Podcast Interview: Pierre Alex Jeanty 08/16/2023 - A 7-figure bestselling author on selling direct and talking with your readers

Carla King interviews Pierre Alex Jeanty – A 7-figure bestselling author on selling direct and talking with your readers

Nonfiction Authors Association Podcast | August 16, 2023

“One thing I understand—nobody spends that much time on a website. We think people are sitting there and reading websites all the time, but no, they’re engaging on social media. They’re watching videos on TikTok, or they’re just reading your emails or your text messages, whatever happens. So what the authors need to put the focus on is trying to find the ideal reader, and put them in your email list ,and build community around that.”
-Pierre Alex Jeanty

About Pierre Alex Jeanty

Pierre Alex Jeanty is a USA Today Best Seller, a 7-figure author and marketing enthusiast who specializes in selling direct to readers. He primarily focuses on poetically sharing his journey, lessons, and mistakes along the paths of manhood and love, while also vowing to share wisdom he has gathered along the journey of life through his brand.

Pierre resides with his family in southwest Florida where he operates as the founder of Jeanius Publishing, a publishing company dedicated to helping poets thrive. And he is also dedicated to being an educator in the self-publishing world. He’s developed a system that other authors can follow, called the 7 Figure Book Business Blueprint to help authors grow your brand, build a profitable email list, and create a direct-sales system for long-term success, and that’s what we’re talking about today.

Nonfiction Authors Podcast: Pierre Alex Jeanty

Find the video podcast, show notes, links, quotes, and podcast transcript below.

Live on 8/16/23 at 10:00am PT

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Show Notes

Links

In this episode…

How to shift your mindset from author to marketer.
Benefits of using Shopify for direct selling.
How your audience can help you in determining what products you should sell on your ecommerce website in addition to books.
How Jeanty leveraged his email list and social media platforms to sell his books.
How Jeanty has established a relationship with his readers.
Tips on how to connect with your audience.
How to keep Facebook Ads successful.
How to successfully manage ads and other marketing methods.
How Jeanty handles both domestic and international shop orders.
More insight into how a general website and Shopify site are different.

Transcript

[00:00:35] Carla King: Hello and welcome to the Nonfiction Authors Podcast. Today we’re talking with Pierre Alex Jeanty about the value of selling and communicating directly with your readers and how to get started doing it. But first, this podcast is brought to you by the Nonfiction Authors Association, a supportive community where writers connect, exchange ideas, and learn how to write, publish, promote and profit with nonfiction books.

Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and visit our website to find transcripts, show notes, and links to all of our episodes. Explore our membership options and download free reports. Search the archives, and get answers to your writing and publishing questions. Now I’d like to introduce our guest. Pierre Alex Jeanty is a USA Today bestseller, a seven-figure author, and marketing enthusiast who specializes in selling direct to readers. He primarily focuses on poetically sharing his journey, lessons, and mistakes along the paths of manhood and love, while also vowing to share wisdom he’s gathered along the journey of life through his brand.

Pierre resides with his family in Southwest Florida, where he operates as the founder of Jeanius Publishing, a publishing company dedicated to helping poets thrive, and he is also dedicated to being an educator in the self-publishing world. He’s developed a system that other authors can follow called the Seven Figure Book Blueprint to help us grow our brands, build profitable email lists, and create direct sales systems for long-term success. And that’s what we’re talking about today. Welcome to the podcast, Pierre.

[00:02:15] Pierre Jeanty: Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. And thank you for having me.

[00:02:23] Carla King: Let’s start at the beginning. You had a blog that was super popular and readers were asking you for a book and you delivered on it. Can you tell us about that first experience in bookmaking, direct selling, and then selling on Amazon and other outlets, and maybe a little bit about why that wasn’t working for you?

[00:02:43] Pierre Jeanty: Since about 2009 or so, I’ve been writing online—which is writing quotes—and then I started gentlemanhood.com, which the idea was to blog about relationships and my just experience, which is still what I’m doing. But, during that period of time, social media wasn’t fairly new. But it was still where there was more engagement on—especially on Instagram, on Twitter and those places.

It was a bit more niched, down to where the community just kept saying, ‘We want a book. We want more than just snippets of what you’re posting. Let’s make it happen.’ And then I waited for two years to publish my first book, but the process actually became simpler than I realized it was. First all I needed, obviously, was to write the book, find editors.

I went through about four of them, because I did not know what I was looking for, but then I went to try to find a printer to make it happen. During that time, Kindle Publishing was not necessarily around—it was CreateSpace. So I had to find my own printer, because I didn’t know much about CreateSpace—or trust it, in better words.

I did not live too far from Miami. I found a printer in Miami and I did my first print run. And in terms of launching that book, I had an email list that we built on MailChimp starting around 2011, 2010ish that we just announced it. These were the people who’ve been through the blog, but they wanted more. And we simply just announced it to the audience. And that’s how we made our first 100-150 sales, I believe. Where it was direct, which is why I’m back to my roots. The experience—just making the book, getting to the printer, then storing the inventory inside my house, and then printing out the labels—it was a lot of labor, way more labor than the take. And just that amount daily.

It was quite an experience, but it was definitely worth it. As I was working with what I got, I opened a little bit more to the idea of letting Amazon handle everything simply because we started to see there were less inventory calls, there was less time at the post office, and so forth.

But, the audience wanted it and I gave it to them. And this is part of my writing journey—that whatever they ask for, I try to deliver.

[00:05:02] Carla King: That’s a very important lesson, and it obviously launched your author career. And I saw somewhere that you don’t say, ‘I’m an author and a marketer.’ You say, ‘I’m a marketer and an author.’ Can you talk about that a little bit?

[00:05:15] Pierre Jeanty: So I think it’s important to make the distinction, because a lot of authors do not like marketing. And even those who are author-marketers, they still think with their author brain more than the marketer brain, because everything—they see it in the scope of being an author.

I’ve completely separated the two, because for instance, right now I’m in my marketer room. This is where I do anything involved, marketing and business wise. But when I need to write, I have an entirely different room that I focus on writing—more on writing. So the point that I make with that is— that everything that I’m teaching comes from learning the marketing business, online marketing business, following Russell Bronson and keeping up with all the different courses and everything. So I’ve invested in that knowledge. So in grabbing that knowledge to then utilizing it in the author’s world, versus trying to be an author who sells books.

So my success is because we have formulas, we have strategies. We’re not hoping that we sell books or hoping to find the latest trick. We build systems, which is why we talk about the Seven Figure Book System. So yes, it’s two different worlds. They operate different. One, you could be emotional about your work and your passion, versus the other one—you only care about data and what decisions to make.

[00:06:32] Carla King: Yes, you’re very data driven and that’s important. I’m going to quote you from your book. I dug into it this morning a little bit, and in some of the first pages you say “the difference between a business and a side hustle or hustle entrepreneurship…”

I love that word… “is that a business has established cash flow. It has a customer database, it has a system, it has expenses, it has goals, et cetera.” You took your authorship to the level of a business to create a business, and you eventually chose Shopify to deal with your direct sales. Can you talk about how that has helped you and your business?

[00:07:13] Pierre Jeanty: I’m glad you like the idea of separating authorpreneurship and business, because I think to operate under a system like ours, you have to look at it like you’re building a business, and that’s where you have the foundation to scale. You have a better foundation.

Now in terms of Shopify—Shopify was just it. It became the web, e-commerce platform to use for us. So we started off with WooCommerce, and once we found out about Shopify and all the technology it had that I was looking for, we abandoned SamCart and ThriveCart—which we were using at that time—and came to Shopify. Shopify gives the ability to build your own Amazon, because it’s connected to all those marketplaces differently even ways we could sell on Amazon. Still keep our rankings going, but we’re actually the one behind that.

It gives you the ability to do way more. And it’s right now one of the [fastest] growing e-commerce platforms. simply because they’ve stayed up to date and keep up with it. Especially during Covid, there was an uptick in people using it because they made it so seamless.

It’s almost like an iPhone. You go to the marketplace, download different apps. You sell the books, you get to upsell anyone. You do not have to have any developer skill sets or knowledge to make it happen. So Shopify’s ideal. It’s one reason—like I think Tesla, just different major companies, Office Depot uses it. So that is why that I picked that. It was easy for me. And easy to connect everywhere and easy to market especially because we do a lot of Facebook marketing. It’s more accurate than what we’ve seen, and takes less work to connect everything together.

[00:08:53] Carla King: And when I go to your book site—which is pierrejeanty.com—I see that you sell individual books, and you also sell book bundles. And you also sell t-shirts, mugs, wall art with quotes. All kinds of things. Did your audience tell you that they wanted bundles, and wall quotes, and t-shirts, and coffee mugs and things?

[00:09:21] Pierre Jeanty: It’s a mixture. So one of the first things we ran into when we started building this system is—we did not have cash flow before, so we started having cash flow on a daily basis. But then we were not covering enough profit to handle the cash flow, because some of the sales will go to Amazon or different channels, which is a byproduct of this—is that every year we look at the data, at least 30% of our sales goes to Amazon and different other channels. So what was happening for every dollar—even if we made $1.60, we’ll get the dollar back after some fees.

So it became difficult, where we said, ‘Hey, we have to find better ways to be profitable.’ And the profit will come on what you do on the front end, right? When the customer is buying, and also what you do on the back end. So that led to starting to experiment with different products. So there are cases where we’ve asked the audience what they want. And there are cases where we just simply created it.

So bundles—we brought books that we felt people were often reading with each other. And I get a lot of pictures on social media where people are tagging the books that they’ve gotten, which one they’ve read after they’ve read this one or that one.

So we got a sense of what would make sense. And we know our audience. So if you go and try to buy Ashes of Her Love, you see there’ll be a Heartbreak Bundle. The reason being is that Ashes of Her Love—it’s written for people who are heartbroken, but there’s a large amount of people who are divorced who read that book.

So if we have a Heartbreak Bundle, it makes sense. So now you get three books that are going to help you throughout that process, or at least help you process the feelings and emotions and things of that nature. That just made sense. And when it came to the t-shirts and everything else, it’s simply us seeing what people are repeating, and also makes sense for having candles and coffee mugs. We know readers who are reading poetry are drinking tea, coffee on a consistent basis. And they want a candle—they want to set the atmosphere to read. And maybe we’ll have some blankets later on.

We actually started doing calendars, and that was an idea we thought, ‘This does not make sense because you have phones. You have your watch, you have everything.’ But people will still like calendars with quotes, and those are things we just test with our audience. Then whatever sticks we keep, and whatever doesn’t work, we let go of.

[00:11:51] Carla King: I have to say, I think your wall art with the poetic and inspirational phrases is just brilliant. Because people love to have those on their wall to remind them that, ‘There you go, life is okay. You can work through this.’ So your first book was super popular, and you sold it with your email list. And you eventually wrote two more related books—Her, and Her Volume II, I believe it’s called.

Did you also sell those through your email list? Was your email list growing? What was happening during that time? You were making a substantial amount of money to even support your family during that time.

[00:12:41] Pierre Jeanty: Yes. So even since my first book, I’ve been a full-time author. So I originally almost quit my job, simply because I wanted to blog full time, and I was getting AdSense revenue.

But then I published a book and that became all that I’ve done. I sold t-shirts as well, but, Unspoken Feelings of a Gentleman—the first five, the first hundred copies were sold through my email list. MailChimp sent them to my website and made it happen. The rest were just simply social media influence.

So during that time, my Twitter page had 500,000 followers. And I had about 60,000 followers on Instagram when I created my old book. My first book. So it was a matter of utilizing that audience, but also having things where—since social media, even Instagram, was still fairly new in 2014—that during that time we would message celebrities. We’d find ways to grow, because the content we’re bringing to the platform actually wasn’t found everywhere. So I had a large audience. So that’s the first book. And after that I went to do two other books, Unspoken Feelings II, and To the Woman I Once Loved. But To the Woman I Once Loved, I realized the need for more poetry than actually telling my story and making it content that relates to people—it was more self-help—that I decided I want to create the mix. Now I had the formula: have a successful page, constantly market and leverage off influence, which at that time, ‘influencer,’ wasn’t even as popular. Fashion Nova was just getting into the influencer space like crazy.

We did not nurture our email list during the launch of Her, but I leveraged off influencer marketing to where CreateSpace and Kindle Publishing Services was currently pretty much the two during that time that helped Her in terms of distribution. But then we leveraged off the audience and the power of social media.

Now the books like Ashes Over Love—which was published in 2019—and the remaining, those were the ones where when we launched them, we sent emails out, and we got people to buy them everywhere. And also, we’ve been making—for almost 10 years—still making income just selling our books, but a lot of it too is the marketing behind it.

Why I say I’m a marketer is—we spend a lot of money on Facebook marketing, and we know, actually, how to get people to buy books there.

[00:15:09] Carla King: How have you developed this relationship between you and your readers and attracting new readers?

[00:15:16] Pierre Jeanty: I think one is heavily marketing. We’ve—year to date since the beginning, since 2014—spent millions in marketing on the platform, so we understand how Facebook works, and things of that nature.

We’ve also done influencer marketing. So we keep a constant flow of readers coming in. But when they come in—for instance, now someone comes in. The idea of coming in—it’s not you coming to our email list. It’s that you make a purchase, then you get on our email list, and we keep nurturing you. I send an email to have a conversation.

It’s not a newsletter. It’s just—to me, it’s maintaining a community. So we send emails, where we get ideas—even book titles. We see what people need, and then I go and create. So I’m one of those authors who has passion,projects. And I also have projects that are for the market, which is my audience.

So if enough people are talking about heartbreaking—we’re seeing that has resonated with people. When we send this type of content, I create something around that. For instance, right now I’m in the process of writing a book, and first thing I was like, ‘I pick a side, do I want to write a love poetry book or one that is more focused on healing?’

So I went to two of my readers that are close to me. That’s the first thing I asked them, was like, ‘Hey, which one would you feel will be more beneficial.’ They’re like, ‘Healing.’ So for me, I’m like, ‘Okay, this process is a passion project, but right now I need something for my audience because they’ve been waiting on content.’

[00:16:43] Carla King: Obviously you’re really striking a nerve with your audience. You’re giving people what they want, what they need. You’re constantly assessing the value of your work to your readers. And I think sometimes, many authors work in a vacuum, right? They haven’t had a blog. They just have this idea for a book. Maybe they’re a professional. A lot of nonfiction authors also like to write poetic stuff. I don’t know what you would say to them. What would you say to people who don’t have a blog or an audience, and who have a book and who want to really start connecting with their audience right now?

[00:17:22] Pierre Jeanty: I do believe that is a structure that I’ve developed over the years. The problem you’re running into is that authors are in a vacuum. They don’t want to spend much time on social media, which is understandable. I got tired of it where I don’t necessarily spend as much time, or they don’t want to do all of the blogging that’s taken on away from writing. And that’s why I’m a marketer first.

In my marketing expertise or skillset, I found, ‘Okay, what is a formula to not get caught up in that?’ And if you have a book, as a nonfiction author, where it’s niche to a certain audience, I guarantee you could find those readers on Facebook and probably Instagram when mentioned that in different places. It costs money, but instead of you spending way more time creating content for free and trying to get that to catch on, why don’t you simply turn on a machine where you break it into having an e-commerce funnel—traffic funnel—on Facebook, an email funnel.

So the concept is—you build a website. Like Shopify—now, anybody can buy from it. You could go on social media and post and try all the tricks and hacks. Or you could put some money to the side where you sell Facebook. Hey, the people that I’m looking for, I don’t want to work for them, but you already know them.

So let’s put my ad in front of them and tell them this book can solve this for you, or can help you with this, or help you process this. Now you automatically start to create a community where they get into your email list from e-commerce funnel to a traffic funnel then your email list. And now you get to nurture and build a foundation, which is what I call a business. Because now you have what in business is called a customer pool, like a customer list or recurring customer. They’re not necessarily recurring in a sense where they’re buying every time, but every time you launch something, you should be able to get them to buy. So now your launches are successful, your ideas are fresh. You have people that love your book rather than trying to just wow people into buying your book.

Some authors are seeing the results because they’re active on social media and growing, versus some who will have no interest in social media. They have ads running and going and following this funnel, and it works for them. So authors like that—I think you have to find a system, not just rely. It’s hard to win in today’s social media economy, per se, because the algorithms are tighter, engagement keeps dropping, everyone is asking you for money to pay. The platforms are extremely monetized, so you don’t want to go and start trying to apply what worked in 2014. Now you want to start where you can win—the fastest way is running ads and having a proper funnel.

[00:20:11] Carla King: And people complain a lot about Facebook changing their ads, and they work this way this day, and they work a different way the other day. How do you keep up with those changes and keep your Facebook ads successful?

[00:20:23] Pierre Jeanty: First is keeping up with Facebook. I think that the great thing that works— and that’s why I even have a marketing agency—is the fact that, over the last 10 years, we tend to see how Facebook reacts, how things will change, for instance. For the last three months, we have had ads that weren’t as profitable and I told our clients, ‘I’m not sure what Facebook is doing, but if I could bet they’ve already made enough of a switch to AI and they have something up their sleeve.’

While I’m on vacation, pop, here comes Threads. And then, sometime during that month while I’m teaching my accelerator, I sent them an article where Facebook announced—I think someone mentioned exactly what I thought. It’s like the leveraging of AI more. And the goal is to make sure— now you don’t necessarily have to create the ad, you just say, ‘Hey, I wanna sell this in the door.’

And I’m like—anytime the platform is going through changes, or things are down, you do not look as to why Facebook is changing this. You have to look to say, ‘What is Facebook changing and how do I change with it?’ And I think a lot of people are stuck in their ways because how I used to run ads in 2014 is not the same now.

How I used to run ads last year is not the same now or even four months ago. So it’s a constant change. And this is where sometimes I advise either you keep up with Facebook or you find someone who does and who could do it.

[00:21:45] Carla King: There are plenty of people who want to do that for you.

[00:21:48] Pierre Jeanty: That’s the part that I—that’s even the way I teach. I’ve met so many Facebook marketing gurus and half of them haven’t spent as much money that I’ve spent. I’m like, ‘Just you?’ Yeah. It’s crazy.

[00:22:01] Carla King: It’s tough. You have to know a little bit about what you’re hiring out. You can’t just trust. You can’t just hire somebody blind.

[00:22:10] Pierre Jeanty: And that’s one of the reasons that, when I decided to teach authors after—what, almost nine, about nine years now—I have a system that I feel like not too many people are duplicating, or teaching about it. That’s why I’m in the front end of it. And I say, ‘Okay, we teach you what it is and how to apply it and what to expect. So now you are going to get those predictions.’ And there’s some form of funnel and process.

So your business grew a lot. Your business grew an awful lot and you’ve had to scale. I’m sure you had trial and error with that, but a lot of authors, understandably, are afraid of this whole labor effort of doing it themselves or hiring out people to print, to mail, to hold inventory, to deal with cash flow and to deal with customer service, especially. How does an author think about and plan for scaling? One, I think the technology is actually making it easier. So for instance, I have a warehouse, and all the purchases actually go through there. But now, I have a warehouse because I had to do that because no one else was doing it for me. And I couldn’t find anyone who worked with authors the way I wanted to.

But now you have POD companies like BookVault. And Lulu has always done that. And different ones that are popping up that are providing solutions. They can do Shopify. So now there are authors who are getting their books printed right away—right after purchase. And it’s being fulfilled and everything else, without them being hands on.

There’s also just different—hiring out would be the difficult part—but there’s VAs that you could hire. It’s all a matter of just either you choosing whether you want to do it yourself. And there are easier ways because with everything that’s being created, even Facebook ads are becoming easier, despite people finding out that it’s hard.

The reason it’s hard is because they’re stuck in the old way versus receiving the new way. You want to figure it out yourself in some cases, but the time that you’re going to put in and the lack of motivation and passion for those things will not make it work.

So I say—they have the technology, they have the people and the resources. It’s just a matter of choosing.

[00:24:32] Carla King: Yeah. And I suppose some authors might experience a big boom growth spurt, but most authors are going to have a gradual growth spurt so that you can have the time to figure it out.

[00:24:45] Pierre Jeanty: Yeah. So when we started this, I started in one room in our office, and it grew to be in a warehouse. It grew to where now the warehouse and the offices are clogged up, to where I have a second building that we’re in here. It’s always slowly progressing. But if I could say one thing—it’s that the last four years have been the best because I have an email list of 300,000 people. Simply because I just—with the system, it’s set up in a way you keep building a foundation, but then you have real assets or a real way to make money. So now later on you can make decisions, then, to hire more out or do those things. Before ,when I was doing it with Amazon, it was up and down. It was not as predictable. Though I had money. The big question many authors don’t ask is that, ‘When I sell this book, how am I going to sell my next book, and more books after that?’

Most people worry about the sale that is happening on Amazon. And it’s good you make money and if you just have money for the time being and work. But me, I’m always looking at—how can I have longevity? Which is why I say this system has changed. Because I got money, still get my same Amazon sale, but also a customer base. So now I make better predictions to hire, and outsourcing, and everything else.

[00:26:05] Carla King: I saw on your website that you’re sending most readers to your website to purchase your books, and you’re sending international orders out of the US orders to Amazon. Is that correct? Is that the only time you send people to Amazon? How does that work?

[00:26:21] Pierre Jeanty: So what we’re seeing is—as I mentioned earlier—that 30% of our sales go to Amazon, despite a hundred percent of our marketing dollars going direct to our shop.

[00:26:30] Carla King: I see. So people are seeing your ads and they’re going to your—do you think they’re going to your site and they’re like, ‘Oh, I might be able to get it on Amazon a little bit cheaper,’ or something?

[00:26:38] Pierre Jeanty: Yes. And it’s the fact that people are loyal to Amazon, so some of them will go there. So we calculate that within there because it becomes part of our profit margin. But international—simply because with the shipping and everything else—I’m not too much into the POD yet because a lot of the technology is new, but our warehouse, especially during Covid, there were too many boundaries and too many things to sell international. So we would tell people, ‘Just get it on Amazon.’ We had an international distributor that—sometime we’ll send it to them, but even they were having issues, so it was like, that makes sense.

But now we primarily focus—we haven’t really dove into every territory—but we’re trying to maximize off the US. And the idea is, if you think about a business, you take each territory by—not by storm, but you milk it for what it is. So we’re finding that the US is ideal. Then we will get to Canada, then we’ll get to every place as we keep growing. But we keep our eyes on the US only right now.

[00:27:40] Carla King: So you really do make a lot more money selling direct. And it sounds like you make about 70% of your sales directly from your website.

[00:27:47] Pierre Jeanty: Yeah. About, let’s say, good 65ish because there’s another 3% or 5% …

[00:27:53] Carla King: …that comes from Barnes and Noble, Google…

[00:27:55] Pierre Jeanty: Yeah. All of that. Kobo. Apple.

[00:27:57] Carla King: Yeah. And So we’ve talked about how to sell the books direct. You like Shopify? I’ve personally—I’ve experimented with Shopify right now. I’ve got WooCommerce and the Lulu API. I’ve worked with Payhip, all kinds of places. So really interested in diving into the Shopify experience, because it is a dedicated product just for doing this. And it has an interface that is seamless.

[00:28:25] Pierre Jeanty:this information Yes. That’s why I like that idea. When authors are selling direct to there, a lot of them run to WooCommerce. And it’s been a norm for authors. And a lot of them are testing different things. And I say—look, you to me—especially being a marketer, someone who’s been consuming a lot of this information for years—if you want to sell maybe a book where you lead a course and everything, you could consider SamCart. You could consider Kajabi, ClickFunnels, those things. But if you want to do something where you give your readers the feel they would get on Amazon, and they’re having a sense of buying a storefront and shop for more of your books, and have all the leverage of bundling and everything else—Shopify. Over the years, I’ve continuously—as you said—dedicated, I’ve improved it to where I’m still learning new things. Even doing this for four years at a high level. I got a Shopify plaque here that says 100,000. I’m a store that does extremely well, but still I’m still learning.

[00:29:24] Carla King: Shopify sent you a plaque because you sold 100,000 items.

[00:29:28] Pierre Jeanty: Yeah. So since I started, I’ve processed about 250,000 orders just on that store. And recently, they started giving out plaques to a certain top percentage store. And they sent us this little lovely plaque in the back, and it says ‘100,000 Orders.’ It has my name—makes me official.

[00:29:45] Carla King: This is also a barrier that I’d like to talk about a little bit. Most authors have WordPress websites, or they’ve gone with Wix or something. And we’ve got all our blogs and our pages and all that. But with Shopify, it’s a commitment. You change your whole website to Shopify. How did that process work for you? Did you do that? Or did you just start with Shopify for these books?

[00:30:07] Pierre Jeanty: I just left the other websites alone and just built a Shopify, because one thing I understand—nobody spends that much time on a website. We think people are sitting there and reading websites all the time, but no, they’re engaging on social media. They’re watching videos on TikTok, or they’re just reading your emails or your text messages, whatever happens. So what the authors need to put the focus on is trying to find the ideal reader, and put them in your email list ,and build community around it. So for me, I was like, ‘What’s the purpose of my website, besides looking nice and being professional?’ So I simply just sent them to the shop, and anything I need to tell them or need to do is there. So I did not lose anything. And even the students that I’ve helped, I said, ‘Look, just abandon your website.’

What is your website doing at this current moment? Yes, they know about Carla King. Are they buying? Because as an author, just knowing you doesn’t necessarily do much for you. I have 700,000 followers on Instagram, but not all of ‘em are buying. I had to spend millions of marketing to get people to buy.

We call those—don’t focus on vanity metrics or just vanity ideas, because a website is not what it used to be. That’s why landing pages work.

[00:31:25] Carla King: Landing pages work. Words to live by: landing pages work. Okay. Why don’t you tell us—we just have a few minutes left—about your seven figure business, and what you do for authors, and how we can find you and all that.

[00:31:40] Pierre Jeanty: You can find me at sevenfigurebookbusiness.com/book, which is where I send everyone, because there it tells you a little bit about my process, but it also shows you some results, and also tells you about the book. Everyone who’s looking for me in terms of you being an author and needing help—I want you to go to the book first, because I want you to get the information so you see the bigger picture.

So now, when it comes down to helping you, you are actually sure. I don’t want anyone to be taking a risk and a sense of not having knowledge, hoping there’s a get rich scheme or anything like that. I want you to understand that if you’re ready to build a business, this is it. But after you get the book, you have access to a five-day video training that I have, and also the private community.

And if you want to check out my writing, my name is Pierre Alex Jeanty. You could search it up on Instagram, TikTok, whichever platform. Because I know you people do want to validate some of this and see the possibilities.

[00:32:42] Carla King: And I’d also recommend looking at your blog …

[00:32:44] Pierre Jeanty: gentlemanhood.com.

[00:32:46] Carla King: I know it’s old, but I have to say, Pierre, that it’s a great model for authors to see the kind of content that grabs readers. You offer a lot of solutions there. You’re so honest. You talk about stuff that people don’t really want to talk about, but they really do. And I think authors have a hard time taking risks in their writing and in their business. So I really wanted to point people to gentlemenhood.com, as well as pierrejeanty.com. And also sevenfigurebookbusiness,com.

[00:33:20] Pierre Jeanty: Yes. Thank you. I haven’t blogged in so long. And when people bring that website up, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it exists.’

[00:33:28] Carla King: It’s great. And you have a great old podcast that you haven’t been doing lately and all that; I mean, this is what we do as authors. We try stuff, we see what works. We take our attention away from one thing and put our attention on the other thing.

[00:33:40] Pierre Jeanty: That’s very true. That’s very true. And that’s why I say—sometimes I tell my wife this—is that we start something, we find out what it’ll take to fail, and then we move, then we eventually come back to it. And I think that’s the idea with the blogging, with our podcast, and everything else. We start success with the podcast, but the podcast was different. We had our third child. That took time away from us, but that’s what you have to do. So authors—and this is worth noting as we end this—is that, what makes the marketing side more effective for me and the author side is that when something doesn’t work, I sit there and analyze and then build upon that. Versus, when it comes to the author side of me, it doesn’t work. You feel like a failure and onto another project. But me, I move on. But then I gather all my data as to why that doesn’t work, because later on I always go back for some reason.

[00:34:36] Carla King: Great!. Thank you for your wise words and your experience and for being on the podcast today.

[00:34:42] Pierre Jeanty: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. And again, I’m looking forward to hearing this and looking forward to seeing how this works out for you too, but it’s been a pleasure. I really appreciate it.

[00:34:52] Carla King: Thank you. And thank you to our non-fiction author listeners, and the professionals who help you succeed. Remember, keep writing and publishing. The world needs your experience and expertise.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Nonfiction Authors Podcast. You can find the transcript, show notes, and links for this episode on the courses and events tab at nonfictionauthorsassociation.com.

Quotes from our guest

“So let’s put my ad in front of them and tell them this book can solve this for you, or can help you with this, or help you process this. Now you automatically start to create a community where they get into your email list from e-commerce funnel to a traffic funnel then your email list. And now you get to nurture and build a foundation, which is what I call a business. Because now you have what in business is called a customer pool, like a customer list or recurring customer. They’re not necessarily recurring in a sense where they’re buying every time, but every time you launch something, you should be able to get them to buy. So now your launches are successful, your ideas are fresh. You have people that love your book rather than trying to just wow people into buying your book.”

“And I’m like—anytime the platform is going through changes, or things are down, you do not look as to why Facebook is changing this. You have to look to say, ‘What is Facebook changing and how do I change with it?’ And I think a lot of people are stuck in their ways because how I used to run ads in 2014 is not the same now. How I used to run ads last year is not the same now or even four months ago. So it’s a constant change. And this is where sometimes I advise either you keep up with Facebook or you find someone who does and who could do it.”

“The big question many authors don’t ask is that, ‘When I sell this book, how am I going to sell my next book, and more books after that?’”