How I Built A $120K/Year Business That Helps Authors Publish And Market Their Books
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi, my name is Steve Kidd. I am a third-generation minister, an international best-selling author of 21 books and counting, and I have the privilege of helping people write, publish, and market their books to best sellers and beyond.
As awesome as helping people share themselves with the world is, what I really do is help people discover their purpose and share it with a world in need. I show people the up level, the next, the more in life that allows them to see that their cloud doesn't just have a silver lining, but it is silver covered in cotton candy.
I've had the honor and the privilege to work with several thousand authors and those authors equal more than a million lives that have been touched by the books that they have written.
I offer a Done For You program for people who do not have time to write their book but know they need it. I have a Taught To You class for those who wish to learn how to write their book themselves.
And I have a Marketing You program for people who have written a book and would now like the book to be a best seller; whether your book is brand new or 20 years old I can make your book a best seller - guaranteed!
I went through a painful divorce in 2020 and my wife was my business partner, so though I have been in business for 35 years I had to completely restart from scratch. I was able to still hold as a $100,000 gross revenue company for that 1st fiscal year and since then have experienced a 20% year over year growth as I rebuild.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I started selling at five years old. My parents had purchased greeting cards and holiday napkins for my older brothers to sell and they quickly found that they weren't really interested in selling. Being the naive 5-year-old that I was I ask if I could sell them.
My mom packed up a bag assuming that I would come back in a few minutes. Instead, I came back with an empty bag and a pocketful of money and I've been in sales and marketing ever since.
I started a marketing company in February of 1987 which became an Internet digital marketing company before the word the Internet actually even existed. In 2007 my then-wife and Second youngest daughter went on a mother-daughter trip to visit the filming locations for the movie Twilight.
They blogged about their travels and turned that into a book I helped them publish that book and made the book at one point the number one best-selling movie-related travel guide on Amazon. It was with this book that I learned just how powerful being a best seller is and how necessary, if not mandatory it is for marketing. I took the experience of this and began ensuring that all the clients I worked with didn't just have a book but were best sellers.
Encouraged by a coach, we put together a program that anyone could do to write, publish, and market their books to bestsellers. We beta-tested this program with 20 people at the end of 2015 and ended 2015 at $60,000.
In 2016 we helped 156 people become best-selling authors and reach over 180,000 people with their books, growing our little company to nearly half $1,000,000. I have been working with authors, helping them share the unique brilliance that is them with the world ever since.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
In the early days of doing books, there was a lot of hard work before I had a system. Learning to manipulate programs like InDesign to show up the way that you wanted things to work with graphics people. Doing layouts.
So all of those were things that I had familiarity with; I had never done them on this larger scale. There were several iterations to that first book before it ever looked right. Even though, at the time, I was writing, editing, and publishing a weekly local magazine, doing the full book was a new experience.
I had to create all the steps of capturing the content from the author and organizing it in a readable format to have the complete content for the book. When I began to bring on employees, and I created a system, there were nearly 50 steps originally, which now has grown to over 75 steps to go from start to finish to create a person's book.
Each step needs to be overseen and supervised to provide a consistent and quality book that the author loves.
Describe the process of launching the business.
We have been a marketing company for years and had been doing books for high-end multi $1,000,000 clients for nearly a decade before we created our system to make getting your book done a reality for everyone.
We went to a networking event and shared with a small group of people an opportunity to be part of our beta group to test out the new system that we had created to make it accessible for anyone to write, publish, and market their books to best sellers.
Out of this group, we had 20 people who signed up to do their books during the months of November and December of 2015. The beta price for our program, which is now $15,000, was for those first 20 people, $997. From the money raised by those people, we were able to start a new division of our company helping people with their books.
Our program gives a person everything they need to do their book. We use an interview format to help them write their book. This process includes my story development editor going through their interview, arranging it, as well as going through it and letting them know what additional information or clarity we need to finalize the content of their book. Which allows anyone to get a book written.
From there, we edit the book, do the cover, and format the book for eBook and print. Then we do what we do best. We set up the book for them on Amazon in an account that they own (which is extremely important because many services don’t do this) so that their book will not only become a best seller at launch (which we guarantee) but also will allow the book to rank well any time traffic is driven to Amazon.
We also learned very quickly that that price was far below even giving it away and cost us far more to cover costs than we earned. We slowly ratcheted up the price throughout all of 2016 and, by the end of that year, had landed a price point of $5997, which we later discovered was still far too low but allowed us to create enough cash flow for the company to get things off the ground, Up and running and then demand.
Follow your passion. Though something trendy MAY make you some or even a lot of money for a time, ultimately, trends change.
Though we had good cash flow, the biggest lesson we learned was that competing on price and trying to be affordable for everyone was a recipe for us always being just a little bit behind what we needed to really continue growing the company.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
In 2016 the marketing of our program was relatively simple. We were an active part of the Ewomennetwork, And of motivating the masses, and from these two organizations, we drove 156 customers and built a Facebook group of nearly 1500 members. As we expanded into other organizations and networks and continued building our Facebook group, we ended up with a Facebook group of about 3500 members.
The problem that began to arise in early 2019 was the changes in the algorithm four Facebook made groups less and less effective to the point where we moved from having approximately 10% of the group participating in any event we did to less than 1/10th of 1% actively participating in any campaign we did.
From there, we moved to do paid advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn but again, because of the changes in the algorithm, we quickly found that regardless of the daily or monthly amount we spent in our ad budget, Facebook ads were not converting as they had been previously.
We had to find a different way. Word-of-mouth advertising only works when you control what words are coming out of people's mouths, and so we began to develop relationships with strategic partners who had complementary services to ours and begin driving traffic both to them and to us.
It is about finding companies that are not your competition but have a service that what you do will help their customers, and what they do will help yours. As an example, in our case, I work with a company that helps people create and manage a podcast. Because these people are already creating content, it is a natural fit to take the content they are putting out into the world in book form.
Another company we work with is books people as a guest speaker on podcast and on live speaking platform. This is a great addon for our customers and as a marketing company, I know that if their clients are a best-selling authors it helps them get many more bookings and be more marketable. This currently is the most effective form of marketing that we are experiencing.
We are now in the process of developing a community-based app to create our own family of our exclusive people in our exclusive community to help them get their book written, learn the nuances of publishing it, and most importantly marketing in it not only to the best seller but all of the things that come beyond that. We are excited about this new venture.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
At the end of 2019, my wife, who was my business partner, chose to go a different direction in her life, and as a result of the divorce, I found myself with the system that I created and the knowledge as well as very powerful track record, but I had to start essentially from scratch.
Add to that some of the economic upheavals of the last couple of years, and we've learned a lot of lessons which I'm happy to say have allowed us to be in a place where though the company is currently smaller, we're now streamlined and poised to truly expand not just to where we were at the high point but far beyond that.
With offerings, services, and a community truly capable of meeting the needs of the market, it is as wide and broad as the customer base that we've always served.
Our short-term goal is the launch of our community and the expansion of our done for you program to also include a step by step do it yourself course allowing people to take very small baby steps and work their way through all of the over 70 steps necessary to truly write a powerful book, publish it, and make it not just a best seller but the foundational element to everything that you do in your marketing.
Our long-term goal is to move the company to an average sales annually of about $10 million we now have the systems built to be able to do this.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The biggest thing I learned through this process is how important everybody's voice is. So many systems make a person prove that they're worthy or even put them down as being less than others.
But the truth is each of us has a unique talent that is absolutely in demand and needed by the world. No matter who you are, the truth of the matter is there's somebody who though you may be saying the same thing that everyone else is, that particular person we'll never truly get the help they need until you share who you are, what you know, and your passion with the world.
Someone is waiting on you!
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We recommend writing your book via interview. We use the enterprise level of Zoom has transcription built into it for conducting our interviews and recording the core content of a person's message.
From there, since we are dealing with the written word, we rely heavily on Word. Ironically with all of the other tools that can be used to write and format a book, a Word document (and it is saved as a PDF) is still the best tool to give the best layout for a person. Though we have and use the entire sweet of Adobe products, in the end, Microsoft Word still serves our clients best.
For my radio show, I record the interviews in Zoom and do the post-production using Adobe Audition.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
To this day, the 2 most influential authors for me are C.S. Lewis and Terry Brooks. Both of them understand the need to engage with (and sometimes even do a 4th wall break and talk directly to) the reader. A book that makes the reader feel as though it was written for them and the author is talking directly to them is always the best.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Don't get caught up chasing a trend. Follow your passion. Though something trendy MAY make you some or even a lot of money for a time, ultimately, trends change.
When we instead follow our passion and do the thing that we were meant to do, that thing that burns inside of us ignites us and we are always ready and wanting to talk about and do more with is the thing that even in the toughest of times (and every business will go through them) your PASSION is what will pull you through and bring you to the other side to a brighter future.
Where can we go to learn more?
- Website
- YouTube
- To Schedule a FREE session to talk about your book with me
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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