SOW 131 – Motivational Press with Justin Sachs

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Justin Sachs is the Publisher of Motivational Press and Chairman of the Board of Justin Sachs Companies, a group of companies that provide high-level services to business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations world-wide. Justin joins the show to tell us about Motivational Press and its successes in 2013.

Find out more about Justin Sachs at www.justinsachscompanies.com.

Visit Motivational Press at www.motivationalpress.com.

Justin’s work has been acknowledged by Presidents, Congressmen, World-Renowned Business Leaders, Non-Profit Executives, Authors, and Entrepreneurs alike for his ability to achieve extraordinary results.

Having advised and trained hundreds of thousands of people internationally, Justin is a highly regarded business expert on effectiveness, peak-performance, and marketing tactics. Justin has produced three movies including his best-selling Achieve Your Ultimate Success. He has written 6 books, including 5 international bestsellers, on topics ranging from leadership to business growth. He has been featured in hundreds of media outlets throughout the world including MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News, and Yahoo Finance. Justin has been featured alongside world-renowned business experts including Brian Tracy, John Assaraf, Mark Victor Hansen, Loral Langemeier and many others.

Justin’s philanthropic endeavors have won him many awards and accolades including the Prudential Spirit of Community Award, and Distinguished Recognition from the California Department of Education. Justin started a non-profit organization when he was 16 to inspire youth to engage in community service. More recently, he has been honored to partner with organizations like Kiva, Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Foundation, and The Illumination Foundation.

Justin’s books and DVDs have been read by hundreds of thousands worldwide.

Narrator: Speakers, publishers, consultants, coaches, and info marketers unite. The Speaking of Wealth show is your road map to success and significance. Learn the latest tools, technologies and tactics to get more bookings, sell more products and attract more clients. If you’re looking to increase your direct response sales, create a big time personal brand, and become the go to guru, the Speaking of Wealth show is for you. Here is your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Speaking of Wealth Show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we discuss profit strategies for speakers, publishers, authors, consultants, coaches, info marketers, and just go over a whole bunch of exciting things that you can use to increase your business, to make your business more successful and more and more passive and more and more automated and more and more scalable. So we will be back with a great interview. Be sure to visit us at SpeakingofWealth.com. You can take advantage of our blog, subscribe to the RSS feed, and many other resources for free and SpeakingofWealth.com and we will be back with a great interview for you in less than 60 seconds.

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Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Justin Sachs to the show. He is the publisher of Motivation Press. And this is a pretty unique company that offers some great services for authors. Justin welcome, how are you?

Justin Sachs: I’m great, thanks. It’s good to be with you. How are you today?

Jason Hartman: Good, thanks. I always like to give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located?

Justin Sachs: I am in San Diego, California.

Jason Hartman: Oh, beautiful place. I love it there. So tell us a little bit about motivational press. You’re in your seventh year I believe.

Justin Sachs: We are. We’re in our seventh year. We do about 100 titles a year and work with some of the best and some of the newest authors; primarily non-fiction titles. Everything from business to self-help to sales to leadership to personal development, health and wellness. I mean you name it, we’re working on it. The way the company first got started was I realized that while I was speaking and promoting and doing all of my different activities as an entrepreneur, as an expert, as an author, I realized that what I really needed was to support more people, as many people as I could. And the only way to effectively do that was to duplicate myself. And since as far as I know, that’s not scientifically possible at least as of yet, I had to figure out how I can get more experts delivering as much of their content as possible so we could help as many people as we could.

Jason Hartman: Good stuff. So what are some of the keys to success in being an author? Most authors, they’ll do a book and they’ll sell them at the back of the room, and that’ll be it. You know, maybe sell a few on Kindle or some electronic platform. But what’s really the thing that separates the haves from the have-nots in the book world?

Justin Sachs: Well the easiest answer to that question is marketing. I would say that the amount of marketing, the amount of promotion that you do, is directly equivalent to the number of sales that you get. And for most people, most of the time, that is not what you will find in a publisher. I would say that very, very, very few publishers are actually doing measurable marketing for their titles and for their authors. So that means that it’s up to you as the author and you as the expert, to really push your book. You know, at motivational press, we are probably at the forefront of the amount of marketing that we do for authors in all of the different components that we do, things that we recommend all authors do. Everything from book reviews, getting as many of those as you can.

Getting foreign rights opportunities for your book in foreign countries. Getting in the media, getting on radio shows, getting different opportunities in front of you to make sure that as much as possible, your book and your brand is in front of your potential buyers.

Jason Hartman: Yeah and that’s certainly important. Marketing is definitely one of the keys. But with your model for example, do you do a complete solution for authors or is it the publishing side, and then a little bit of marketing? I mean, it can’t be an open requirement, forever marketing. I mean there are an endless number of ways and outlets in terms of marketing of course.

Justin Sachs: Right. I would say we do have a complete package that in essence offers everything that an author will need to get the book written if need be, edited of course. Packaged, published, distributed, marketed, promoted, all the core components they will need are all taken care of for them. I would say that that’s just the beginning. Right? I mean as much as we want to provide the solution that will make every book of ours a New York Times bestseller, there’s only so many books that become New York Time’s bestsellers. And the books that do are those that sell so effectively.

I used to do a lot of work with Chicken Soup for the Soul authors, Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield. And they’ll tell you, hands down, bestsellers take five years. There’s no such thing as an overnight true bestseller. I’m not talking about an Amazon bestseller campaign, because we know you can do that and in 24 hours be a bestseller. I’m talking about a real bestseller that’s selling millions of copies. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the rich dad, poor dad story of Robert Kiyosaki, working it and working it and working it. And those first 5 thousand sales, he’ll tell you were the hardest 5 thousand sales. And as momentum really builds, that’s when the bills start to roll. But that takes 5 years to make, that takes 3 years to make.

Jason Hartman: Yeah it certainly does. I mean the story of Wayne Dyer is great too. When he published his first book years ago. And him going around in a station wagon selling the book, and doing radio interviews, it’s just so different nowadays though. Because there are so many more books out and so many more choices for people. Let’s talk specifically about what your company does. I mean, does someone come to you with an idea, do they come with a finished manuscript, do they come with a manuscript that needs editing? And then, do you handle interior art as well as cover art? Take us through that whole process if you would.

Justin Sachs: Sure. Well I would say the answer is yes to all of your questions. People come to us, really at any point in the publishing process. We have plenty of authors that come to us with a completed manuscript and are ready for packaging, publishing, distribution, promotion and marketing. We have plenty of authors that come to us and say look, I have this great idea for a book, I’ve been speaking for 5 years and I know I need a book, everyone tells me I need a book. I just don’t have one yet. So we help them to actually create the book, whether they want to write it themselves and work with us to coach them through that process, or whether they want us to have a ghost writer work with them, interview them and write the book for them.

And then we work with authors that have a sample chapter, they’ve developed their proposal, they’re ready to get started and are looking for a high level publisher to help them with the distribution, the marketing, the editing, the promotion, and all the core components they’re going to need for success.

We’ve been very fortunate that with our process we’ve been able to have books that have sold literally 435 thousand copies in their first year. I will tell you it’s taken a lot of money upfront and a lot of effort up front to really make sure that the marketing works. I mean, heavy, heavy direct mail campaigns and marketing and PR and getting them on radio shows, but I will tell you that success is possible with a book and the positioning in turn, is huge for that author because now all of the sudden he’s able to get on just about any stage he wants speaking. He’s able to get on just about any media talk show, and what’s more important to him is that his consulting business has sky rocketed and that was his core goal.

Jason Hartman: And what was that book by the way? Tell us that name and the author.

Justin Sachs: The book was 42 Businesses Under one Hundred Dollars. It’s an entrepreneur book.

Jason Hartman: And I mean, did you handle all of that marketing or did that author bring a big marketing budget? It sounds like it was a pretty big budget.

Justin Sachs: Yes. Absolutely. I mean, for a campaign like that, you’re looking at a 6 figure budget. You really have to be committed to a very high level of marketing and promotion. And really be willing to blow it out of the park to really make it happen. I mean, you mentioned you had Jack on the show. Jack and Mark’s story is very similar. The New York publishers came to Jack and said we’ll publish the book. Go take a second mortgage on your home because you need a 100 thousand dollar marketing campaign in order to get your book on the bestsellers list. That, in a lot of respects, is somewhat of the back story that they don’t always tell up front but so many times you really need six figures to effectively make a 100 or 200 thousand unit seller in terms of books. So it really is going to take a lot.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t make considerable money with your book as long as you build you brand around additional products and services that you can create. And so that’s what we help our authors with is first, identifying what specifically that goal is that they have. What is it that the book is going to do for them? And once they have that specific goal in mind, figuring out what additional products, services, and opportunities that they can offer their buyers so that it’s not just about the book. You know, ten dollars of sales is never going to make you a million dollars unless you have such an expansive marketing budget like the big boys. You know, Kleenex was able to do it. Q-Tips were able to do it, right? But books are very rarely able to do that unless they have huge marketing budgets.

Jason Hartman: But if anybody can agree to spend 100 thousand dollars, I mean you said 6 figures, but I don’t know if it’s 100 or what 6 figure number it is. But to sell 445 thousand books the first year, I mean that’s an incredible return on an investment. No problem. I’ll give you 100 grand to do that for me.

Justin Sachs: Right, absolutely. For a lot of people that is very true. I would say that it has to be the right book, it has to be the right marketing. All the ingredients have to work together, but it’s definitely possible as we’ve seen. And the best part is, is once you become a bestseller, regardless of whether it’s an Amazon bestseller, whether it’s a Barns n Noble bestseller, whether it’s a New York Times bestseller, the best thing that happens to you is that all of the sudden your foreign rights opportunities go through the roof. So now you can get tons of foreign rights agents representing your book to your foreign publishers, which in turn creates a huge volume of revenue for you as well.

Now, it’s important to know that that doesn’t work for every book in the market. Right? It doesn’t work for every real estate book, or for every law book, because the laws are different from country to country. The real estate is different from country to country. But most business and sales books it works perfectly for. Most self-help books, most health and wellness books. These are the areas where we are seeing the biggest success in terms of foreign rights. And if you’re an author in the field and haven’t sold your foreign rights, then either it’s because you don’t have enough volume behind you to warrant those sales in the foreign market or because you haven’t pushed hard enough. So that’s what we help our authors with, is really getting those opportunities as much as possible.

Jason Hartman: That’s great. That’s fantastic. So you have one model where you participate in the ongoing sales of the book or just at the beginning?

Justin Sachs: No we help our authors with the sales for the lifetime of their publishing with us. As long as their book is represented by us, we’re constantly representing them to the media, constantly representing them to speaking opportunities. We believe very firmly that if we can support our authors for the lifetime that they’re with us, then they’ll continue to publish their books with us and continue to send us more and more clients. So we have a lifetime, it’s almost like a lifetime membership though it’s not really. It’s a lifetime authorship I guess you could call it that our authors are with us and we continue to support them. We just sold one of our clients book to China and he has been published with us now for 4 years. So in that field, you talk around the industry, that’s unheard of to sell a book after 4 years. Most books sell the first year in foreign rights or they don’t sell at all.

Jason Hartman: So you’re basically a PR firm as well?

Justin Sachs: We have a PR firm in house that actually we ended up buying in order to fulfill the marketing for a lot of our clients. We found that because no other PR firm worked, I mean if you’re like me you’ve hired tons of PR firms and found very little return on investment, right? Most people I know spend ten times what they make with their PR firm. So we said there’s got to be a way to do it cost effectively and there’s got to be a way to produce a return on investment on some level, even if it’s just in brand equity. And so that’s what we were able to do. We had to acquire a PR firm and then literally turn it upside down to figure out how we could make that work. But now we do, we put our offers on all sorts of radio shows. Nationally Syndicated, some television shows and many markets throughout the country to really support them in their positioning.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Good stuff. Well what else should people know about publishing, getting successful out there, I guess one question I’d like to ask you before you go, is maybe for some of the biggest mistakes that you see authors making as they’re publishing and how they can avoid those.

Justin Sachs: That’s a great question. I think the biggest thing an author commonly, not screws up, but commonly doesn’t do effectively, doesn’t do correctly, is the number one thing an author must do is have a clear vision of exactly what the purpose is of the book for them. Why are they publishing that book and what is it going to do for them? And if you can’t get clear on that upfront, then don’t publish a book. I’ve seen so many authors either waste tons of money on marketing without a clear system to convert people from that initial sale of buying the book to all of the other products and services that they offer, and that is a prescription for failure.

Because the more you spend on marketing, the less money you’re going to make if you don’t have that system set up on the forefront. So I would say create the system. That’s the number one thing. Identify the goal that you want to fulfill upon. Do you want more screen engagements, consulting clients, do you want to get people in your seminar, do you want to just sell a bunch of books? I had one author that said I don’t want any of that; I just want to sell a bunch of books. Which is fine but the level at which you’re going to sell those books is a different marketing strategy. You have to focus differently on selling those books in that manner. So you really have to pay attention to all of the different variables when you’re talking about how to effectively produce a bestseller and how to effectively produce a book strategy that works.

Jason Hartman: Good stuff, good advice. Justin, give out your website if you would. Tell people where they can find you.

Justin Sachs: Well, at MotivationalPress.com. You can call our office at 888-357-4441.

Jason Hartman: Justin Sachs, thanks so much for joining us today.

Justin Sachs: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

Narrator: This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights, and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com or email media@HartmanMedia.com. Nothing on this show should be considered personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network, Inc. exclusively.

Transcribed by Ralph

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