Planning a Book Launch Party with Rich Bontrager

Stuart: Foreign. Welcome to another episode of the Book More Show. Stuart Bell here. And today, super excited because we have Rich Bontrager with us. Rich, how you doing?

Rich Bontrager: Doing fabulous, Stuart. Thanks for having me here.

Stuart: It's a pleasure. This is going to be an exciting one. So today we don't often spend time talking about book launches because we very much get stuck in the mindset of thinking about them in the traditional sense, which is not often what we're thinking about, usually. But Rich made the great point that it's missing a huge opportunity. Book launches and the hype around the event, the kind of point in time which is launching the book is a great opportunity to kind of engage the existing audience, find some new people and just really make a little bit more of a celebration of the hard work rather than what we typically do is just think about getting it as a lead magnet, but then not really using that as a point in time opportunity. So, Rich, why don't you share a little bit more about what the stage media does and how you got involved in the whole book side of the world.

Rich Bontrager: Yeah, Stuart, thanks. And again, you're exactly right. Authors work so hard in the book, and you know this better than anybody else, they work hard in the book and then the book comes out and they go, I did it. We're done.

Stuart: Thank goodness.

Rich Bontrager: And they miss so much of what can happen by leveraging media to help amplify their book and their brand authority and who they are as an expert, which is where I come in with my media expertise. I've been a radio, television, media guy for all my adult life, 30 plus years. And I have worked with great speakers, author influencers. But what is happening now that's changed the game for everybody is we're all online, we all are in front of the camera. We're all using media every day of our life. Not social media, not just Twitter, Instagram. We are using media in a new way in all of our professions where again, no one had training except people like me that were in the business. So I now help people learn how to leverage media to amplify themselves, their brand message, their brand authority, their products, their services, so people are more drawn to them and captivated. So when it comes to authors can now be a media celebrity. Not the book. The book is great, but you are the genius that made the book. So let's amplify you and amplify the book at the same time. And that's where the book launch comes in. And that was kind of the. And during Pandemic, there were no live book launches. You couldn't go the Barnes and Noble, you couldn't give a speech on stage and go to the back of the room. So I had to create, and many others have tried to create their own TV media streaming event to help authors get found and seen again. And that's where the book launch is all about.

Stuart: There's so many points that it brings up because we spend so much of the time, it's like no good deed goes unpunished. So we spend so much of this time trying to break the habit of people thinking about books in the traditional sense and instead think about them in a more democratic sense. A conversation starting book, a way of engaging people and moving forward. Not the book as a product itself, that it almost does a disservice or the punishing side of that is that we don't talk about the elements that could be leveraged without getting sidetracked completely on only thinking about it in that way. So this idea of looking at all of the potential opportunities to get the word out there, whether it's in a direct response route or whether it's in a more of a broadcasty traditional media sense, looking at all of that landscape and finding the most effective way of utilizing each of those tools rather than just looking at how everyone else does it, that it's definitely something that we've missed a trick on in. In terms of not. Not giving people opportunities to do it in a way that's achievable. And I think, as you were saying, the thing that's really changed in the last couple of years is now just how comfortable people are being on camera because everything is zoom based on it's necessities, the mother intervention, as they say. And that's definitely raced the game a little bit.

Rich Bontrager: Have you found people? Oh, no. Authors aren't used to the camera though, Stuart. They're used to let's get a book, let's write the book, and then let's sit down and have a book party and read and talk about the book and dissect the book. And I've worked with a lot of authors. They struggle with not reading the book. They. They struggle with the story of just sharing it. Their heart, their mind, their narrative. They literally want to read a paragraph and say, let me read you a paragraph about my book. No, you're reading the book, you're not telling me about the book. You're reading the book. I work with them, so they now can flourish on camera. And the book is the product, but they are the genius that made the product. People at this point now may have read the book, but how much more do they want to know about the author now? Because they've read the book.

Stuart: Yeah.

Rich Bontrager: That's where the genius is when you do this.

Stuart: Right. And that bridge across into what you do, which I think is more in the traditional sense of the word and lesser on the very. We're very focused on the lead generation piece, but bringing these two word worlds together and leveraging the elements of it that people can make the most of this idea of. You talk about the genius of the author and people are interested in the story. We often get people asking about a audio version of the book. So they'll talk about having they think about it in terms of an audible book or an audiobook on Amazon. And we often say, well, that's great, but from a lead generation and engagement, a conversation starting perspective, that's not really doing that much. But the piece that you can do is have the audio companion to your book. So use that as the framework. Still talk about your ideas, but what brought you out to those ideas? What are you bringing to it? Why did you get to that position? And I think that is also very much what you're talking about, highlighting the author's genius of the idea.

Rich Bontrager: Oh, yeah. And there's so many different ways just to talk about the ebook or about the audiobooks for a second. You could have the author do the forward, you could have them read the preference. We'll talk about them, their family, the origin of it. You can have someone else read the book and do the narrative. Have a professional broadcaster do that. And then at the end, when they have the bio, the contact, the teaser for the next book, the author can go do that. So literally, as you get the audio, you're hearing from them in their own heart, their own passion, reading those words off the page. And again, it elevates. I want to know who he or she is. Because this sounds so cool.

Stuart: Yeah.

Rich Bontrager: And then they still get the great content because the book will always have the content. And I know the books are a lead gen. They are like the new business card. But the business card is not leading to another book. The business card is leading to the author.

Stuart: Right.

Rich Bontrager: And that's why I want to help elevate and make them shine more. So when they read the book, they go to the back and they say, go to Google, go to Facebook, go to Twitter, follow me here, go to my website. I want them to be able to really shine. So then they can hook the clients, get the Next speaking gig, whatever it is, but you have to get them ready to do it. So these book launches are one aspect of. Hi, you're on camera. They've all got the book, they're going to order the book, let's talk about the book. But in that I also talk about them and their genius and it takes it to a new level.

Stuart: So how has that changed over recent years? Because you kind of look back 10, 15 years ago and maybe we're dating ourselves now, we've both got the same hairline that kind of gives away how old we are. But you look back and media then was much more gated in the sense that journalists would outreach to publicists and publicists would deal with authors nowadays as a, as an outsider or to the extent that we've had exposure to it, it's much more direct to the source. And I'll give an example of that of one of our authors who we actually did a podcast with. I think it went live last week or the week before as we record this. But what's changed in your experience about removing those gatekeepers and authors now needing to do more of that job themselves?

Rich Bontrager: Well, again, you would get those. And you had to be at a pretty substantial level. Unless you're doing a local morning show on a small town. The small town would have the local author, they've done good, they do a five minute little entertainment piece with them and you know, maybe you get two lines, maybe you get two questions about the book and the rest of it is like, what else she got going on? Things like that. So it gives a small personality profile. It's usually a five minute piece and you're done. That's it. On the national news, you might get them to do a little more in depth. I know some channels would do a walk and talk, go behind the scenes a little bit with them. But again, it's five to 10 minutes at the most on the national level. But an hour long book is a whole different thing. With the whole hour dedicated to you, to your fan base, to your story. Now you get to really unfold it much more and it's customized to you. Where the networks and those bigger shows, they already know what they're going to do. You got five minutes and we're going to give you three questions and that's it. And you're done. And they rinse and repeat. With a book launch, imagine what an author could do to have a great hour filled with interviews, discussions, you know, the testimonials found in the back of the book. Why not have them live on camera with you? There's so much you can do with an hour versus five minutes. And now it is like you said, the direct access to the host, to the creator. I work directly with the people that we do book launches with. Yeah, what a great direct access now instead of working through the networks and those gatekeepers. Because we all know it's frustrating. They don't always call you back, they don't always email back, and they always don't get things done that they promised to get, you know, get done.

Stuart: Yeah. And I guess even there must be some instances where you kind of see it on. You ever watch the Larry Sanders Show? When I was growing up, that was one of the American shows it was on and there was like a meme of one of the guests where they always cut. Whenever they had him back in, they always cut him because they ran out of time. So I imagine that's not unheard of. Even if you go through the effort of, of getting something more, more mainstream, the end message may turn into something not quite as intended. At least you've got control over this yourself.

Rich Bontrager: That's exactly right. That's a great point. Because my book launches are live and I do, I love doing lives more than anything else. I come out of radio. Everything was live and radio, but a lot of those shows are edited. And then you get those half statements, those quick cuts, it wasn't quite what you meant to say. Came out a little bit differently on the playback. And then it does feel more rushed. And whereas that hour is, let's all grab a cup of coffee, grab some popcorn, get some ice cream, sit back with us virtually and watch this. And it is on video. This is a watching live streaming event where you are the crowd, sit back and enjoy the conversation with it. How much different can that be when that's there for the author instead of, hey, I did my interview, but I have no idea what they're going to do with it.

Stuart: Right. Yeah. How it's going to end up, where it's going to be used, what the context is going to be. That idea of. So we very much talk about the books, small books, conversation starting books as the most effective thing. That whole thing about the engagement and the conversation piece, the fact that you are having this fireside chat, this kind of behind the scenes peek into the bigger picture, it just creates such a better asset that resonates with people, a way of kind of connecting with them on a different level from your experience. Because as we say, authors aren't necessarily Authors, from our perspective, are business owners. And business owners aren't necessarily used to being in front of camera and sharing a message in a concise way. I know that I struggle to stay on topic and not get kind of drawn off on the tangent sometimes because it's so interesting. There's so much potential. But how more savvy are people now compared with a few years ago? Or what are the gaps in what they need to think about? So they might be comfortable with zoom, but actually there's a way of orchestrating it a little bit more.

Rich Bontrager: Yeah, great, great question. That takes you to the next level. What I do besides book launches. I'm a media communication coach. So I literally coach TV media skills. I help them learn how to show up on camera professionally like a real professional talk show would be run or a interview segment. So sit up, look at the camera, smile a lot at the camera. Hand gestures are very important physicality. I literally give everyone for the book launches three coaching sessions to not just build up their program, but I want them to really shine. And that's my number one passion. And I get on shows, I get on podcasts, I can find me media opportunities to speak. But I want you on your event to be the star. So I'm going to coach you to help you shine and learn these things. Again, I know these because I've been doing it for 30 years. You don't know them, but I can help you learn them. And then when you're on your event, you shine even more. So yes, they're more familiar with it, but there is a broadcast style, there is a professional performance style. Shall we say that this is where I take them to a new level. And this helps authors in so many areas now going forward for future talk shows, on stage performances, anything they do now, they get more value out of that besides just the book launch.

Stuart: And like I say, particularly now, it's such a skill that perhaps in the past. So my ex was head of media for some big multinational companies. Countries almost said so. Big multinational companies, they would do all of the subsidiaries around the globe would have to do media events locally. And part of her responsibility was media training for those people. But it was still the exception. It was a high level executive, was maybe doing one or two things a year. Even that would be busy now. The opportunities you've got as a small business owner to do things like this that we do now a podcast. Increasingly podcasts have a video component, not just the audio component. The video is the audio is used for the podcast. Over here but the video is used elsewhere. And it's just the expectation. Clients, customers now are more inclined to want to jump on a zoom call rather than be in person or expect to see when they look at your website, expect to see you and your face as opposed to just some boilerplate text templates. It now almost becomes again dating ourselves. But we can remember when websites were new. Not every company had a website. So at some point it was new and different, different and an exception. But at some point it quickly got to that tipping point of it was a baseline. And if you didn't have a website, then it became questionable. It was almost became a ding against your authority. And I think we're not far from video being in the same place. If you're not present in places, that's going to start to become questionable.

Rich Bontrager: We're already there, right? In my opinion, I think we're already there. Pandemic accelerated. Everything. Everything in our lives have accelerated, including this idea that you need to be media friendly more in everything you do on your company. If you do not have videos on your company website, you're missing. If you do not use videos for your client consultations, you're missing it. If you are not using video to help tell your story. We can now on an Amazon page, do a book trailer like a movie trailer. It's been done for decades. Think of this. An author can have a movie trailer now on Amazon or their own website to tease people about the content of their book and hook them into buying the book. If you are not leveraging media, you are behind the whole thing right now. You are way behind what? Let me put it this way. Authors are creators, right?

Stuart: Right.

Rich Bontrager: Why not be creative and use every tool at your disposal to elevate you and your brand?

Stuart: That's a great point of putting it. It's using every tool at the disposal. It's not necessarily, as I say, like we've done in the past, not necessarily shutting off to certain things which can be beneficial. And I wonder, actually, I mean, I kind of sound faculty's entry saying that we kind of blocked this particular. Some of these channels trying to kind of separate the idea, break the habit of thinking about in the traditional sense. Also, time's moved on. I mean, we've been doing this for 10 years now. And 10 years ago when we started talking about conversational books and the whole publishing framework was. And the whole video framework was different. So it would have been difficult to do some of these things. Now that we've. Now that we're having this conversation and the realization is there. I think the trick now is not to get kind of caught up in what was or wasn't done in the past, but now is the opportunity to do it and moving forward.

Rich Bontrager: So now is the opportunity to build your own media empire. This is what I'm speaking on in my stages. It's your brand authority again. The author is the genius. The book is a result of the genius. So now you have one aspect of your media empire, your book. You have a print. Well, maybe you have an audio podcast and you have an audio podcast part of your media empire. Maybe you have a video podcast or. Okay, then you have three of the aspects. Oh, I want to get the public speaking now. Well, that's the fourth leg of your media. You see how this works now you start extending your media empire, but you're the center of it all as the genius. People think of their Facebook, their Twitter, their Instagram, they think of that as their media empire and they're pushing out towards that. Instead, I coach people, have all of that be your channels, like on tv. Those are your channels that point back to you. You are the network hub of your media empire. And when people begin to understand that, it changes the game.

Stuart: Right? Because if it's risk mitigation, if nothing else, I mean, building all of their empire on these other platforms without just thinking about the mass distribution. But you are the hub. You own the assets, stays with you, and then they're just distributed in other channels. I mean, the risk of building, I mean, we saw it with Facebook advertising accounts that where they were tightening up on things and then ad accounts would get banned. And particularly, I mean, we work a lot with realtors in one particular arm of the business through no fault of their own. The Facebook AI that was going through and doing some ads checking was banning accounts. And imagine that's such a rug pull. All of a sudden you've got all of your. All of your traffic was coming from that source and then it's pulled. Or you have a Instagram page and it gets pulled or it gets hacked or something happens and it gets taken down. That idea of owning the elements and such a game changer and so easy for people to do. It's. Yeah, it's remiss of people to not well.

Rich Bontrager: And content is king. We all know content is the king. It's the hook, it's the lead magnet. So through the book launch, for example, you get media assets now, because if you don't have good media assets, it doesn't matter what you put out. There no one's clicking, no one liking, no one's fouling. And so through one event, for example, through the hour long book launch events, you get a live event, you get a link to replay forever on your website, on your YouTube, wherever.

Stuart: Wow.

Rich Bontrager: Then out of that you can. We will curate three mini sound bites out of your event. Oh wow. Now you have short content for your Instagram or your Twitter, for your TikTok, all your little channels. I will help curate three different media clips from one. Your one big event. What an ingenious way to take one event and repurpose, repurpose, repeat. And again, this can go on and on.

Stuart: Yeah.

Rich Bontrager: So this is where authors have to start thinking about the book is one piece of content that's starting full content now.

Stuart: Yeah. The good thing is that once it's. So we talk about this actually in the scorecard, the book blueprint scorecard, which is we're going to use as an example which we'll get towards it. One of the elements there is beyond the book and this idea of what happens after it's written. So in the couple of examples that we give in the book are relatively narrow, but they all come back to this idea of the book is the starting point of the conversation and the conversation continues. And how can you do that? The benefit of having it written is you've got the seed material for a whole year's worth of content further down the track. And then once you've got that year's worth of content, it effectively becomes evergreen because in 12 months time you're going to have a combination of your audience either doesn't remember what you told them 12 months ago or you've got new members of the audience. So you've now from this seed piece being able to generate other media from it and knowing what that media, how to effectively create that media creates that downstream funnel of an evergreen process. One of the things he mentioned was the book trailer on Amazon. It's something that we haven't looked at but just in talking about it, it immediately makes me think of advertisement for the book to buy the book. But in a lead generation sense and a conversation starting sense, why not maintenance in a conversation starting sense, why not make that, hey, it'd be great if you download a copy of the book. Also once you've got it, you should really go to the website because I've done a behind the scenes fireside chat. And then although Amazon isn't giving you the leads of whoever buys the book, you don't know who those people are a subset of them, hopefully will be drawn to the sites. And then you've got the opportunity to start that conversation in that parallel way.

Rich Bontrager: No, I mean your link in the bridge is very well stored. That's exactly what I coach people on, is you use this, the link of this, the link of this. And again, the genius is in some of the books now, which I plan on doing with my book. As I work with 90 minute books, I'm going to put little links, QR codes or whatever we come up with to go to my coaching videos that match that subsection of my book. So you read the book, you go, oh, this is great. Grab your smartphone, click, oh, now I have a further explainer video with it's me. Yeah, not just the words. Now it's me and my words. You can explain. And it elevates. So now it's an interactive book. Now it's a book that leads you to one of my coaching groups that you can join. It's an endless portal now to media and access and information in a whole new creative way.

Stuart: Yeah, exactly. That rapport building through the process. So not only do you have the book in the first place, but you have the way to build the relationship by offering more. And then the more that you're offering is directly related and tied to the programs that you're offering. So if people are dialed in and attuned to what you're presenting, they're predisposing themselves to be good clients and evidencing them to themselves that they're on the right path, which makes it much more likely that they'll convert. They'll reach out and do something to be to work more closely with you.

Rich Bontrager: One area that I'm getting a lot of calls on or authors when I do their book launch is like, do you know some podcasts that I can get on? So they're learning the next step is media press releases, which are kind of a thing of the past because everyone's on social media. But they understand there needs to be a book tour.

Stuart: Right?

Rich Bontrager: Book tour now is a podcast tour, right? Get every one of those. Go Google your name. If you have a book right now, go Google your name, see how many different podcast shows you've been on. Go save every one of those links in a glue in a Google Drive sheet or just add them to your YouTube channel. When you do your next book, add a link in one time. Say, if you want to learn more about this, I talked about it on this interview, click right. You've already done the Interview, it's in the can waiting to be reused. Yeah, why not reuse what you've already done? And the more podcast interviews, the more content you get. So, again, never waste the content you have. But again, you need to go out there, you need to have these tours. The book won't sell itself. And by the way, the book is not where you're going to make money anymore. The book is that lead magnet. Right, Stuart? It is that new business card. How you make money is the book pointing to you to get on more speaking gigs, the selling to more coaching, whatever it is you do as a business, that's where the real money is.

Stuart: Yeah.

Rich Bontrager: Book is an excuse to get to know you.

Stuart: Imagine. Imagine how many books you'd have to sell to make the same that you would make for one consulting client, or if you're a financial advisor, one transfer of assets. I mean, it's just to think of the book as the product is crazy. The book is the conversation. What you were saying about reusing the assets, I've used the analogy before of like, it's like an army. There's lots of different campaigns and there's lots of different force multipliers and there's lots of different approaches, but once you've got them, you've got them there to use, and which one you use in the right context for the right campaign will vary, but once you've done them, they're there and they last forever. It's very much about building this arsenal of things that you can use to deploy at the right time in the right way.

Rich Bontrager: Well, and like one of those assets, again, going back to the book launch is we gamify this. Think about this. Have you gamified your book? People love trivia games, you know, people love getting prizes. Let's be honest, we all love a good gift. So in. In the book launch, we gamify your book launch with three different prizes. We sit down, we talk about what they're going to be. If you do have a coaching segment, the grand prize will include one of your free coaching segments. It's now a lead magnet, but it's a prize. So we spin this wheel and it's like, you know, kind of spin the wheel. Everyone's cheering, laughing. We announce the name, we have a good applause. So we've gamified your book. Now we've turned it into a fun thing. They win and you get that. Plus through the book launches, you talk about the direct contact, you were more of a personal touch. You get everyone that registered for your event. You get their email. Now you get to do a personal hi, thanks for coming. And the engagement through one book launch goes on and on. Yeah, that's how you take something like this and turn it into a media event. Not just oh, I cracked open my box and we got a book today, let's go sell it.

Stuart: Yeah, exactly. It's, it's having it in a more orchestrated way. You can imagine a scenario where we're often talking about the back cover of books and helping people make those as, as effective as possible in moving the conversation forward. So a traditional book, the back cover job of work is to sell the book because it's on a shelf. It's the compelling copy that makes people take it to the checkout completely irrelevant online in a lead generation sense because in theory people already downloading the book separately. So what the back cover can do is give people the minimum viable commitment next step. It's the small thing that people can do. But people have often challenged by what those next steps could be. But if you know that you're going to have a book launch and you know that you're going to be talking about the book and the context of the book and why it's important for an hour, that could be a step in the, on the back cover of the book. So talk about the inception and kind of wrapping the timeline around.

Rich Bontrager: Yeah, no, maybe. So maybe like on that last page of the book where you always tease the next book coming up, you literally in that last page of the book, you could have in there. Join us for our live book release party. Intentionally time it book is printed, it ships you, you know, a month after you get the book in your hand, you're gonna have a book launch. Put it right in the, have a link, have a QR code scan directly to where you're going. And one of the first things you're going to want to do is have someone give a testimony, right? You're going to want to get a testimony. Someone who's already pre read the book during that month. So now you have time to go get it testimony, put it on your landing page and someone will brag about the book and how excited they are to come to your book launch party.

Stuart: Right. It's such a great way of just as you say, not getting to the finish line of writing it and thinking, oh thank goodness, that's it, it's done and now some magic will happen. But just with a small amount of orchestration, planning ahead on how to use it once it's complete and it's such a game changer in terms of the velocity of, of, of moving people to the next step and excitedly bringing along that audience. There is something about the month or so after the book is created. It's that point in time that can never be recaptured. To grab it and make the most of it definitely seems like a worthwhile thing having gone through the work of creating something.

Rich Bontrager: Well, and these and these book launch parties can be hybrid. Too many of them are straight virtual. But I also do hybrid ones where we have a real in person crowd, an intimate 30 person crowd, let's say, shows up family, friends, some co workers, you kind of stack the deck and then you have the streaming crowd and you have the two universes play together. So the creativity side here is good. But like you said, those first 30 days after a book are so important. So you want to keep it going up and down like a roller coaster. You want those high moments of everyone go find the book, go push it out, go settle back, go share one of the testimonials, maybe one of your curated clips from the. That is gonna be a testimonial about the book. Grab that one out, another 30 days later, drop it in, reboost up amplification of the book, do it again 30 days later. Okay, now we're 90 days out, Stuart. We're gonna re amplify a different clip from the book and do it all over again. And every time you put a link to sell it back to your landing page. But you are creating content to keep that roller coaster going forward.

Stuart: Yeah, such a great opportunity. And it ties in so well with the whole concept of the conversation starting 90 minute books. Because that's the. This is specifically the reason that we're encouraging people to write is the way to at the top of the funnel, at the early stage of the relationship, engage someone and then build and develop the relationship. And the book launch party is definitely part of that. So let's talk about what we're going to do as the example. So we're going to take the book Blueprint Scorecard, which is our framework book that I recently wrote, and we're going to use this as a live example. Everyone can follow along with and see exactly how it works so that there's remove any doubt from people's mind that this might be for them and hopefully, I mean, forget about our version of the book, but hopefully they'll see for themselves how much it can be utilized. So run me through what the plan is for the next couple of weeks as we're gonna do the use this one as the live one.

Rich Bontrager: So we're going to take this book by Stewart and 90 Minute Books. We're literally going to do what my company does. We're going to do four weeks of social amplification. We're going to start pushing out media, Instagram, Twitter, post about the actual book launch party. We're going to have a little description about what the book is, whose store it is, what 90 minutes is. So they get a little commercial of what this book is about and why it's important. And then we're going to invite everyone to come to our virtual streaming event. During that time, Student and I are going to work, we're going to go through some consultations, get them more camera ready more, you know, this and that. Make sure we design it what he wants. We'll come up with those special guests every time we have three guests beam in. And often I ask for the client to give me five names. And after that I'll take the names and I'll go reach out on Stuart's behalf, say, hey, I'm doing this book launch for Stuart. Would you want to be a guest and beam in and talk about the book? Brag on Stewart a little bit, whatever you want to do. And often I do not reveal to Stuart or my guest who that surprise guest is going to be. He doesn't find out till the night of it. And that's part of the fun of these reveal parties for the book. It's kind of like, hey, Ted beamed in and you haven't seen Ted for 10 years but he's read your book. You have no idea what Ted's going to say. It's a great emotional charge. It's a voice from the outside speaking into the moment. And again, those are all beamed in. So we're going to plan all that. We're going to do the live event, give away some prizes, and after the event, then I produce it, cleaning up a little bit. And then Stuart will have a link to that to forever share that one event out. I will also create those three curated clips and you will get those clips to use any way you want. Also part of that pre production time, part of the pre promotion is Stuart and I will probably do a couple live streams to tease the upcoming book launch. So we'll get it on and we'll be on several of my media channels all at once. And the idea is, hey, Stuart, who are you? What's 90 Minute Books? And we're doing a book launch, so we'll do some preview Short content, commercials. That's what we're going to do. And then we're going to invite all of you that are listening to this to come and join us.

Stuart: Absolutely. And really it's the. Everything we do, we try and make as straightforward as possible and really encourage the fact that everyone who's a client of ours, everyone who's not yet a client of ours, everyone who's done it on their own, but kind of resonates with the way that we think about it. This is something that you can do yourselves. So where's in the. I guess give people a chance to peek behind the scenes before we. We do this next month. Where's the best place that people can check out more of you and what you do?

Rich Bontrager: Yeah, rockthestagemedia.com is the website. You'll see it there on the upper name tab. Going across. There's a place called the book release party. There is a companion piece we serve as well, called the Spotlight. It's a shorter media clip. It's about that just focuses on you and your brand authority, you and your genius. So those are kind of companion things, but you'll see them on the website. Go to the book launch party. The book release party. There's a version one, version two. And yeah, let me know that Stuart sent you if you're interested and we will get you on for your book release party in 2023.

Stuart: Yeah, I'm excited to see other people do this. I know that some of our clients have done bits and pieces on their own, but to now be able to point people in a direction where they really get that done for you, because this is difficult for people who haven't done it. I mean, skill thing, but the capability is another. So I'm excited to be able to share you as a resource for people. Okay, so that probably wraps it up for today. We'll check back in with everyone with some messages as we get towards the launch party next month, obviously. So a couple weeks from now, and then we'll probably jump back on a call to do a postmortem afterwards, just to kind of break it down a little bit and check back in with people and probably share some of the ways that we've used it behind the scenes again, all with the idea of encouraging people that they can do it themselves or pointing out that this isn't. This isn't an unknowable black box. There's a resource now that people can do it.

Rich Bontrager: Well, again, my old passion, Stuart, to do this is to help you shine. It used to cost thousands of dollars to get on tv.

Stuart: Right?

Rich Bontrager: It's not that expensive anymore. It's really an investment into you, your book, your brand. But again, it's beyond the book now. It's about you as the authority and me helping you shine and gets you out there further is one of the funnest things in the world. So I would love to help you and your people do that more.

Stuart: Fantastic. Well, I'll make sure that there's links to Rockstar Stage Media in the show notes just to make it easier for people. Obviously they can just type in if they Google Rich Trigger Bontrager. I don't imagine that there's too many that come up.

Rich Bontrager: There's only one. There's six pages of Google and you can find Rich Trigger Bon Trigger pretty darn easily. Reach out to me personally if you want to. And I still accept all my own email. Even though I have a team, I still get every email, read it myself, so you get direct access to me.

Stuart: Fantastic. Well, thanks again for your time. I'm excited about sharing this with everyone as we go forward. I'm excited to go through the process myself. I'm not sure we can do anything about the accent in a couple of weeks, but maybe we can do anything, something about the other presence. And yeah, just thanks again. So we'll check back in again. Everyone check out rockthestagemedia.com check out the show notes for the episode. If you just want to click on a link and we will catch you in the next one.