Suzanne’s shares her integration of her professional, spiritual and real life experiences as a nationally recognized coach, speaker and trainer on life purpose, professional reinvention, career change, personal fulfillment and “Lifestyle Prepping.”

She has a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology, specializing in Dreamwork, an author of 3 books including the award-winning life purpose workbook, 111 Inspirational Life Purpose Quotes, and Exercises to Find Your Purpose in Life.

KIMBERLY: In the Mind Body Spirit arena as we are in, I see many different marketing challenges that come up. What do you think are the main marketing challenges as far as running a business that we see in Mind Body Spirit?

SUZANNE: The big one for the Mind Body Spirit people is that we are not so connected to the 3D world, the business world. We are led by the spirit, and we want to be doing things that are in service to spirit. So we are not marketing pros, we did not come here to do that. We came here to go with a certain flow and vibration, and it takes a while to figure out how to integrate the social media, website that you have to do. I think from a spiritual perspective that is the hardest part.

KIMBERLY: Absolutely. So what is working for you in your marketing and social media? Is there a certain avenue that works best for you?

SUZANNE: I love Facebook and LinkedIn, and I like them for two different reasons. Facebook is much more inspirational, and I can give resources, information, vibe, visual. I love LinkedIn because of the contrast to Facebook where I just post whatever I want to, and it is more fun. When on LinkedIn I am looking for specific things whether it is radio show hosts, spiritual people, people I can connect with for my life purpose curriculum – just a lot of different things. It is very strategic when I am on LinkedIn. One of the thing that I love about LinkedIn is what you are looking for, and if you know that right search term, you can find those people on LinkedIn easily and effortlessly. Most people are very responsive too.

KIMBERLY: Absolutely! So let us talk about your virtual book tour and how you are an author of three books. I am fascinated by virtual book tour. I have been talking about this with some people, and I have not met someone that has pulled together what you have. So let us talk a little bit about that, what it is and how it can serve the authors out there.

SUZANNE: There are three pillars to a good marketing of promo book launch. You have to have your infrastructure in place, which included your press kit, one sheet, and knowing what you are going to do. Also, something I have my author do is called an author information sheet, because it is important that everything about you and your book becomes like a vitae for your book. Once those things are in place, you have the ability to mobilize and publish well.

Additionally, in the visibility category, there is a book trailer, and people think ‘Why do I need a book trailer?’ If you have your book trailer done properly and the distribution piece of it done properly, some companies will send it out to 5,00 librarians for you, hundreds of bookstores as well as every book video hub. All of a sudden you have back links, the promotion you never thought you were going to have. If you have a book synopsis done, that gets out and is sent out to 1,000 literary agents around the world. These things I have actually done in pride, so it is not like I am making this up, you get responses.

With the book synopsis, you want to have that sent out to all the literary agents. Plus, if you have it professionally done, it is in the language that the book industry is used to hearing, not an author talking about their book which is not the best thing to do either because we have a bias. Whereas if you have someone in the industry, they can do good SEO for you and make it so that it is the kind of verbiage that people want to have. Your book is a unique book, but it can be written about in a way that really showcases it. Your book synopsis can then be sent out to 1,000 literary agents. So you can see about actually getting a book deal out of your book synopsis, and it is a great way to query. You do not have to do it, it is a service that I have, that they go and do it for you, and the only thing you get back is the ‘yays’ and ‘nays’. All you need is one yes.

The final thing is sales channels, you should be in books fairs and most people do not even know about book fairs. There is Book Expo America, Frankfurt Book Fair, ones in India, China, Guadalajara, Cape Town in South Arica, they are all over as well as state and national ones. The state ones are like library associations. So if you get yourself out in front of librarians you can be bought up for them. Then there are the sales channels that are like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, then distribution channels like Ingram, Baker & Taylor, New Leaf. You need to be in some distribution channels for wholesale orders.

KIMBERLY: That is wonderful. You have everything really dialed in. I also have a business background and the different way of thinking. You have done a fantastic job with this but what has been your biggest challenge with marketing?

SUZANNE: The biggest challenge with marketing my book business is that it is very new, very innovative. When you talk about book tours, virtual book tours, the thing people’s minds go to is a book blog tour. That is nice but it is a very highly selected niche market. Again, how do we expand that? When I went to start this company, I said ‘Where are all the places that people go about books?’ That is when this whole thing rolled out for all these different things. You have to be in all those different places and then to find resources. That was the next trouble – putting the resources together, reciprocal marketing, affiliate programs, referral marketing and all that kind of stuff. Then how do you find authors? There are some really interesting ways to find authors, and there is a steady stream of authors. This business has actually turned out to be something that can actually niche well and focus on nonfiction authors.

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