Beyond Book Sales: How to Build a Profitable Author Platform - BM-521

You wrote the book. You got it published. You’ve been putting yourself out there.

So why is it still not bringing in real income?

This week’s guest, Robin Ayoub—founder and CEO of N49 Networks, fractional CRO, and podcast host—shares what most authors miss when they expect their book to do the heavy lifting.

We get into what actually drives revenue… and where authors tend to get stuck without realizing it.

Because the gap isn’t effort.
It’s how that effort is aimed.

What you’ll start to question:

Is your book really the thing that’s supposed to make you money?
Or is it playing a different role altogether?

Are you doing things that feel productive… but don’t lead anywhere?
There’s a difference. And it’s not always obvious.

Does visibility actually translate into sales?
Or is something missing in between?

Are you clear on who you’re trying to reach… and where they already are?
Because guessing looks a lot like “trying everything.”

Is AI helping you move faster… or just creating more noise?

If your book isn’t doing what you expected, this conversation will help you see what’s really going on.

And more importantly… what to shift.

Here's how to connect with Robin:

30-minute complimentary session

Website

LinkedIn

Email

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When Visibility Feels Hard, Podcast Guesting Changes the Game

If you know your book deserves more reach but visibility feels like a struggle, podcast guesting can open the right doors.

Podcast Connections gets you in front of the audiences who need your message and your expertise.

Contact them at PodcastConnections.co

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Transcript

Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Oh, welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is Robin Ayoub. Robin is the founder and CEO of N49 Networks. He helps founders and leadership teams figure out why revenue stalls as companies grow. As a fractional chief revenue officer and strategic advisor, he helps align sales, marketing, operations, and AI so they actually produce results. With more than 25 years of experience across global services, technology, and regulated industries, Robin is known for cutting through noise and bringing clarity to what really drives revenue. He's also the creator and host of Localization Fireside Chat, a leading industry podcast featuring global voices in technology and communications.

Susan Friedmann [00:01:11]:
Robin, what an absolute pleasure it is to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.

Robin Ayoub [00:01:20]:
Thank you, Susan, for having me. Appreciate it.

Susan Friedmann [00:01:22]:
Well, Robin, you know, just a few weeks ago, the tables were turned and I was your guest. So it's so fun to have this reciprocal arrangement that you now are a guest of mine. I'm thrilled to introduce you to my listeners. Now, talking about my listeners, as you know, nonfiction authors, and many of them believe that selling more books will solve their revenue challenges. Let's ask you, where do you see the real revenue breakdown for experts and thought leaders, which, as you know, many of my people are, and if they're not yet, that's what they want to be. That's what they aspire to.

Robin Ayoub [00:02:06]:
Thanks for bringing that topic. It's a pretty interesting topic that everybody thinks about, and if they don't think about, maybe they should think about. But from everybody I've spoken with over the years that I've been doing my career built around revenue generations. Of course, I started my career as a technologist, and we'll talk about a little bit of an AI impact down the road in our conversation today. But most revenues in my mind breaks down from the will to generate revenue. Anybody who says otherwise, they'll be fooling themselves. Basically, we start from the concept, from the thought process that I build and they come, and that has long gone now. Basically, I write a book and all of a sudden I've got a lineup on my doorstep or on my website or converging on my LinkedIn profile.

Robin Ayoub [00:02:50]:
Try to buy my services. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't believe that. And if they are coming to your website, maybe they are coming or they're coming to talk to you. Maybe they are not the type of customers you want, or they're just trying to check out what you do, how serious those kind of conversations they are. If you wrote a book in hope to generate revenue, I gotta say, maybe just a hope, in my opinion, has not been proven yet. That a book will drive tremendous amount of revenue without any other added effort.

Robin Ayoub [00:03:20]:
It helps, don't get me wrong, it does help, but it will not solve your revenue problem completely. That's for sure. If I was to say somebody was to ask me, well, how do you fix revenue problems? There are several facets to, or several, I want to say, issues that we have to look at when we're looking at revenue generation. Revenue generation, there's 3 categories of what makes revenue. One is you need a product. Two, you need a market that wants that product, not what you perceive as a product owner. And this is where mistakes tend to happen. Product owners or idea owners, they think, because I created the idea, I am so close to the idea, must be, everybody wants that idea.

Robin Ayoub [00:04:04]:
And then we go to the market and the market gives us a different signal. Maybe yes, maybe no. In a lot of cases, it's no. But the question is, which gets me to my third category, you need sales activities to drive revenue. And when I talk about sales activity, you need— and either you do it as an entrepreneur, and I know all your listeners are entrepreneurs working on their own— you need to be a master of everything. In this case, you need to be the salesperson, you need to be the networker, You need to be the lead generator. You need to be the closer. Don't underestimate the ABC rule, always be closing.

Robin Ayoub [00:04:41]:
We'll talk about that if there's time. So, when it comes to revenue, those 3 categories need to be in mind all the time in addition to writing a book and hopefully the book generates revenue for you. But if you have those 3 categories together, market that wants an idea that you've built or you've put together, and a means to connect these two together, either you personally or you hire a salesperson to do it for you. Those three are very, very important to generate revenue.

Susan Friedmann [00:05:11]:
I love that you brought that up because number one, you're right. One of the first conversations that I have with authors when they come to me for either publishing or marketing is that they're not going to get rich on a book. It's unlikely. I don't want to say they're not, but the chances are pretty slim unless of course you're a celebrity or you've got something that's going to really drive sales. For the most part, that's not the case. The book is the product. What the market wants, and I think you said something really significant, Robin, and that is you think the market wants it. But in reality, that may not be the case, and you find that out the hard way.

Susan Friedmann [00:05:58]:
That's one issue. And then the third one is the one that they hate most, and that's the sales activity. It's like that's what they want somebody else to do for them. Can you market or sell my book for me? It's like bringing a child into the world and saying, okay, I brought it into the world, but I really don't want to look after it. You take care of it.

Robin Ayoub [00:06:22]:
You're absolutely correct. It's proven over time that whoever creates an idea, a book in this case, are the best salespeople for this particular idea. They are so passionate about it. Nobody can speak to the amount of passion that they have about this particular idea, but they need to have invested time, energy in doing so. It will not happen on its own. You got to go out. You got to pound the street, as they say in North America. You got to go meet people, shake hands, attend networking events.

Robin Ayoub [00:06:50]:
You got to do all of it. In order for you to put it out there. And you're right, unless you're a celebrity of sort and you have millions of followers, you're not going to be able to make money out of this venture unless you do extraordinary stuff by actively promoting it. And market reacts to people who have energy promoting an idea. And there is a psychology for this one. If the market sees an idea owner, a book owner, or whatever, product, service, whatever they are, And nonchalantly, once in a while, they pop here and there and they do a little bit of an effort here and there. Nobody pays attention to that because the message we're signaling at that point is, I don't know if I believe in my own ideas. I don't know if I believe in my own product.

Robin Ayoub [00:07:33]:
And therefore, I'm not investing a lot of energy, a lot of time and investment into it in order for me to promote it. People and market wants to see that you are passionate about what you're doing. And that's the key to selling, that you believe in what you've written in a book and you're trying to make more people see what you saw in that book. And thirdly is, if you don't exhibit some sort of an energy pushing that out, people are going to discount you and then the book is not going to hit the street as hard as you might think it will.

Susan Friedmann [00:08:05]:
Yes, that's so true. I mean, the passion for your book is key, and I hear that Many times I start off with a conversation on the phone with somebody, and if I don't hear that energy and that passion, I know there's a problem. It's like, well, why did you write this book? You've gotta believe in it, as you say. And that energy and passion is the beginning of that sales cycle. Because if you are not excited about it, then who else will be?

Robin Ayoub [00:08:37]:
Correct.

Susan Friedmann [00:08:37]:
I always love that scene in When Harry Met Sally. Did you see that movie?

Robin Ayoub [00:08:43]:
I did see it, yeah, but that's a long time ago now.

Susan Friedmann [00:08:45]:
It's a long time ago, but there's this classic scene when they're at the ice cream parlor and the one person is just exuberant and almost orgasmic about this dessert. They say, "I want what she's having." That energy that you see and hear in somebody who's like, "I want that." If it's good enough for them and they feel so exuberant about it, then I've gotta have that. And that's part and parcel of what you're saying. Now, something that comes up, and let me ask you about this, is interestingly enough, once the book comes out, all of a sudden there's this imposter syndrome that sort of suddenly creeps in and it's like, oh, people are going to judge me and they're going to criticize me. And oh, I'm not sure that I really feel write about, putting this out in the world, all of a sudden, all this internal head trash starts exploding.

Robin Ayoub [00:09:50]:
Yeah.

Susan Friedmann [00:09:50]:
Talk to us about that.

Robin Ayoub [00:09:52]:
These kind of thoughts and ideas and internal debate, I think, should have happened on the onset of the idea of writing a book, not after the fact, in my opinion. Internally, when I decide to do something, I make those decisions first before I engage in doing the actual project, in this case be it a book. If you believe in something and you put it out in a testimony, be it a book or a thesis or a paper of some sort, and then later on you debate the facts, what people are going to think of it, well, here's the news: you're in the public domain now, and that's part and parcel of what being in the public domain means. You are going to get supporters, you are going to get detractors,, and you got to get people who are neutral about the idea. So you've got to take it in a more of a 'it is what it is' kind of a scenario. You're going to get people who are going to love you, love the book, or love the idea that you try to promote, and you're going to get people who are going to criticize you for it. That's the nature of the world we live in. And that's when people embark on something and they're expecting 100% supporters out there.

Robin Ayoub [00:10:59]:
I don't know which idea has that nowadays. It doesn't matter what it is.

Susan Friedmann [00:11:04]:
Yeah. Let's go on from that because many authors are chasing visibility and we know this from social media, but from a revenue perspective, what do you feel matters most more than visibility?

Robin Ayoub [00:11:21]:
You mean like to achieve revenue?

Susan Friedmann [00:11:23]:
Yeah. And to achieve it, that revenue is the goal as opposed to visibility being the goal.

Robin Ayoub [00:11:30]:
The Instagram syndrome that is going on out there, how many clicks I get and how many likes and hearts, whatever they call them, those don't generate revenue. In fact, most successful people who are generating revenue don't have a lot of followers on any social media, to be honest. And the way they do it is they do it by pinpoint accuracy in terms of who are they connected to, who are they connected with. Are they going to move the needle for them when it comes to generating revenue? The fact that you got like a million people following you and only 2 people buying from you doesn't mean anything. You got a million people following you, good luck with that, and I'm happy for you, but that's not going to generate revenue for you. You got to treat a book as a business, as a business opportunity, and try to figure out who is most appropriate to be buying this book at scale.. You cannot be selling this at onesies and twosies. You can do that if you want to, but that's going to be a long road to whatever you want to end up with in terms of your revenue goals.

Robin Ayoub [00:12:30]:
But if you are going to do this and you're going to do it well, and again, going back to treating it as a business, you are going to treat your book as a product, and that product needs people to buy it. And buying it at scale, at scale, and I repeat, at scale, it's much easier for you to achieve your desired revenue numbers and publicity if that's the case because numbers lead to publicity in a lot of cases and leads to fame, I guess, if you've got 20 people buying it versus 20,000 people buying the book. The way you would do that is by who the book is for. Try to isolate the idea a little bit. Try to figure out if I'm writing a book about engineering. I'm writing a book about engineering, so I'm thinking engineers will be interested in this book. The first question is, where do they hang out? Where do they frequent? Which networking event they attend to? Which school do they go to? What are the major associations that bring these people together? And this is how I would target generally to go out and try to figure out how can I take my book now and make it part of those networks. And I gave engineering as an example here, Susan, but that could be anything really.

Robin Ayoub [00:13:39]:
And I'm speaking about it in a business book sense. If you are talking about it from other types like romance novels, etc., I wouldn't know how to answer that. But from a business perspective, I would look for specific association related to what I'm trying to do. Related to what I'm trying to do is if I'm doing, for instance, a book— another example would be a book on statistics. I'm a statistician and I wanted to do a book on statistics. Okay, so if I wrote a book on a certain method of doing statistics,, then the odds would be is that market research industry and those marketing companies in the market research industry probably would be more suitable to buy my book. Again, when you're coming up, and I've seen a lot of— this is another one too, sales managers writing books. That's like you can throw a stone and hit 200 of these guys.

Robin Ayoub [00:14:33]:
And I feel like everybody writes a book on sales management and I just I laugh when I see these books because the only wisdom in there is go get leads and leads generate revenue. So I get that, I understand that. But if you are not— again, if you don't have anything genuine, innovative, something new to push that somebody else— you're not copying somebody else's idea, that's another one. And then you are designating the book to a specific group of professionals. This is where now we zooming in a little bit.

Susan Friedmann [00:15:01]:
And then you chase that group and try to sell your book to You mentioned something earlier, the ABCs, always be closing.

Robin Ayoub [00:15:11]:
Talk to us more about that. I always, since I was a kid, and just, you know, like it's something in your, who you are as an individual, but then you go to a class somewhere and somebody talks about it and say, well, that's who I am. I'm not learning a new skill. I'm just validating who you are kind of thing. Every conversation needs to lead to something. When I say always be closing, I'm referring to closing the sale. But closing the sale could mean many things. It could mean a purchase order.

Robin Ayoub [00:15:38]:
It could mean I booked another meeting. It could mean I booked another podcast with Susan. It could mean, I don't know, I got invited to another networking event with a person perhaps I'm interested down the road to do business with. Always be closing, meaning don't lose sight of the objective that you have in your mind is to sell something. Now, you may want to go across many steps to get there. And each one of those steps is a closing on its own. There's another way of saying it. It's called move the yardstick one yard at a time to your ultimate objective, which is the purchase order.

Susan Friedmann [00:16:14]:
Yeah. Then how can authors tell the difference between, let's say, activity that feels productive and activity that actually produces revenue?

Robin Ayoub [00:16:25]:
Many people ask that question and they're probably misunderstanding the sales process. For that, we have to go back a little bit. If you're coming in at the end of the sales process, meaning somebody picks up the phone and calls you, Susan, and says, "I want to buy 20,000 books of yours," that would be at the end of what I call the sales process, meaning that if I was mapping out the sales process and I want to put it into a CRM or Salesforce or one of those software, I'll put it at stage, let's say, 80% close. When I receive the paperwork, 90%. And when I sign it, it's 100% is delivered. Now, what I'm talking about is starting from the beginning, I have a person that I'm interested in talking to or a group of people I'm interested in selling them something. And those types of activities, as I record them either in a CRM or on a paper or in a spreadsheet, it doesn't matter, or in your mind, Those activities, as you move along, that mean you're engaging that interest and you're emphasizing and you're stressing the purpose of your conversation with that individual, or that individual may not, in a lot of cases, may not be the ultimate buyer, but maybe your allies to get you a buyer, right? So those activities, you need to have tons of those in order for you to close. Very rarely nowadays somebody sitting on their desk and their phone rings and they get a purchase order.

Robin Ayoub [00:17:49]:
Very rarely it happens, but it's much less than 20%. You need to create activities in order for you— for the phone to ring and get you that order. And those activities could vary in many ways. Could be you participating in networking events, going to conferences, attending— depends on where you are and what you're trying to promote— attending Industry events, maybe. But you've got to go out and you gotta state your objective. That's another one too. A lot of people go to these events and they don't say what they want. They're shy about it.

Robin Ayoub [00:18:21]:
What is your objective? What do you do? What are you here for? I see people like— I meet them in networking events all the time— is, what are you here for? Like, what is it that you do? That's the biggest question that people trip over. What is it that you do and what are you here for and how can I help you? People want to help each other, but if you can't articulated clearly, stated clearly, nobody's going to be able to help you.

Susan Friedmann [00:18:42]:
Yeah. It's interesting because people think, well, they go to these networking events and they're asked that question and it's like, oh, I wrote a book.

Robin Ayoub [00:18:53]:
Okay. Yippee-doo. So is everybody else, right?

Susan Friedmann [00:18:54]:
Is that true? Yes, exactly. It's like, okay, there are 4 million books out there being written every year. I mean, yes, you're just one of a crowd. How's that going to help me? And knowing that and even preparing for that kind of conversation, I think that's a problem is that there's that lack of preparation, especially when you go to networking events because you say, I'd like to be able to help you, but I've no idea how I can do that unless you share with me how I might be able to do that. I'm not a mind reader. Well, I could be, but—

Robin Ayoub [00:19:29]:
And one of the biggest things that right now we're seeing, and I'm seeing a wave of it actually, I got a couple of them coming up this week. I'm seeing a lot more people who wrote books coming on podcasts talking about their books. I'm just noticing it now, but maybe this has been going on for a while. Your podcast is a testimony for that. But on my side, I mean, I do my podcast in the language industry, so I've got people who wrote books in cybersecurity, for instance. They're coming on the podcast, talk about their books on cybersecurity. Podcast could be another way of putting the word out, but that can't be everything. You have to be like a triathlete when it comes to selling.

Robin Ayoub [00:20:08]:
I use sports analogy on that one. So you gotta do everything possible to get the word out— your social media, your podcast, your face-to-face networking. Do not leave any stone unturned. A, you're going to find opportunities. Activities leads to opportunities, just a straight mathematical formula. Activities leads to opportunities, opportunities to close deals., and therefore, you're closing sales. You treat that as a mathematical formula. I need 20 activities to close 1 deal.

Robin Ayoub [00:20:36]:
If I need 2 deals, I need 40 activities. That's one way to do it. The other thing that you're doing at the same time is you're demonstrating how much you believe in the cause that you've written about. This is very important because most people write books, their heart is not into it. People know that. They wrote it because they think it's gonna get them a business of some sort. And people know that and they shy away from it. If you demonstrate that you're passionate about what you just wrote about, people will take a different view of you.

Susan Friedmann [00:21:08]:
Very much so. And we addressed that a little earlier, the importance of passion and energy. Now, I want to touch on a subject that I know is near and dear to your heart, And that is, where do you see AI truly helping authors grow their businesses, and where is it creating noise rather than value?

Robin Ayoub [00:21:32]:
Yeah, so we talk about AI quite a bit on the channel. In fact, the company I established, we do automation as well. So where it could be helpful for people who are interested either A, in writing a book, and B, marketing a book, and going through the process of both. In terms of writing a book, I see AI helping quite a bit in generating ideas, not doing the actual writing, but you can do draft writing, I guess, nowadays. I've seen somebody came on my podcast. We talked about an app that they've written. They're from New York. What it does is it helps people write a book.

Robin Ayoub [00:22:08]:
In my personal experience, I've tried to write a book, and every time I say, okay, well, I got to dedicate some time, I got to sit down, I got to write a little bit, I get distracted because a million things are happening and I can't commit to a timeline for the book. It seems to be taking a back bench kind of thing. With AI now, you can do it faster, at least get the initial ideas on paper, and then go through the process of getting a human in the loop to edit it for you. So it's, you know, goes without saying that with AI nowadays, our ideas are expanding now. We still need to filter through those ideas to see what works or what doesn't work. But if you were to sit on your own and you sit, you say, okay, I'm going to craft a few ideas, it will take you weeks, which AI now can spit out all kinds of ideas in no time. And it would allow you to at least go through them and figure out which idea I want to write, I want to write about, or I want to talk about, or I want to expand, etc. So idea generation and creativity and bouncing ideas It is very interesting times we're living in right now when it comes to AI.

Robin Ayoub [00:23:14]:
What's happening right now is because we are passing as a humanity in what I call the trust phase, meaning that we don't know if we trust AI yet. There is a category of people, of content consumers I would call them. They look at content and as soon as they detect a hint of AI in it, they shy away from it. So, oh, it's written by AI. You've seen that on YouTube. You've seen that in everything, really. If people notice that the content has involved in somehow written by AI or I had touched it somehow, there's a category of readers would say, "No, it's not for me. I want authentic, genuinely human-written something." That's the noise.

Robin Ayoub [00:23:54]:
That's the part that probably category of content readers or consumers out there saying, "No, I don't want any of this stuff." But not everybody is the same and the market will dictate eventually most of this stuff will be heavily vested via AI and less human, and it'll always be human in the middle, human involved. Somebody told me today, human in charge. That's not human in the middle, human in charge of the development process with a book idea. I think, and you're seeing it right now, Susan, you're going to see a time that it takes us to write a book shrink quite a bit dramatically over time, maybe less down the road than it is right now, because right now we're still in a trust phase. We don't know if we trust this thing. So we're spending a lot of time editing, reviewing, making sure it hits home the intended audience. On the automation side, on the marketing side, I think it's a miracle worker right now because why? Because now, you know, an author can be a Swiss Army knife, to be honest with you. They can be the author, the marketeer, the salesperson, all in one if they use the right tools when it comes to AI.

Robin Ayoub [00:25:00]:
There's a lot of automation possibility using AI for marketing that they can use, people can use. It's not going to cost them that much money. And since they are solo, they don't have a lot of teams behind them trying to support them. They're going to have to rely on them themselves to do it. The alternative to that is do it manually, reach to each individual manually, tell them I wrote a book and go through the spiel again. You don't need to do that. AI can help you expand and amplify the message dramatically from a speed and coverage perspective. The selling piece also, perhaps, like the entire administrative part, not the actual talking to people and talking to your customer, but I'm talking about the administrative part.

Robin Ayoub [00:25:42]:
If you want to, for single owner, maybe you don't want to do that, but if you have an administrative part to selling, all that stuff can be handled via AI, from invoicing to troubleshooting, et cetera.

Susan Friedmann [00:25:52]:
There's so much that AI can help us with. It's just amazing. I'm just blown away with every day I'm finding something else. Any event, I know that before we run out of time, I was like, I want you to share with us how our listeners can find out more about you and your services.

Robin Ayoub [00:26:13]:
Absolutely. You can head out to my website, n49networks.com, N49, the number 49, networks.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm easy to be found on LinkedIn. Robin Ayoub, you can find me. And also, you can email me if you want, robin.ayoub, my first name, dot last name, at n49networks.com.

Susan Friedmann [00:26:34]:
I really appreciate it. And I'll put all of those links into the chat because I never know where people are. They're walking their dog, they're mowing the lawn, they're doing all sorts of things. So isn't necessarily able to write something down. Excellent. And as you know, Robin, we always have our guests leave our listeners with a golden nugget.

Robin Ayoub [00:26:57]:
What's yours? Mine is, I know for the solo owners or the solo entrepreneurs out there, times can get tough sometimes. So I leave you with this. Never give up. Always, always, always, there's a way to get through. Never give up at all. If you believe strongly in something, hold on to this and make it the reason for you to succeed tomorrow.

Susan Friedmann [00:27:20]:
Yeah. Perseverance pays off. It really does. Yes. I know often, you know, authors come to me and they say, oh, well, I tried that. They did a couple of podcast interviews and it didn't lead to massive sales or any kind of speaking engagement. And I say, no, just keep going. If you're talking to your audience, things will happen.

Susan Friedmann [00:27:41]:
Absolutely. Maybe not immediately, but over time. Things do happen. It took me 2 years before I sold half a million copies of my book to one company. You never know it. I didn't go in expecting that order, but because of the relationship and that perseverance, that's when it came about. So yes, you're absolutely right. Hit the nail on the head.

Susan Friedmann [00:28:04]:
Robin, this has been fascinating and a very different approach for our listeners. Listeners, I know that we covered a lot of in-depth material, go back and relisten to this. Listen to Robin's wisdom. Check him out. I'll put all those links, as I said, in the show notes. And if your book isn't selling the way you want it or expect it to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for. So go to bookmarketingbrainstorm.com to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books.

Susan Friedmann [00:28:54]:
Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.

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