How To Self-Publish A Bestseller with Anna Vocino: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like The Product Boss. Today, we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active, and we'll be breaking down how to self-publish a bestseller. To drop these value bombs, I have brought to Anna Vocino and to EO Fire Studios. Anna is a voiceover talent comment and bestselling cookbook author who just launched her second low-carb cookbook, Eat Happy Too. And today, Foundation will talk about putting up solid, golden, trustworthy content to establish trust and confidence with your audience, staying in line with what you know to be your truth.

0:44And remember, if you have a gift or idea to share, stick with it because there are people out there waiting for your content and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Anna and our sponsors. Online Marketing Made Easy podcast, hosted by Amy Porterfield, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with a focus on online business, including digital courses, list building content, and more. Online Marketing Made Easy breaks down big ideas and strategies into actionable step-by-step processes. A recent episode that will help you get more results with a whole lot less stress is on four ways to avoid burnout.

1:19Listen to Online Marketing Made Easy wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world And four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training, where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Anna, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. What's up, Fire Nation? You know, I'm a proud member of Fire Nation, So I feel like I'm speaking to myself as well as the rest of Fire Nation.

2:00So something interesting that people probably don't know about me is that my husband is also a comic. And we started a dual stand-up act about marriage. We started writing it two years ago, and we started putting it up recently. And it is insane that two people who've been married 20 years would put it all out there. And I realized why you don't see that a lot. and that's because usually comics aren't dumb enough to marry other comics and they're certainly not stupid enough to put their marriage out there on stage and make fun of each other in order to make other people feel better about their relationship.

2:38Did you make up new lyrics to I Got You Babe and sing that from stage? No, but I'm writing that down. That's obviously something we need to do. That would be brilliant. We don't have any songs yet, so I think we need to explore that. Well, I love that. And Fire Nation, Anna's a dear friend. Like I said in the intro, her new cookbook is gracing our kitchen table. So every morning I get to see her smiling face when I walk downstairs to go hit my new Peloton. Smiling and ladling. Ladling and smiling. Ladling and smiling. So pleasant. What I love about you is not only do you list entrepreneurs on fire and have you done some really cool things in your life with comedy, et cetera, but you are totally an entrepreneur and you've self-published a bestseller, which of course is the title of this audio masterclass today.

3:26So let's talk about you self-publishing a second cookbook. Like talk to us about the journey you went through, some of the lessons you learned, why you did it. Share with us. Well, I was lucky enough the last time to be on your show to promote Eat Happy, which is the first cookbook. And then I thought I'd be super clever and call this one Eat Happy 2, T-O-O, because who doesn't love a grammar joke? When I published that first one, I was like, I am done. I'm not going to do this again. This is insane. I felt exhausted. I felt burnt out. And then I realized I needed to keep writing recipes to update the blog because you just have to keep producing content.

4:09And the thing that I found over the years and also from doing almost 1 ,200 episodes with Vinny on the Fitness Confidential podcast is like, we have to keep producing content. It doesn't stop, you know? And, and so I, it's kind of like one of those things, like when you get in there and I start wanting to write a recipe, well, then I write another one. And then I write another one. And then what if I did this? What if I did that? And then I realized I had like 40 or 50 new recipes. And so I was like, all right, well, I need to write a hundred more and do a second book. And I thought it would be out a year sooner.

4:40Cause I did have that 100 % sophomoric attitude of, oh, I got this. I've already done this. I know how to do this. I'm sure we'll get into it, but I made so many sophomoric mistakes that I didn't anticipate thinking, well, I've already got this. I know how to get at bat at this. But then three years later, the second one is out and here we are. Now I'm writing new recipes for a third one. I'm saying, what are you thinking? What is wrong with you to myself? So let's go ahead and dive into a couple right now. I mean, what are the couple key mistakes that you made in this kind of sophomoric experience that you just look back and be like, Anna, what the heck were you thinking, girl?

5:21I have really dialed in how to write a recipe quickly. And when you do that, you have a tendency to overlook certain things. So I thought that like, I was like, there's going to be the first round. The first book had so many typos. It was such a mess. I had to reformat so much stuff that now I know how to write a recipe. It's not going to take nearly as long in the editing process. And I was 100 % wrong. It took the exact same amount of time. And that's because you just have to keep looking at it because every time you look at it, stuff will jump out. And despite having, you know, four proofreaders, an editor, and myself looking at it so many rounds from, let's say, March – let's say a six-month editing process of going back and forth, it's still – there were still a couple of typos that I was like, no!

6:09No! No! No! So, you know, and I know that happens with every book and you have to forgive yourself and, you know, address – if people write like, hey, this thing is missing that thing. Yes, I know. I'm sorry about that. Here's what the instruction is. you have to kind of like be easier on yourself. However, I'm not very good at being easy on myself. I'm very hard on myself. Do you ever get frustrated when you hear like those songwriters be like, yeah, I sat down and like the lyrics came to me in like 15 minutes and I just kind of made a beat to it. And, you know, 20 minutes later, you know, I had this fill in the blank hit song that, you know, made them multi-millionaires.

6:45Listen, that happens. I mean, especially with writing, I've been writing jokes for years and there are some jokes that just come to you right away. And then there are some that's like, I'm still workshopping some things. And there's also the same way with recipes. And some recipes come right away like, oh, this would be great and perfect. Now, I have a certain set of parameters to fit the recipes into, which is they have to be NSNG, no sugars, no grains. And so some things work really easily and really quickly and some don't. And I'd say the biggest trip up that I have is all of the intro pages at the beginning of the book.

7:17I don't like writing that stuff. I like writing the recipes. So I definitely have my own areas of resistance, which we all do. And you have to just deal with it. And by the way, Fire Nation, that songwriter has been writing songs for like 20 years to be able to sit down and then figure that out in 15 or 20 minutes. So they've all put in the time, put in the reps to actually make that happen. And now here's a little spoiler alert, but you had an issue, a situation, a massive wrench thrown into your launch machine from a little company run by a little guy named Jeff Bezos called Amazon. So tell us what happened and how the heck did you keep your sanity when it did happen?

7:56Honestly, I think half the hair fell out of my head and which is for a woman is not, well, for anybody is not an exciting thing to happen. I was so, oh no, like it was, it was an exercise. I don't want to say in futility. It was an exercise in not letting a giant corporate behemoth dictate how you feel about yourself and what you're putting out there. And I learned, I practiced everyday forgiveness every day. I forgive you. I'm laughing with you, Anna, by the way, just so you know. Yeah. And I know, and now I know I'm not the only one to go through this because I was literally like, are they punking me?

8:25Like, am I on some list? So what happened was that the books were all, I did my work of getting the books pre-sold to a certain number that I was told, great, you're going to get on the bestseller lists, the certain bestseller lists. Fine, whatever, great. And most importantly, you want to do a launch where your book shimmies up the Amazon numbers because then more people will see it, people who've not been exposed to your work. It's a very important thing. And for the second go around, I have a wonderful, dedicated, rabid audience. So I wanted to have that as well as the new folks. So the books were delivered to Amazon.

9:09They had thousands of books sitting on their loading dock for like three weeks. And even then once they finally got checked in, they then have to do what's called trans shipping, which is they ship them to other warehouses to then fulfill the orders. So it took about a month after the release date. And in the meantime, the Amazon algorithm was sending these crazy emails to people who preordered the book saying your estimated delivery. And by the way, the launch date was October 1st of 2019. So they said your estimated delivery will be sometime between October 31st and January 2020. and I was like, well, go ahead and put January 2020 on my tombstone because I'll be dead by then if they don't ship these books off.

9:54I was like, what? And also it's an exercise in my child is healthy, my husband's healthy, my friends, I have friends, I have a good life. Let's not let this be the end of the world. But every single day I was like, really, Amazon? But we need Amazon because that's the main hub through which we sell most of our books. Now, the good thing is Barnes & Noble, I immediately was like, well, get it at Barnes & Noble. They're stocked there because everybody seems to think that Barnes & Noble is a redheaded stepchild, and they are not. They're there ready to sell you books. But they sold out immediately, and then they had to restock because everybody was like, well, screw Amazon.

10:30I'm going to go over to Barnes & Noble. So anyway, it was a big cluster mess. Yep, got it. Yeah. And I was like, I learned that no matter how you think like you got this, you don't necessarily got this. So it was also an exercise in releasing attachment to outcomes. And what I did instead was deepen my relationship with my existing fan base to manage the situation. Fire Nation, practice gratitude. I mean, there's a reason why the Freedom Journal and the Mastery Journal have one thing in common. You start your day off by saying, I am grateful for blank. And I challenge everybody as well to be unique with it.

11:11Don't just be like, I'm grateful for my husband every single day because guess what? We get it, check that block, come back to it once a week or so, but find new things, unique things that you're grateful for. And don't be shocked at the things around you that you're grateful for. Like right now, I am totally grateful for the fact that I have an inverter AC in my office right now because it's like 87 degrees in Puerto Rico with 90 % humidity. Like I'm happy. I'm grateful for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Real grateful. You have a full-time job. I mean, you're the voice of NBC during the day. You're a comedian at night, soon to be doing a song skit with your husband.

11:45It's going to be amazing that I'm going to get full credit for. Yes. Give me credit twice and then it's yours forever. Oh, well, good. Okay. How can somebody, Fire Nation, build a fan base while still rocking a full-time job? Well, here's the thing. I am a big proponent of don't quit your day job until you have certain things in place. And that could be the really reserved, I don't want to say conservative, because I'm not conservative in the sense that I want everybody to take risks. but at the time where I was taking big risks was when I had a, you know, a kid in school and I still have a kid in college right now.

12:24You know, it's like, I have a lot of obligations. My husband has a lot of obligations and we're some of the lucky ones to have moved out to Hollywood and have actually made a living working in the entertainment industry. But, but there's a big, but for me, I kind of felt early on, you know, I want to build something else. I want to build something that's not dependent on me waiting for the phone to ring. So yeah, it's super freaking cool right now that I am the voice of NBC's promos for their, for their comedies and their, you know, reality shows and all that stuff. And that's, that's an amazing opportunity and it's very lucrative and it could go away tomorrow.

12:58But what doesn't go away tomorrow is what I've built with, uh, podcasting with Vinny and these two cookbooks and then whatever future cookbooks that I put out. I very specifically wanted to build something. And you know what? I realized I can be an old lady and cooking on YouTube videos and writing recipes. And so for me, it was really important to kind of create that structure for myself because I don't like the feeling of being reliant on my agent calling me saying, hey, we have a job for you. Because if you're waiting for that to come in, then it becomes you're dependent on it like the rats in the cage with the crack pellet, you know, coming down.

13:37And I don't want that. I want to be able to build my own. So I very slowly and very organically over the past eight years, I took some of my existing fans because I used to be on television. I took some of my existing fans and we built a whole new thing and have very slowly and methodically built up an audience. And I took Gary Vaynerchuk's advice to heart really early on when he said that, you know, I know he doesn't have time to do it now, but he responds to people's messages. He answers questions. He stayed up late managing the situation. And, uh, and I am, so one reason half my hair fell out during the launch was because I wanted to answer every single person who wrote me, tweeted me, Facebook me, Instagram me, DM'd me, you know, everything.

14:22I wanted to make sure that I was very hands-on. And that's what I mean by deepening my connection with my audience. And I want to get into that more so, but we're going to do that in a little bit because it's such an important. And I think really big topic that you fire nation need to really kind of wrap your heads around about growing your audience, the new audience, but then also deepening the connection with your existing audience. Not like letting that wither on a vine either. Plus, I mean, what I love is that you're going to be telling us some secrets like behind the scenes of making a high quality book without an actual publisher.

14:52Like, yes, it can be done fire nation. And then staying aligned with your core message fire nation is going to win every single time. It's that authenticity. and it's being genuine. Those topics and more are coming up when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you're anything like me, then you're looking forward to a lot of outdoor time this summer. I'm talking about hitting the pool, going on epic hikes, and maybe even getting in a few pickleball matches. But in order to do all that, you and your team need to work smarter, not harder. That's why we're so excited about HubSpot's integrated AI tech.

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16:40Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online, and more. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor for this free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs. That's thought-leader.com slash fire. So Anna, we're back. And as we kind of teased before the break, it's really important for Fire Nation to know they've got to both be growing a new audience, of course, but also deepening the connection they have with their existing audience.

17:14And you've been able to do this as you've been self-publishing books and being the voice of NBC and being a comedian. You've figured out ways to do this on multiple levels and multiple industries. So talk to us about that, the importance of both and how you can manage that. Your initial round of kind of growing your platform is, uh, it's kind of like what we were discussing earlier with like being on top of things, answering questions. NSNG, which was started by Vinny, no sugars, no grains is, is kind of a different thing. It's, it goes against the diet mentality and we don't, there's no nutritional info in my book.

17:49It's a cookbook of real food. That's it. And that's a hard thing, especially someone like me coming from diet mentality who wants to count the grams and the carbs and the thing. I'm trying at least to shift a paradigm with people. Like if you eat real food and avoid processed food, your body will actually start to learn how to eat when you're hungry and be full and stop eating when you're full. And it's a paradigm shift to not go, oh, wait, you don't have to weigh the food and measure the food and count the food and count your things and do 30 minutes of that. No, you don't. So I understand that the people who are coming to me are looking for a way out of the diet madness.

18:28And so I have to establish trust with them. So if I gave them a bunch of recipes that caused them to gain weight or it caused them their type 2 diabetes to come back or after they've done all this work, I wouldn't have a very good trust. So number one for me is putting out content that is just solid, golden, and trustworthy. And right there, you will establish such a level of trust with your people that they will go to bat for you. They will spread the word about you. And that's what I mean by growing things organically. It's all based on you putting out really high quality content. And it's changed now.

19:03We put out a lot of free content before you even sell anything. That's just, to me, that the, and I don't want to call it the freemium model, but it's just what we're all used to getting a ton of free content before you even pay for anything. And it could be argued too that you don't even need to pay for my books. You could just go to my website and get recipes. Fine. Most of my audience though, they trust what I'm doing and they're excited to get everything packaged into a nice package of a couple of books. So that being said, my audience now, the notes and the messages that I get are like, it's the holidays right now as we're recording this.

19:38I'm not sure when it's going to come out. my audience will, like my ideal buyer of my books, she buys nine to 10 copies of my book and gives them out as gifts. So that's how powerful, that's how much they believe and how strong they're aligned to what my message is. And by the way, Fire Nation, that's how 1 ,000 true fans turns into 10 ,000 true fans because that one person is buying 10 copies. So keep rocking it. And I think too, early on, Vinny and I both decided, we both are cut from the same cloth, that we didn't want to take on any sponsors or any, well, I'll just say sponsors, that aren't aligned with what our message is.

20:21Because it's very confusing when you hear us, when you hear anybody say like, don't do A, and then you're like, here's an ad for A. You know, it doesn't make sense. And people have that cognitive dissonance that I wanted to be clear on the message. That being said, there's a lot more to grow. I'm going to come out with a marinara. Eventually, I'll come out with cookware. I'm working towards broadening the base of what it is that I want to put out there. However, this core audience, they're going to be the ones that sell it. And then as new people come in and they say, oh my gosh, this is really cool.

20:54I have access to the author. I can ask questions in her Facebook group. And she's actually there. She's joking around with people. That's my philosophy for how I like to handle it. Not everybody likes to handle it. that way. It stresses some people out. I like it. I love engaging with my audience. I'm an internet extrovert and at home I'm an introvert. Fire Nation, I mean, this is the two balancing acts. I mean, how much time are you going to be spending just focusing on growing your audience and getting new people to your brand? It has to be some time spent doing that, but definitely not all your time.

21:25And on the flip side, you can't just be sitting there and just engaging, engaging, with your fans nonstop who are already your fans. You've also got to be balancing that with the new growth, with the new fans. So you can continue to grow your audience. But again, these people who are already your fans, they're your evangelists. They're going to be the ones that are buying those nine, 10 cookbooks that Anna's talking about and sharing it with their friends. And that is in a way like you arming these little sales team to go out and make sure that they are spreading the word for you. Like I love when I get emails from listeners that it's like, John, I make every single person that I meet, listen to at least one episode of your podcast, just because I know it's not for everybody, but I know that a high percentage of people that listen to it should be listening to more episodes of the podcast.

22:09And I'm like, thank you. Like you are my little evangelist out there just spreading that word. And now one thing I do want to kind of bring it back to the self-publishing model right now, and that's making a high quality book. I mean, again, right down in my kitchen, I should be holding it in my hand right now, but I'm not. But in my kitchen right there on the table is your book. I've already held it in my hands prior, like when you first said it over here. It's super high quality. I mean, the images are sharp. The book is solid. It's beautifully made. And a lot of people think you need to go like this professional publisher route to get that kind of end product.

22:42You've shown that it's possible to actually not go that route to still have super high quality. So tell us all the secrets. Well, okay. Listen, I totally understand people wanting to go to the traditional publishing route because managing all of the moving parts of getting a beautiful book out there in the world. And cookbooks, let's be honest, it's all about the hardcover. It's the Kindle is fine, but and it's great for when you're at the grocery store, you're like, Oh, what are the ingredients again? But people, I love hardcover cookbooks, they'll always be a perennial seller. And so you want to make sure that what you have is gorgeous and competitive.

23:17And like my old favorite cookbooks from back in the 60s, 70s and 80s didn't have any pictures because they didn't have the capability of doing that. Now you have to have pictures. So I, um, I think that first of all, cover design is very important to me. I am not good at graphic design. I am very good at giving people words. And so I really believe in figuring out what you're not good at and hiring those people who are good at interpreting. So, so I hired somebody who's wonderful at interpreting the words that I say in order to put it out. And then I can say, Oh no, move this here, change that color there.

23:53I like this font. I also, and I said this for my first book, I found out it was going to be$30 ,000 to$50 ,000 to hire a professional food photographer to shoot about a third of the recipes. And so I was like, oh, no, I'm not doing that. I will go get a Canon 70D for$1 ,800 and a nice lens for another$500 and start shooting stuff myself. I've now built up and I have several lenses and I took a course at Creative Live. And then I realized, oh, this is really fun. I really like this. Listen, if I had figured out, oh, I'm terrible at food photography, then I would have had to take another route. But luckily, I have a penchant for it, I guess you could say.

24:35And it has worked out. Now, things like I received a very first copy of my first book and And it was, everybody said, do print on demand, do print on demand. And I did it. And the pages looked terrible. The photos were dull. You could see the text through the page thickness was so thin. You could see the, I don't, and I'm like, I don't want that. I want it nice. And so it took months for me to source a printer who would do the weight of paper I wanted, the finish of paper that I wanted, and to make the photos really pop. And where'd you start there? Like, where do you kind of start that process?