Today I’ll speak with Nick Hutchison, the founder of BookThinkers, an online book community focused on highlighting personal development and growth titles. Nick will tell us all about BookThinkers and how he and his team have built a successful book influencer platform.

01:07 - Alright Nick, welcome to Published. Why don’t we start with the basics? Tell us about yourself, what you do, and how you got started with BookThinkers.

• Sure. My name is Nick Hutchison and I founded BookThinkers about five years ago now. I was a struggling college student and I had accepted an internship my senior year of college with a software company and during that internship one of my sales mentors recommended a couple of good personal development books.
• At the time I was sort of anti-reading but I really looked up to this guy so I read some of those books and my entire life changed and here we are now, five years later and I have BookThinkers which is now an online community of over 100,000 nonfiction book lovers.
• We have a podcast, we do book recommendations, masterminds, we’re writing books, all sorts of crazy things, but that’s a little bit about me and how I started the company.

02:04 - Congratulations on your success and I’m sure it was quite a journey along the way. Was there anything that surprised you that sort of stands out when you look back?

• Number one, from a macro perspective, I’m kind of shocked I was never introduced to some of these subjects growing up.
• I grew up in a great family. My parents were amazing and my brothers were always challenging me to battle them in sports and stuff like that. I was okay in high school as a student and even in college as a business student but I was never introduced to some basic foundational stuff like personal finance, or philosophy or psychology.
• And a lot of those things are important to understand how the world truly works. And so, the world of personal development books is so large and there’s so many resources out there. But the average person, I’d say I was the average person, isn’t necessarily made aware of those as you’re growing up here in the US.
• What I mean when I say I’m surprised by that is the world of personal development business books is so large and so immense and there’s a book to solve almost any problem and if you’re not taught that at a young age you might miss the ball and there’s an opportunity cost to that.

03:49 Speaking of books, of course, that is the main thrust of what you do so can you talk to us a bit about the benefits authors receive when they work with BookThinkers?

• I’ll start with a short story: when I first started posting on social media we wanted to build a mobile application for readers, so they could retain and implement more information from the books they were reading. The relationship we had with the developers sort of fizzled out and my business partners at the time who started BookThinkers with me sort of left the project alone. And the only thing that had any traction at all was our socials so we started on Facebook and then we went to Instagram and I was just sharing what I was reading. I was just documenting a process, I wasn’t really creating anything and over time authors started to reach out and say, “Hey I’d love to send you a free copy of my book in exchange for a review.” And I thought this was crazy. People are sending me books, now I don’t have to spend money on them and then eventually authors started to say, “Hey, how much do you charge for a review?” Now, I’m getting paid to read. That’s something I would just do totally for free. Now I’m saving money and making money and I thought that was amazing.
• The model started with that, we would charge for book reviews. Now we have a whole suite of services that are designed to create social exposure for authors.
• It’s very hard to promise any return on investment in terms of book sales because now there’s so much competition and there’s so many impressions that it takes to lead to a book sale.
• What we can say, for example, is if you do a picture post with us, you’ll get 20,000 minimum impressions to targeted readers in the nonfiction space. If you do a video review with us, you’ll get a couple thousand views on the video and we can upload it to your amazon book page
• Our services have continued to evolve. Now we have podcasting, we have a little bit of social media management, there’s all sorts of things that BookThinkers does.
• The primary benefit to working with us is we’ll guide you to one of those offerings that make the most sense for you and we’ll generate a big impression count for you and then you can go out, kind of like a publisher does in setting up a framework, and it’s the author’s responsibility to take advantage of it.

06:10 - Speaking of publishers, I would say even pre-pandemic there was a shift away from the more “traditional” ways of promoting. And a lot of the attention moved away from book signings and book tours over to more of a digital approach where of course you can get very targeted in who you’re trying to reach. How have you seen that shift impact what BookThinkers does and how do you think BookThinkers fits into that sphere of influence?

• Yeah that shift has been great for BookThinkers because we're primarily on socials.
• I think, with Amazon lowering the barrier to entry and hybrid publishers like Greenleaf stepping up and giving more back to authors, letting them retain that intellectual property, giving them a higher percentage of that residual income that gets created from the book, more and more people are writing books.
• And the traditional publishers have a lot of traditional relationships and those traditional relationships aren’t on social media because social media wasn’t available 10-15 years ago or anything farther back than that.
• So, a lot of what’s happening is new. When BookThinkers started on socials, we really kicked it into gear maybe three or four years ago and started paying attention to the space
• Bookstagram, really wasn’t even a thing, it was just starting, there were only a couple accounts that have over 10,000 followers. Now there are dozens and dozens of them in the nonfiction book space. So, still what’s happening today is relatively new.
• With a bigger trend towards authors getting into the space and wanting to steer their own ship, social media seems to be something they have familiarity with or they already have a little bit of an audience so they’re much more comfortable working with us in the social space than I think they would have been if we were doing this five or ten years ago.
• In the same way that authors are releasing books to solve almost any problem, I think you can leverage a platform like Instagram to find almost any audience. And so these people, like target readers, are congregating on social media behind hashtags or in private groups and you can leverage social media to find those people.
• And BookThinkers, as a business, we’re getting better and better at that. We’ve only been in the space a couple years but we’re learning about these different tools and we’re learning how to navigate them more and more successfully every day.
• So, it’s been great for us. And unfortunately, with socials, they're always changing, just like I”m sure the publishing landscape for you and the authors. For us, things are changing all the time, so now Instagram Reels have come out of nowhere and TikTok came out of nowhere and it kind of flipped everything around.
• It’s been fun but it’s been good.

09:10 - Yeah it is a constantly evolving journey. You’re right, our authors are increasingly familiar with social media but they’re still often very skeptical. They’re concerned about a time commitment and they’re worried it’s sort of frivolous or it’s not going to convert. Could you possibly speak to the power of an engaged social community and what that could mean for their book launch?

• What’s nice about a social community is you get repetitive impressions.
• So if you can bring somebody into your community as an author, let’s say you write about personal finance so you create an Instagram page, for example, around personal finance tips. If somebody sees a piece of that content they come over to your page, your call to action is very clear, like “follow me and you’ll learn about personal finance” and they hit that follow button. You don’t have to sell them after one impression. Now they’re in your community and they’ll get a few pieces of content a week depending on how frequently you’re posting.
• Over time you’re building affinity, you’re building trust with that person. They’re engaging with content, you’re getting third party validation from other followers that are engaging with your content. Now that reader, when you jab jab jab with free value, and then you come with the right hook and say “Hey, I see that you’ve been following me for a bit, will you buy my book?” they're much more likely to say yes.
• And then the relationship doesn’t have to stop because unlike at a bookstore when they pick it up, they’re in your social community. It’s like they’re following an email newsletter or something like that.
• So they purchase the book and you can follow up with them a few months after that and ask, “Did you get anything out of the book?” And if they say yes, you can ask for an Amazon review or a Goodreads review. And little simple asks like that aren't a big deal when you’ve been consistently providing value for a longer period of time.
• And so that’s why I think every author should be on socials. And you can leverage the search mechanisms within each platform to find target readers by searching hashtags and things like that.
• So, I would encourage everybody to learn a little bit more about it and to get in front of their audience. For me, I was very skeptical at the beginning of BookThinkers. I didn’t have a personal Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook at the time but I got in there and started to learn and we did one hundred impressions a week for the first six months and then it was a couple hundred impressions a week and now it’s a couple hundred thousand.
• So, readers exist on the platform. It definitely does take a little bit of time to build that audience, but it’s so worth it.

12:01 - I’m glad you mentioned getting used to the ask. Even when I launched my own book, lots of people reached out to me thanking me for writing the book and I had to remind myself to respond and ask them to write a review. It wasn’t natural to receive praise and then put an ask on the end of it but you really have to get in that mindset.

• Yeah, I agree with you. The author has the best chance to sell to anybody, directly from the source. You need to be out there in your DMs, responding to comments, creating engagement, becoming friends with other authors in the community. If you’re not, there is an opportunity cost to it.
• There is a time commitment if you want to do it the right way. You can hire a virtual assistant or get somebody to help you out on your team if you have some infrastructure around your book.
• But there’s nothing that beats an author on an Instagram story reading a chapter from their book or a couple of pages and responding to questions. That trust is really important and nowadays with all the competition for your attention as a reader, you need sometimes ten or fifteen impressions before you make a purchase decision

13:40 - So for the folks that are new to this and taking your advice and want to try their hands at socials, how do they know they’re being effective in creating an engaged community?

• What’s nice about Instagram as my platform of choice, is I always tell authors, go follow dream accounts and go follow your competitors. So, follow people you aspire to be like. And also, follow other authors in your space that have recently released books.
• Look at what type of content is working and try to recreate that for yourself. And study everybody and just observe. You don’t have to start posting on day one. You can just observe and take notes on what you think is working.
• Once that’s done, you can start generating content for yourself. It is a little bit rocky up front. But you can’t get to your one 100th video without your first 99.
• It’ll be a little rough up front but you’ll start to understand and you’ll get feedback from the social platform itself on what’s working and what’s not.
• Instagram determines the value of a piece of content by micro testing. Let’s say you have a thousand followers, you post a piece of content, it’ll go out to maybe fifty of your followers and people that follow the hashtags you’ve used. And if it gets high engagement, Instagram will give it to more of your followers. But if people don't engage with it, then it’s not valuable to Instagram.
• Remember, Instagram is a business, they make money from selling advertising slots to other businesses but if it was all advertising on your newsfeed as a consumer, you would get off the platform. So, in order to keep you on the platform and observe as many ads as possible, they only want to share high quality content and they determine that quality based on if it gets engaged or not.
• So, one other piece of advice I have for authors when you first start putting your content out there. It’s not whether or not you like the content that matters, it’s whether or not Instagram likes the content, the followership you’ve developed. Do they engage with it in the first couple of hours after you post it or not? If they don’t, do less of that. If they do, do more of that.
• The last thing I’ll mention is consistency. Consistency matters a lot. The more impressions you have with someone the more likely they are to build trust with you, your brand, and your book. And they’re more likely to make that purchasing decision and move up your value ladder. So you want to get out there as much as you can.
• That can be a bit overwhelming if you’re trying to create content all the time. So sometimes you just want to document what you’re doing. Most of us don’t find ourselves interesting, but other people find you interesting. If you’re reading another book because you’re an author, and you love understanding what other books in your space are saying, share some of your bigger takeaways, tag those authors, maybe they’ll repost it and you’ll get a taste of their audience as well.

18:30 - Now in terms of working with people like you who we’d call book influencers. At what point would an author getting into the social media space consider doing that? And if they are at that point, what advice would you have for that person?

• I think every author is a good fit working with book influencers. Every book influencer has different offers on the table.
• As an example, BookThinkers will always do a free unboxing video now. So if you want to share your book and we think it could be useful for our audience, you just send us a copy of your book and every Monday and Wednesday on our Instagram stories we have thousands of people show up to see new books and you might sell a couple books that way.
• You don't always have to spend money. But then we do have different services that work all the way up to a couple thousand dollars.
• So, if you’re interested in working with a book influencer, survey as many as you can because there are a lot these days. There are certain accounts that are based in the US and they might charge a higher amount than one based in India.
• Are you looking for social exposure and new followers? Or are you looking to sell books? Who gives you the best chance of doing that? What types of content do these people produce? It’s very rare for a book influencer to produce video content for example. So if you're looking for a video review, there are less options than if you want someone to take an image and post it on their feed.
• So start to survey the book influencers, see what kinds of different packages they have, see what fits your budget, see the potential reach for each of those offers, see where their audience is from. That’s an important one as well because you want to be targeting specific people.
• In terms of timing, definitely post book launch or around your book launch I think is the best time. There’s a lot of excitement typically. You’ll have more energy to be posting frequently. And so those potential followers have a higher likelihood of following you.
• For those followers that do want to go out and buy your book immediately because it’s going to solve a problem for them, you want to make sure it’s available. Sometimes people come to us pre-book launch but we say it’s not a good fit yet.

20:58 - So what kind of interesting projects are you guys working on over at BookThinkers?

• We’ve got a lot of fun stuff going on. BookThinkers has a podcast where we interview world-class authors and we try to basically see who is their target reader and is the listener a good fit for their book. So we always have new episodes coming out. We have 4 or 5 new episodes coming out in the next few weeks, so definitely go and check those out.
• We’re working on different masterminds so if you’re interested in sitting in on some of the interviews we host with successful authors, entrepreneurs, or innovators just shoot us a DM and we can tell you a little bit more about the different masterminds that we have going on.
• And we are working on a mobile application, the same one that we started the business with, that will help readers retain and implement more information from the books they’re reading. That’s been a very long project. I’m not sure when we’ll be releasing that. But if you follow BookThinkers you’ll get updates on the different projects that we have going on.

22:00 - And if someone has been listening and thinks they might like to collaborate with you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

• You can shoot us a DM on Instagram with your email address and we can share the different author services that we have available. Or if you have a question on book recommendations or anything else like that we answer every single DM that we get. Sometimes it takes a day or two but we make sure that we respond to every single question.
• And then the other way is on our website Bookthinkers.com, there’s a contact form. There's also an author contact form in our Instagram link in bio. And you can fill out a little form about your book and we’ll get back to you with the prices.

22:45 - Great. You’ve been super helpful today. Any parting advice for our listeners?

• If you’re somebody who loves reading, if you’re an author that’s listening to this specifically, thank you. People that are reading and trying to implement what they’re learning and sharing what they’ve learned with other people are making the world a better place.
• There’s a lot of positivity in nonfiction or personal development books, which is my niche in the larger scheme of things, but thank you for writing your book. Thank you for trying to make a positive impact.
• And if you’re a reader listening to this, there’s a book out there that can solve almost any problem that you’re going through so make sure to take the time to pick the right book and implement everything that you learn.

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ABOUT NICK

Nick Hutchison is the Founder and CEO of BookThinkers, a company dedicated to empowering every reader to achieve more and live better. Check out their website here for more info: https://www.bookthinkers.com/.