The longest-running book marketing podcast in the world. This is the show for writers who want to build their platform, sell more books, and change the world with writing worth talking about. Whether you self publish or are with a traditional house, this podcast will make book promotion fun and easy. Thomas Umstattd Jr. interviews publishers, indie authors, and bestselling traditional authors about how to get published and sell more books.
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If a reader Googled your name right now, what would come up? An abandoned LinkedIn profile from a career you left behind? A neglected Goodreads page? An insurance agent in Albuquerque who happens to share your name? There's only one number-one spot on Google, and if you don't claim it for your name, someone else will. The good news is that your most powerful tool for winning that spot is the one…
You know you need an email list. You've heard about reader magnets and maybe you even have one, but you're stuck at a handful of subscribers, wondering how other authors build lists of tens of thousands of engaged readers who actually buy their books. Damon J. Courtney knows how. He's an author and the creator of BookFunnel , a service that helps authors grow their email lists and deliver many…
Every month, traditional publishers lose more ground to indie authors. One reason it’s happening is that in trad publishing, a committee or the highest-paid person in the room makes the call on book covers, marketing copy, and even what they suppose readers might like. Both get it wrong far more often than they want to admit. Most indie authors aren't much better off. They just swap the…
For most of publishing history, creating an audiobook meant writing a check for thousands of dollars and hoping you'd earn it back in sales. Because of the expense, many authors decided it wasn't worth the risk. So, they skipped audio entirely. Here's the problem. That decision now backfires in a way nobody saw coming. The number one sign that a book was written by AI isn't bad writing. It's the…
You will die. It could be today, it could be 15 years from now, but no one lives forever. Your books, however, can outlive you. In fact, seventy years after you're gone, they’ll live in the public domain. That means your grandchildren's grandchildren could end up responsible for your intellectual property. Most authors have done zero planning for what happens to their books, passwords, and…
What do you do if your Amazon account gets suspended but you didn’t do anything wrong? Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't care if you're innocent. That's not pessimism. It's strategy. Once you understand what Amazon cares about (hint: it's not you, the law, or fairness), you can start speaking a language they respond to. In this week’s episode , I spoke with Lesley Hensell, co-founder of one of the…
Is hiring a publicist a waste of money or not? A typical book publicist charges between $3,000 and $10,000 per month, and they often require a three-month minimum. At $3 of profit per book, you'd need to sell 5,000 copies just to break even. Most PR campaigns don't come close to selling 5,000 copies. But the publicist gets paid either way, while the author takes all the risk. Here's what most…
Do you feel like an imposter as a writer? You probably are. Most authors who experience imposter syndrome are imposters, but they don't have to be! As the saying goes, “There are no good writers; just bad writers who didn’t quit.” Every author starts off as a bad writer. To make a living at writing you must improve through hard work, determination, and training. In this week’s episode , you’ll…
Are your book sales stuck? Maybe sales have slowed. Maybe your launch never took off. Or maybe you're spending money on ads without seeing results. This week on Novel Marketing , Amazon ad specialist Bryan Canter explains how "promo stacking" can revive a struggling book and put it in front of new readers. You'll learn: What promo stacking is and why it works Which promotions deliver the best ROI…
Instead of a guest interview or a marketing deep-dive, in this week’s episode I'm inviting you to something I've spent years building for authors who want to be taken seriously. You’ll discover: How you can get lifetime access to my $249 course this month for $0 How you can get your questions answered by me live on a monthly basis How you can get my digital doppelgänger (ie. AI Thomas) to answer…