for them.” – Steve Kidd.
Connect with Steve Kidd:
Website: http://thrivingbestsellers.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-kidd-90236655/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzk7pnddt893XlgqTv5Ko5Q
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AskSteveKidd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stevekidd
Connect with Barbara Hales:
Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
Business Website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com
Email: halesgangb@aol,com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheMedicalStrategist
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales
Books:
Content Copy Made Easy
14 Tactics to Triple Sales
Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist
TRANSCRIPTION (135)
Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today, we have with us, Steve Kidd.
Steve’s big heart is what sets him apart, an international best-selling author of more than 20 books, and a third-generation minister, he fills the world with hope, and God’s energy, a diamond that shines through each person he brings growth to and a diamond that is a living and breathing, growing spirit that blooms through each one.
He doesn’t need to shine or be seen. He is seen through everything he touches. The best in the world is seeing the upper level, the next, the more. He is the extreme visionary, living a life of purpose and a vision that sees beyond the bleeding edge of what is coming next to the air being sliced through in front of it.
If you want insight into trends, projecting and possibilities come coming before it even seems possible. Steve is your guy. Welcome to the show, Steve.
Steve Kidd: Thanks so much for having me, Barbara. I appreciate it.
Promoting and Launching Books
Dr. Barbara Hales: So Steve, one of your talents is that you help people create books or launch their books so that they can promote their services. Tell us about your process.
Steve Kidd: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I work with people all the way from, I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do all the way to they’ve had a book for as much as I think 20 years is about the oldest book that I’ve worked with to help them market at the bestseller.
But yeah, we work with a person to help them determine who they’re going to write what they’re going to write, and who they’re writing it to put that together into a book form, do it via interview because all busy professionals are too busy to sit down and put pen to paper or type things out.
And so just simply being able to take the time to talk and have others come in and put that together for you makes a huge difference in your ability to actually put your book out. And then we have story development editors, grammar editors, and graphics people, formatted for eBook and print form. And then most importantly, we have a program for helping you become a best-selling author, we absolutely guarantee it. We’ve done it 1000s upon 1000s of times with a 100% success rate. And the really cool part about those 1000s of people is that equates to literally millions of people that their messages have reached. That’s pretty cool.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that’s pretty impressive. Are you ghostwriting? Or are you putting them together with ghostwriters from your team?
Steve Kidd: I shy away from the phrase ghostwriting because a typical ghostwriter is going to do some type of interview process but then they write it in their voice and their style. I rather am conducting an interview and helping the person through their words put together a book that is very much in their voice sounds like them and is them versus being the ghostwriter. So we do it all via interview and an editor people but we don’t actually have a ghostwriter. Specifically, that’s just going to take your germ of an idea and run with it and make it really essentially theirs.
The Process of Creating a Book
Dr. Barbara Hales: How long does that process take?
Steve Kidd: It doesn’t take very long at all, actually, you know, usually, it’s about a 30-day process it really honestly, if you go more than about 90 days and the creation of your book, um, it means that other things are happening in your life, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. It could be that you fell in love and got married or had a new baby or those kinds of things. But all of those good and bad life events, mess with our schedules. And but you know, I mean, as far as just, in general, 90 days is the longest it should ever take for you to go from no idea to a completely done book and have it be on the bestseller list.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What platform are you publishing the books on?
Steve Kidd: I focus exclusively on Amazon. Number one, Amazon sells in the high 90 percentile of all books that are sold in the world now. So if you want to sell books in this day and age, you want to be Amazon’s BFF. But when it comes to their bestseller list, they’re the only statistically driven bestseller list that I know.
Meaning that if a book is number two, and another book is number three, book number two sold more copies of the book during that timeframe. Now it is a little bit more volatile list than some of the others. But when you start looking at like the New York Times or other ones like that, those are editorials.
They take the information on wholesale purchases by companies like Walmart or Sam’s Club or things like that. And then they literally just write an editorial on out of that list who they believe the best-selling books are. And there’s a lot of criteria for and a lot of people that I’ve heard 1000s upon 1000s of stories of people who, statistically, were on the bestseller list, but they didn’t get included.
And again because it’s wholesale purchases that have no direct comparison to who got the book or who read the book. So we focus primarily on Amazon because we want to do something that’s for real for you.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Is your book promotion through social media?
Steve Kidd: We do a combination of social media, paid marketing, organic traffic, email, and all of those kinds of things. So that we can really get the start going, and then there’s beyond after because the best seller is only the beginning, your book should be a best seller really on day one. And then there’s a whole bunch of additional marketing things that we can do, building your community and your fan base so that your book really continues to sell if the sale of your book is what’s important. And sometimes the book is just building a really great foundation for the thing that really is important.
Dr. Barbara Hales: And if someone has no clue as to what they should put out on their book, what their topics should be that would best reflect who they are, or the services that they provide, I assume then that you talk it through with them to discover what that would be.
Steve Kidd: Yeah, yeah, that’s a lot of fun for me to talk about, what are you passionate about? What are the things that you would say? What are the things that you always say, and help them really discover? The book that’s inside of them? Or what should be the first of all the books that are inside of them to come out?
Dr. Barbara Hales: How did you get into this Steve?
How Steve Starts Creating books and his connections
Steve Kidd: As far as specifically books go, in 2007, the lady that I was then married to and my second youngest daughter, were huge fans of the movie, Twilight, if you remember that movie. And actually, because we lived near where the first movie was filmed, they went on a mother-daughter trip for my daughter’s 18th birthday visiting all of the filming sites for Twilight and blogging about their journey and stuff. And that grew into not just a book, or not just a blog, but into a full book. And I helped them put that together into the print format and publish it. And it was actually at one point, the number one best-selling movie-related travel guide on Amazon.
Dr. Barbara Hales: I see. Now I understand that with the success of some books, you’re able to get people on some TV programs. Tell us about that.
Steve Kidd: So it’s just such a night and day difference between having nothing, I think of Dr. Alicia Griffith, because that I know specifically is one of the examples I gave you. Dr. Alicia Griffith is a medical doctor. She’s an audiologist. She’s been in that field for 20 years, interestingly, and dealing almost primarily with kids with autism. And the interesting part is 10 years into her medical journey. Her son that was born was born autistic. So she has a very practical real-world life experience in it. But nobody knew who she was. And we helped her put together a book about the amazing gift that is her son and then began to show her how to be able to mark it that she was first on TBN.
And the interviewer pretty well held the book up for the camera to see almost the entire half an hour, I think the interview was in that particular one. And then she was invited to be on Good Morning America and segments on Good Morning America, like three to five minutes. And they talked all about her book and all the things that she does with autistic children. But as she said many times over, she’s gotten more out of being a best-selling author than she is out of having been a doctor in her same field for 20 years.
Dr. Barbara Hales: I can imagine that as I tell a lot of my clients if everything is equal and there are 10 colleagues in the room doing the same thing. Who is the prospective patient going to choose? And it’s going to be the person that wrote the book because obviously, the perception is that they are the ones that are the authority in the field.
So when a person goes through this process with you and they have the best-selling book is that what your services end? Or do they go on for other things?
Steve Kidd: So I mean, ultimately, we’re a marketing company with a strong publishing division. I’ve been in a marketing company since 1988. We were early adopters in digital marketing and the internet space. In fact, the word The internet didn’t exist back when we were doing that, to begin with. So for quite a while. We have everything I like to call it publishing to the best sellers and beyond. So there are a lot of things.
And it’s really about having a program and an understanding of what you really want to do. I mean, yes, you can sell books, and you can make anywhere from one to $5, depending on the margins of your book. But it takes a long time at Let’s even say, $5 a time to make 1000 bucks, let alone 10,000, or substantial money, versus if you create a course as one example. Or if you did speaking gigs, or those kinds of things, where you’re getting paid 1000s of dollars for each one of the clients that you convert into a sale. It’s about the same amount of effort but it’s definitely a much more maximized way of bringing in revenue for your time.
Connect with Steve
Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you help your writers get on stage?
Steve Kidd: Absolutely, on podcasts on virtual and live stages, I have a specific contractor that I work with whose entire forte is just literally getting people on the bigger TV show, Steve Harvey, Good Morning, America, all of those and she comes actually from a Hollywood background and, and knows all the ins and outs of that. And that’s all that her business does. And she’s a contractor that works with me and I send my clients that want to be in that realm over to work with her.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that’s really very impressive. So because we’re talking about marketing, how is it that people find out about you and your services?
Steve Kidd: Well, of course, I’m doing a lot of podcasts these days, so that I can share with people. But specifically, if they want to look at my company, you go to thrivingbestsellers.com. And we have our whole process from done for you to do with you to talk to you. And then of course, if you already have a book, the marketing you program, thrivingbestsellers.com that’s our website.
Tips and Tricks
Dr. Barbara Hales: What is one key tip that you could give our listeners today that they could implement right away?
Steve Kidd: So the number one piece of it is somebody’s waiting on you. There is somebody who needs who you are what you do in the world, your specifics, and your specialty, they need you to be the one that does what you do for them. It’s especially true because I know your main listening audience as doctors, that specialty that you spent so much of your life becoming an expert at somebody really needs you. But they need to understand that you exist and who you are.
This brings me to part B of my second suggestion. And that’s you will never maximize the marketing to its fullest potential in any marketing you do for yourself in your business. If you do not have along with that bestseller, it is the number one marketing credential number one influencer credential, if you will, in the world right now today.
And it adds instant credibility. So when you say, I need a doctor, a whole roomful of doctors, but this one is the guy who wrote the book on it. Even something as simple as you put out an article in whatever magazine, whether it’s a trade specific doctor related trade magazine, or it’s something more for lay people when that article is written by the best-selling author of the book, such and such, or just even Best Selling Author, Dr. So and so it makes just a night and day difference between the impact as well as the saleability of that if you want to get published.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Absolutely. Well, you and I are on the same wavelength. I totally agree with you. If there are listeners that would like to reach you and discuss your services further. What is the best way to do that?
Steve Kidd: Well, I made it really easy for you. I love giving people gifts. So I created a free gift for everybody that’s listening today. If you go to goingwealthguide.com, that’s ongoingwealthguide.com There is a five-step process for really being able to create a process so that the abundance in your life is continuously included in that is a link to my signature. Your bestseller and one-hour workshop that you can just listen to and write your book. But most importantly, and that’s free. Most importantly, when you get to the thank you page, there’s a link there. And you can schedule a free call to talk with me and we can talk about really anything you want to but specifically about your book and your marketing and what we can do to help you in the process.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that is fantastic. Thank you so much for being on the show, Steve. This is Steve Kidd that we’ve been talking to with two Ds and I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you. Thank you very much.
Steve Kidd: Thanks so much for having me, Barbara.
Dr. Barbara Hales: This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Till next time.
