If you want to write a book, Laura Belgray thinks you should.

Her book, Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You’re the F***ing Worst, launches June 13.

In Episode 475 of the Marketing Mentor Podcast, Laura shares how she went FROM self proclaimed, late bloomer and lazy person with a dream TO getting the book she wanted to write published the way she wanted it published – by one of the big publishing houses.

You can help make Laura’s book a bestseller by pre-ordering NOW at ToughTittiesBook.com -- PLUS you'll get all the free bonuses (and bloopers).

But first, listen to our podcast here and below.....(scroll down for the complete transcript)

 

Laura and I had a blast talking about:

• How she got her memoir published even though she isn’t famous (yet!)
• How to get paid to be you
• The difference between anecdotes and stories with meaning
• Why so many people want to write a book (and whether the reality of writing a book lived up to the fantasy)
• The rookie mistake Laura made at the beginning of the writing process
• Why Laura didn’t self publish AND how to get a deal without a bidding war
• How she “used” her network to get an agent AND the best way to use your network to launch a book
• How to get people to blurb your book
• How she is marketing the new book, including:
• Why being a pain in the butt author about the marketing is better than being a passive author
• Which guerilla marketing tools she’s using (it involves a "Tittie Committee")

Plus, Laura shared a baby step you can take if you want to be just like Laura!

Pre-order NOW at ToughTittiesBook.com 
to get all the free bonuses (and bloopers).

 

Read the transcript of Episode 445 with Laura Belgray

ilise benun

Hi there. This is ilise benun, your Marketing Mentor, and this is the podcast for you if, and only if, you are ready to leave the feast or famine syndrome behind, and I mean for good.

Is there somewhere deep inside of you a desire to write a book? If so, Laura Belgray thinks you should. Her book, “Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You're the F-ing Worst,” is about to launch on June 13th.

In this conversation, she shares how she went from self-proclaimed “late bloomer and lazy person with a dream” to getting the book she wanted to write published, the way she wanted it published, by one of the big publishing houses.

Laura is best known for her email copywriting business, Talking Shrimp, with her thousands and thousands of subscribers to her “magic emails.” Although many publishers said she wasn't famous enough yet to write a memoir they could sell ... until she found one that would.

I asked her lots of “why” questions and one important “how.” Like why do so many people seem to want to write a book? And why didn't she just self-publish it? And how did she use her network to get an agent to get those all-important blurbs from famous people and to spread the word about the book once it launches, including her ingenious street team, the Titty Committee? Doesn't that just make you want to join it?

You'll notice that Laura's is an inspiring networking story, which is the theme on The Marketing Mentor Podcast at the moment. The timing is perfect, as it always is when you get out of the way and just let marketing work.

So if you like what you hear and you want to pre-order what turned out to be a stealth self-help book, go to toughtittiesbook.com. You'll get free bonuses and bloopers. But first, listen and learn.

Hello, Laura, welcome to the podcast.

Laura Belgray

Oh, hello, ilise. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me here.

ilise benun

Of course, I always ask people to introduce themselves, so tell us who you are.

Laura Belgray

Okay, well, I am Laura Belgray. I am an email copywriting expert and unapologetic lazy person. Also, card-carrying late bloomer. I have a company called Talking Shrimp, and I am co-creator of a course with my friend Marie Forleo called “The Copy Cure.”

In my business, I'm known for copywriting, but my main umbrella mission is to help entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, all the people ending in “-preneur,” make their business a 100% expression of their personality so that you're essentially getting paid to be you. Because for me, that is the holy grail of work.

ilise benun

I love that. It's definitely one of the things that I preach as well, and people really struggle with, so you're a really good ... you're the epitome of that, I think.

Laura Belgray

Thank you.

ilise benun

You have a new book coming out very soon. It's called “Tough Titties.” I'm really excited. I pre-ordered it and ...

Laura Belgray

Oh, thank you.

ilise benun

You're welcome. I can't wait to read the rest of it. I read one chapter. That's what I want to focus on, is the book and your process, and the launch of your book, and all the things that I think my listeners will be interested in.

Laura Belgray

I'm into it. Let's do it.

ilise benun

All right. One of the things I heard you say is that you were very clear about the book you wanted to write and that it had no takeaways, no bullet points, no sidebars. So, just tell us a little bit about the book and why that's the one you wanted to write.

Laura Belgray

Yeah, sure. “Tough Titties,” and the subtitle is “On Living Your Best Life When You're The F-ing Worst,” is a memoir and essays about a misfit coming of age in ‘80s, ‘90s, early aughts, New York City, and late blooming into an unusual life and career. Or as my husband calls it, Loser Sex in the City.

It's a collection of stories that I have told all my life, or always wanted to tell in a book. That is what I set out to write. I've said for so many years, "I have to write a book, I have to write a book, I want to write a book."

My vision was always to write a book of the stories I like to tell, and the kind of book that everyone's always telling me, "Oh, you have to write a book," because they would hear me tell a story and say, "Oh, that should be in your book."

Then I found myself kind of bumping up against this “supposed to” in my industry—the industry being online marketing, copywriting, et cetera, entrepreneurship—the “supposed to” being you're supposed to write a prescriptive book. You're supposed to write a business book; a how-to. In my case, it would probably be a copywriting book or a marketing book. Something prescriptive. Maybe a personal-development book, but something prescriptive, with bullet points, with sidebars, with your next steps and spoon-fed takeaways.

I kind of felt like, you know what? I already do that in my emails. I already give a takeaway. I already arc to that by the middle or end of the email. Make it very clear, why am I telling you this?, here's what to do next, have a call to action, and give my audience what I think they want—which is a business tip or something to think about to shift their perspective.

I kind of felt like, well, I don't want to do that in this book. I felt like, well, now is my time to just write my stories and just tell them.

And I discovered while writing it that that was a little too far in the direction of no takeaways, especially because my editor came back to me after reading a bunch of my stuff and was like, "What are you trying to say here? Where is the wisdom that your audience is looking for?"

I was like, "Oh, no. You want me to write a self-help book. I refuse to do that."

Was like, "No, but your audience still want ... Yes, they want your stories, and yes, they tell you all the time, 'Oh, I would read anything that you write,' but they don't really mean that. They want whatever you're going to write, they want it to deliver some kind of wisdom that they've come to love and accept." Sorry. I mean expect.

So, I had a lot of work to do in that sense. I fought it for a long time. But it made the book much better in the end. I didn't have to ... In the end ... I really panicked that I was going to have to compromise all my stories and make them prescriptive and make them a lesson, and that's not what I had to do. I just had to look into each story and ask, "Why am I telling this?" Ask myself that and find some meaning in it, something for it to arc to.

That is what people ... It's not just my audience. That is what we want to read. We don't want to read an anecdote unless it's about somebody really famous. We'll read, I don't know, Matthew Perry's anecdotes. But no one's going to read Laura Belgray's anecdotes. They have to have some meaning to them. They have to have some rhyme or reason; why did I just read this?

I have read other people's essays and now become very attuned to: Well, why am I reading this? Why did you tell me this story if it doesn't deliver some sort of meaning?

It doesn't have to be a lesson or takeaway, but some sort of meaning ... then I feel unsatisfied. Now I've become very critical of everyone else's writing now.

ilise benun

That makes me wonder also because I've noticed that everyone seems to want to write a book. Have you noticed that?

Laura Belgray

I have noticed that. I think statistically, I think they've done surveys—I don't know if it was The New York Times or someone else—but 80% of people want to write a book.

ilise benun

Why? Why do you think that is?

Laura Belgray

I don't know. For a feeling of legacy and permanence? Or just we want to express ourselves and have a body of work or some form of ourselves that we can hand people. I mean, it's a big accomplishment.

I know the root word of “authority” is “author,” right? There's authority and authorship, so we want that. The credibility, the hey ... and writing a book is a ... it's a prestigious thing. It's always been that way, right? I don't know. What do you think it is?

ilise benun

Well, I think people think what they have to say is very important and they want to say it. I'm not sure that everyone has to write a book.

I think there are a lot of fantasies about what it is, and that's kind of one thing I'm curious about with you. You had this ‘I want to write a book.’ You went through the process. Was it what you thought it was going to be? And you haven't even launched it yet, right?

Laura Belgray

Right.

ilise benun

I'm just curious about the difference between the reality of it and the fantasy of it, because the wanting to write a book, to me, is the fantasy.

Laura Belgray

Yeah. Was I surprised by the process? Yes and no.

I think when I was ... when I was starting to write the book, when I was churning out material for it, but still didn't know what it was going to be, it poured out of me because I was writing stories that I remember. I was writing down things as I remembered them, and I find that easy and fun.

Then when it came time to shape it into a book people would actually want to read, I found it so challenging. After my editor got back to me with notes ... though, I made a rookie mistake of giving her ... she wanted a few chapters, polished chapters, to see if she liked the way it was going.

Instead of a few chapters, I gave her everything I'd been working on thinking like, "Oh, she'll enjoy looking at this and maybe she'll tell me what she thinks of it and what I need to do to make a better." I just kind of thought it would be a coronation, like “You've barely any work to do. The book is written.”

And she got back to me. These were supposed to be sample chapters, but she kept referring to it as “the manuscript.” I was like, "It's not the manuscript. It's my sample chapters," but she kept saying “the manuscript.”

Well, she started her editorial letter for ‘the manuscript’ with the sentence, "I know you are going to have a fabulous book eventually." You could just sense the ... You can smell the “but.”

ilise benun

Right.

Laura Belgray

The but was: where is the voice here? What are you trying to say? What is the point of view?

I felt so defensive. I was like, "I am voice. What are you talking about, ‘where's the voice?’ " But she felt like it was all over the place and she didn't know what I was trying to say with my stories. She had a legitimate point.

Also, I had ... the book itself was supposed to be 75,000 words. What I handed her of my sample chapters was 85,000 words in the very beginning. I kind of vomited on her. But I was surprised by her feedback because I thought I was going in the right direction. I thought it was in good shape.

Even though I'd heard stories ... like, you hear so many stories of authors having this trouble getting feedback from their editor and having the toughest time rewriting—and that's the hard part. I still didn't think it would apply to me, just like no one thinks they're going to get old or get sick ever, or you get sun damage from tanning.

ilise benun

Exactly.

Laura Belgray

Yeah.

ilise benun

I'm also curious, then, you didn't self-publish. You decided to look for a publisher and you went through the whole agent process, right? Why?

Laura Belgray

Probably pride, vanity. It's something that I always wanted. I wanted to be a published author, and I wanted that imprint of a real ... preferably one of the big five, which is what I got. I was very happy with that.

I think it was just me being a snob, a publishing snob. I wanted to be published and not self-published. I think self-publishing is a great thing, and how amazing that we have that resource now. We can do that. It didn't used to be an option. It used to be just so incredibly expensive and formidable, and now anyone can do that. So, I think that's awesome. I don't think that people should not self-publish. I just think it was important for me, for just what I always wanted in my life—to be published.

ilise benun

One thing you said about that whole process was “it only takes one.” What does that mean?

Laura Belgray

Yeah. As I mentioned, I didn't write the kind of book or proposal that people were going to expect of me, especially when they looked at who my audience was and what I did for a living and how I communicate with my audience, the kind of content that I put out there.

I knew that they were going to expect me to write a prescriptive book. And I had a friend who had written a book of essays. It was going to be a book of essays. She sold it and she was really excited about that and she sold it to one of the big publishers.

Then the editor informed her “No, no, no, no. We're not going to write that book that you proposed. We are going to write a book based on this talk that you do. It's going to be prescriptive and you're going to have takeaways and bullet points.”

That's where I developed that fear, that mindset of ‘that's not going to happen to me. I will not let that happen to me.’

So when I queried agents, I got a lot of rejections. Usually their objection was ... they were very kind, thoughtful rejections, and they said, "We love the proposal and we love the sample chapters, but they don't really match. We are not really sure. It seems like it's a serial ... there's a serial nature to your chapters. And the proposal is about an audience that's looking for something more prescriptive."

So they didn't want it and they warned, to write a book of ... to publish a book of essays—a lot of them said this—"To publish a book of essays or a memoir, you have to be really famous. Sorry. We love it, but you're not a famous enough."

Then I did the cross-checking. When you look up the agents that you're going to query, it's a good idea to look them up on social, see who they follow, see if you have any connections to them. And I found one that I was about to query. I saw that she was connected on Instagram with my friend Farnoosh [Torabi].

I texted Farnoosh. I was like, "Do you know this agent?" It was Sarah Passick at Park & Fine. She said, "Yes. Do you want an intro? Do you want an introduction?" I said, "Yes, please."

She introed us. That was the magic trick. Sarah wrote back to me right away and said, "Do you have time to talk?" Out of all the agents I queried, it only took the one.

I had been advised, like, if somebody offers you representation, take it. It's hard to find an agent. So take it, the first one. And I did.

Then we worked on the proposal, and she got set to send it out to editors, publishers, and told me: "Set aside these three days in October,” or September, I think it was. "Set aside these three days in September for meetings with editors at publishing houses."

I marked those off on my calendar. As we got closer to the date, I was like, "I've got these blocked off ready for all the editors who want to meet with me." She was like, "Yeah, we're working on it."

Then that week I was like, "Am I still keeping these three days blocked off? What's going on?"

She was like, "Block off 2:00 p.m. on Thursday for an editor we're going to meet with." I was like, "Just the one?" She's like, "Well ... ."

I had made her promise that she wouldn't let any editors change the nature of my book and decide that it was going to be a prescriptive book. And she was like, "Everybody we sent it to really liked the material, but they asked if you'd be willing to write a copywriting or marketing book or a self-help book ... ”

ilise benun

Wow.

Laura Belgray

“ ... And this one person, this one editor, likes it the way it is and wants to talk about it."

And so we met and she liked it and she promised she wouldn't force me to make it something else. It only took that one. And that's what my agent said to me, in fact.

I was like, "I kinda thought we would have a whole bidding war."

ilise benun

A bidding war. Right.

Laura Belgray

She's like, "No. No bidding war, but you got a deal, and it only takes one."

ilise benun

I love that.

Laura Belgray

Yeah.

ilise benun

That's a good segue to the book launch, because you've got the book. It's in process right now. It's coming out in June, right?

Laura Belgray

Yeah. Yep.

ilise benun

So from a marketing perspective, what's the plan and how can I help you?

Laura Belgray

Oh, thank you. This is helpful. The plan is to go on as many podcasts as I can, ones that are relevant. And also to get friends with mailing lists or followers to mail for me or post for me or both. So if you have a list and you're willing to mail to them, that would be amazing.

Part of this, preparing to ask friends to mail for me ... it's a pain in the butt to come up with a whole email. Some people will read the book first and some don't have time to do that. So, I wrote a whole ... I put together a whole document of swipe copy for emails for friends to send out, of all different sorts.

If your audience is more entrepreneurs and expect something a little more self-helpy or prescriptive, I talk about how this is a stealth self-help book. And in a way it is.

I have been accused of writing a self-help book after all because it does have a lot of lessons in it embedded, not spoon-fed, but embedded. I have different emails for different audiences ready to go.

What else? I'm going to have a party or two. And I will be doing a ... in New York City at the Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn, at the Atlantic Avenue Barnes & Noble, I'm going to be doing a book event, like in conversation and book signing, and that's with my friend Marie Forleo.

ilise benun

Nice.

Laura Belgray

That should be big. I wanted The Strand ... I wanted something in Union Square right, near my house, but my publisher, the publicist there, tells me that it is a huge win, a big score to get a Barnes & Noble. So, I'll go. I'll take it.

ilise benun

It sounds like you're doing a lot of the marketing. What are they doing? How does that work?

Laura Belgray

Well, I feel like they've been on it. I can see what they're doing in terms of the marketing, mostly because they have done giveaways of galleys. They did that in I think December, like around Christmastime, so people would get Christmas mail, book mail from Hachette. And they were asked to give an honest review and share it on social, so I had tons of shares and things that I could repost, and that gave it some nice momentum.

They've created swag, influencer boxes, that we're going to mail out to a select group of people. Also, send finished copies to a lot more.

They made pins that they sent to some people and people love the pins. I'm like, "Please, can we have more of those?"

Marketing does a lot of things that I don't see. Also, they just told me ... I was like, "Should I pitch the book to this bookseller or that bookseller?" They're like, "We are indeed pitching your book to all these booksellers, a whole list of them that we told you about." But I don't remember that.

So I feel like I'm the big squeaky wheel. I'm always like, "Can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this?" It's hard to know what they're doing.

ilise benun

I'm sure they love that, actually, right?

Laura Belgray

Yeah. I don't know if they do. I don't know. I think it might put them on the defensive a little bit because I often get a response, like, "We're doing our job."

Their job is also ... that's marketing.

I often get confused between what marketing does and what publicity does. A publicist is to ... supposed to pitch me to, I guess, TV and other, well, public things. The marketing is all about online. So it's always a split between which one of them is supposed to mail the galley to which person.

So, I just email both of them. They've been doing a lot of mailing of galleys for me. So I'm always like, "Oh, this person's interested in reading it. This person said they would accept a galley and it'd be just be good to get it into their hands because they're a celebrity. Maybe they'll like it. Maybe they'll read it. Maybe they won't."

They had to help me ... Hachette had to help me mail out copies to ask for blurbs, which was a whole process. It is tough to get some people to say “yes” to reading the book and giving you a blurb, especially because I was going for more literary people.

I feel like in our world, in our kind of online universe, at least, or among speakers and people who are online adjacent, they will accept ... they will say “yes” to “here are some blurb options I crafted for you. You can use these or write your own.” They are happy to just take one. They are very happy if you craft a blurb for them and they can put their name to it and maybe tweak it.

Whereas in the literary world, it's like, "If I don't read it, I don't blurb it." They want to write their own, I think, as a point of pride, or just they don't do it that way. So it's harder to get “yeses” from those people.

ilise benun

But I would imagine that a publisher always would prefer someone who is willing to help with the marketing and knows something about marketing than an author who's like, "What are you doing for me?"

Laura Belgray

Oh, yeah. Oh, no, for sure. I think they are glad. I'm a pain in the butt, but I know they're glad that I'm doing a lot of this on my own.

I have bonuses that I've been promoting and I've been doing posts. If Barnes & Noble ... If I see somebody posting that Barnes & Noble has 25% off, I decide to do a post, and get someone to make me a graphic and I pay for it. I take all the initiative in that sense.

Oh, and I have a street team. I didn't mention that in my plan. I have a street team called the Titty Committee. They have all agreed to, in exchange for receiving an early galley and getting to read it early, to review it on Goodreads, and then later Amazon as soon as they're allowed ... and other things ... and promote it on social, et cetera.

ilise benun

It sounds like one of the marketing tools that is part of my framework for the Simplest Marketing Plan, as I call it, “strategic networking,” because it really is often all about who you know. It sounds like you're really leveraging your network. I might even say ‘working your network,’ although a lot of people don't like that phrase. They feel it's too cold and calculating.

Laura Belgray

Yeah.

ilise benun

I don't. I'm curious if you do.

Laura Belgray

Nope. There is a cold part to it that ... where you have to consider: Have I done enough for this person? Have I made deposits enough to ask them for this favor? Because you could very well be told like, "I don't ... like, you didn't mail for my book."

I'm just taking my chances with those, willing to face that consequence, because I didn't really understand the process until now and how important that was. So, I didn't reach out to a lot of these people and say, "How can I help you with your book?" Which a lot of people are doing for me now, and I appreciate it so much.

There is that side to it where you have to consider, like: Am I all paid up? Do I have the right to ask this person? It is transactional in a way. Some people are not transactional at all and they're absolutely willing to do it just as a favor out of love and generosity, which is great.

ilise benun

Yeah.

Laura Belgray

You have to work your network. It is essential. I talked to ... I don't know if you know Todd Herman, who ... He wrote a book called “The Alter Ego Effect” which is a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

He was giving me some tips and telling me what helped, what worked for him. He said, "Podcasts, absolutely. But by far the biggest needle-mover was getting people to mail for me." And I'll be asking him to email for me, even though I didn't do that for him when his book came out. But I will. It's never too late, by the way.

ilise benun

Actually, that's a really important point. And that's where I wanted to get to because there is all this momentum for the launch and the publication.

Laura Belgray

Yeah.

ilise benun

But then there's what they, I guess, sometimes call the “long tail,” right?

Laura Belgray

Yes.

ilise benun

It's the cumulative effect of the momentum that really does it for a book, from what I can tell.

Laura Belgray

Yes. It'd be nice to have an instant bestseller that hits The New York Times bestseller list the week ... that Wednesday after it comes out. But I think most successful books are way more long tail, take a long time to reach that place, and you never know what's going to do it. It could ...

I know that Jen Sincero's book took, I think, three years from the time that it was published to hit The New York Times bestseller list. I think because somebody discovered it who had a lot of friends, and they bought it for all their friends, and then, Faberge Organics-style, they bought it for friends and so on and so on.

ilise benun

What is that?

Laura Belgray

Oh, Faberge Organics. That was a shampoo commercial. I don't know if you remember it, but it was like, "I loved Faberge Organics so much that I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on and so on." Then it's a pyramid of the one person multiplying. So, yeah, that pyramid effect is what can happen.

ilise benun

Right. Sometimes it seems to me like one big splash on Good Morning America or one appearance on a show can sometimes also be the tipping point, if you will.

Laura Belgray

Yes. I think that it can, although you hear different opinions. Some people say: "Oh, TV doesn't sell books. TV doesn't move the needle. Nobody buys a book because they saw it on TV." I don't think that's true.

I also think that anything that people say ‘doesn't move the needle’ can move the needle in other ways; you just don't see it right away. It's like the optics of that. Like, oh, ‘As Seen on TV.’ “Oh, yeah, I saw that on TV.” Or it might be the fifth time they saw it, or it might be the first time they saw it, and then they see it again and again and again. They're like, "Oh, I guess it's meant to be. This is the third time I've heard about this book today." So you want that. You want all the noise that you can make about it to just add up to that effect of like, “Oh, it must be meant to be. It's the universe telling me to buy this book.”

ilise benun

Which is kind of like Marketing 101, right?

Laura Belgray

Yeah, I think it is. We all know that. I don't think this has quite the same effect, but that it takes something like six impressions of a commercial, which is ... it's probably way more now, right?

ilise benun

Right.

Laura Belgray

Back in the day, it was like, you have to see a commercial six times before you absorb it and realize what it's for and think: ‘Oh, I should get that,’ before it registers with you.

Now it's probably 20 times or a hundred times. Yeah, that is something that we've known all along; that ripple effect of having lots of noise about one thing.

ilise benun

Exactly. All right, last question is my baby-step question. If listeners want to take a step in the direction of, let's say, having their own book, publishing their own book, whether they self-publish or try to get a publisher and an agent, what baby step would you recommend?

Laura Belgray

Well, I'd recommend starting to write the book and don't try to think your way into it, because you'll be asked ... If you start ... so, start writing it without telling everyone about it, because if you start telling everyone about it, they will say, "What's the book about?"

Your answer will probably be, "I'm not sure yet." They'll say, "What's the central theme? What are you trying to teach people? Who's your ideal reader?" They'll be way ahead of you with these questions.

If it's me, it would discourage me, and it did for a long time. It's like, ‘I don't know what it is yet. I'm just trying to write it’.

I told way too many people about it, so start trying to write what you think the book is. Get it down. Maybe it's a first chapter or maybe it's a list of stories you want to tell or a list of points that you want to make about your main thing.

Start there before you tell the world about it and before you try to think your way into what this book is, or what is the perfect title? The perfect title might come out of the writing that you do.

ilise benun

Yeah. It also sounds like you're saying: focus on the writing, not on the book, basically.

Laura Belgray

Yeah. That is what I think, at least at first. If you have an idea for a book and you know what that book is, you know what it's about, and you know the things you want to say, you're like, "I don't know. I just don't know how to write them yet. I don't know what stories to put in, et cetera," and you're the opposite of me, I say, "Go write that down. Write down what it is, write down" ...

It can be terrible, but write down what you think the book is about and what points you think you want to make. If you have story ideas for those, write those down, too. You don't have to write them in full, but at least jot them down; get it down on the page before, yeah, just do that before you start trying to think your way and talk your way into the perfect idea.

ilise benun

Yeah, I love the idea of just keep it to yourself. It's private. It's not a secret, but it's private. It's for you, so do it.

Laura Belgray

Yeah. Yeah.

ilise benun

Love that. All right, Laura, thank you so much for sharing. I can't wait to read the book and to mail to my list about it. I'm happy to do that.

Laura Belgray

Oh, thank you.

ilise benun

Yeah, definitely. Thank you for sharing your process. I think it's really helpful.

Laura Belgray

Well, thank you for having me and having me in front of your audience and in their ears, because I hope that this helps them and encourages them to write. I mean, I do think ... I don't think everybody should write a book, but I think if you want to write a book, then you should write a book.

ilise benun

Tell the people where they can find “Tough Titties.”

Laura Belgray

Yes, please go to toughtitttiesbook.com. I have all the books at the main booksellers listed there, so sure, you could find it right there on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Indie Books, but they're all there on the page.

If you buy the book, pre-order the book, and then come back to the page and fill in the form, you will get bonuses.

ilise benun

Bonuses.

Laura Belgray

Yes, bonuses. You'll get your hands on the intro chapter, free. It'll be sent right to your inbox. I'm going to have a cut chapter, I believe, some cut material and ...

ilise benun

Bloopers.

Laura Belgray

Yes, bloopers. Then, also, if you buy two books, I am giving out a replay of a call that I did that was a behind-the-scenes/behind “The Titties” call, a deep dive into my whole process, into how I got the book deal. A lot of what we just talked about, but even more in depth. I went on ... it was a good hour and a half. I answered questions and everything like that, so ...

ilise benun

Beautiful.

Laura Belgray

Yeah.

ilise benun

All right. Thank you so much. And good luck with the book launch and we'll talk again soon.

Laura Belgray

Thanks, ilise.

ilise benun

Laura was so generous and open about her experience. So humble about her own arrogance and defensiveness. It's very refreshing. And I love her baby step. If you want to write a book, you should. So, just start to write the book, but don't tell everyone, or anyone, you're writing it. That way, they won't ask you questions you can't answer yet. Just focus on the writing, not on the book. Focus on the process, not on the outcome. Keep it to yourself. It's private, but not a secret. It's for you, until it's ready for the world. Then let me know how it goes.

If you want to help make Laura's book a bestseller, pre-order it at toughtittiesbook.com to get all the free bonuses and bloopers.

And if you want to build a thriving business on your own terms, the first step is to sign up for my Quick Tips at marketingmentortips.com. Once you're on the site, you'll find lots more resources, including my Simplest Marketing Plan. Enjoy, and I'll see you next time.