Jeff Brown on Book Marketing: Leveraging Self-Published Books for Visibility, Credibility and Income
In this exclusive interview, I speak with Jeff Brown, a former military photographer turned photography business mentor and self-published author, to discuss his journey and insights into book marketing.
Jeff is the current President of The British Institute of Professional Photography and also works for The International School Photography Conference Team. He has delivered sell-out courses and workshops around the world, and now runs four successful photography companies and personally mentors photographers in over 20 countries worldwide.
In recent years, Jeff has self-published four books, including photography business-focused books and journals, as well as travel books. During our conversation, we chatted about how he has successfully blended his skills with self-publishing to advance his photography mentoring business.
Click this link or on the video preview below to listen to or watch my chat with Jeff about all-things books and book marketing. Alternatively, you can scroll down to read the full transcript.
Transition from military photographer to mentor to author
Jeff spent a decade running his own photography business before pivoting to mentoring. He tells me that he was drawn to the potential of using LinkedIn for business growth at a time when most photographers overlooked the platform.
Jeff realised many photographers could benefit from structured advice on utilising LinkedIn and decided to write a book about it, despite his struggles with dyslexia.
His determination led to the publication of his first self-published book, The Photographer’s Missing (Link)In, which became a cornerstone of his marketing strategy.
The power of self-publishing
Jeff asserts that writing a book not only imparts credibility but also opens doors to numerous opportunities. He admits that his initial book had imperfections, but emphasises the importance of creating and sharing valuable content, rather than striving for perfection, as a way to serve and support one’s community.
Thanks to his proactive approach, the creation of that first book brought about opportunities such as speaking events and podcast interviews that increased his exposure to international audiences, as well as revenue through mentoring services and consultancy.
Building a brand through books
Jeff’s approach to writing involves clear structuring and starting with appealing titles filled with relevant keywords. This method ensures visibility on platforms like Amazon.
During our conversation, he shared his strategy of outlining chapters to produce solution-based books, his system for making writing manageable, and the tools he uses throughout the book-writing process.
Beyond photography books: Passion projects
Jeff has recently expanded his writing to include travel books, utilising his skills as a photographer and his passion for exploration and travel, often on his beloved motorbike.
His recent project, Northumberland 250, showcases his commitment to not only capturing beautiful images but also telling engaging stories about his home county in the North East of England.
Book marketing advice for aspiring authors
For those photographers hesitant but interested in writing and leveraging the power of books as a marketing tool, Jeff advises starting small and focusing on topics that align with their expertise or passions.
He also suggests using interviews and shared experiences as ways to enrich content without relying solely on one’s writing ability.
Is there a photography book in you?
His story illustrates the power of self-publishing in building authority and opening new avenues for professional growth. His experiences are certainly inspiring!
If you’re a photographer looking to expand your brand or just someone with a story to tell, Jeff’s insights reveal that there is indeed a book in everyone, waiting to be written. I hope you find our conversation inspiring.
Watch the interview and subscribe for more
Catch the interview with Jeff Brown here on my YouTube channel or click on the video below. (If you enjoy it, please like, comment and subscribe while you’re there). Alternatively, you can read the transcript below if you’d prefer.
Whether you’re a photographer looking to stand out or thinking about writing your own book, this episode is packed with practical tips and inspiration. Big thanks to Jeff, and enjoy the episode!
Zoe
LINKS & FURTHER INFORMATION
Discover Jeff’s books on Amazon
Video Transcript
Zoe Hiljemark: I’m delighted to welcome Jeff Brown today. We are going to be talking about book marketing. Jeff is a former military photographer, but he’s now a photography business mentor helping thousands of photographers with their photography businesses and helping them with their marketing.
So what Jeff has very cleverly done is he’s become a self-published author, and it’s this that I really wanna dig into in today’s interview to find out how he’s been using that in his marketing strategy and how that’s benefited his business. So welcome, Jeff.
Jeff Brown: Thank you. Thanks for having us on board.
Zoe: Delighted to have you, Jeff. I mean, you are literally the photographer’s mentor – people in the photography business know of you, and, of course, you’ve got some fantastic exposure through your books, but also through your mentoring on YouTube, podcasts, et cetera. So in the industry, you are very well regarded and it’s an honour to have you.
I’d really like to dig into that expertise today, and find out about your book marketing journey and how it was that you went from military photographer to the photography mentoring that you do, and now obviously to the authorship genre as well. So, do tell us how you got started with your first book.
Jeff Brown: So obviously I was a photographer. I had my own photography business for 10 years. Then I got into the mentoring side of things after a change of direction, and I moved away to Northumberland to a remote rural part of England. And I looked at a different way of publicising my mentoring ’cause I noticed there were loads of mentors on the likes of Facebook and stuff like that.
And I thought, no, I’m gonna go down the LinkedIn route. So I got really into LinkedIn, started seeing some amazing successes on LinkedIn. I thought, you know, loads of photographers don’t know about LinkedIn. This would’ve probably been about seven or eight years ago.
I mean, it’s the best social media platform for photographers without a doubt. If you’re wanting to get some return from the time that you put into it, but nobody was shouting about it. And I thought, well, one of the best ways to do it would maybe to write a book.
And I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I’m dyslexic. But I had the ideas in my head. The problem was just getting it out there. So I actually sat down and I wrote the first book. I structured it out. Now one of my things is I’m quite OCD, so everything has to follow a pathway and that’s the way I’ve written all my books since then.
I start with the title. So what the title is, and that’s got keywords in then a subheading, which is the solution that tells people what the book does, get a cover design, and then I’ll just start writing it out in a logical format. So that’s my current LinkedIn book, which is my fourth edition. So it’s quite a chunky one. This has gone to international bestsellers numerous times. Number one bestseller in America.
Zoe: Wow! Congrats! Fantastic!
Jeff Brown: But this was the first one. Right, which I then looked through again. So it’s only 49 pages. It’s more like a pamphlet.
Zoe: You can see it’s a lot thinner. Yeah.
Jeff Brown: Yeah, yeah. So if you’ve got the two, right? So this is the fourth edition. So this went through, that was the first, and then, and then they jumped up to this one, which was the second, which had about another 30 pages. Then the third edition was a lot bigger. Now the reason I’m showing you them is just even with that first edition, which had spelling mistakes because I didn’t get into having a copywriter at the time. I just got my mom to check it.
Zoe: You did it all yourself…
Jeff Brown: I did it all myself, got my mom to check it, got a friend to check it who’s an avid reader, and then put it out there. And even with just that first book, I got onto a couple of podcasts and that first book I got onto the Photo Biz X podcast, and I got about 15 clients signed.
Zoe: Oh, that’s a huge podcast in the industry, isn’t it? Yeah.
Jeff Brown: And that started to get me out there internationally and get me seen in America and Australia. So one of the things I teach now to my clients and I mentor with is to get a book out there. We’ve all got a book on us in some way.
It could be our expertise, it could be our passion, and it’s about not thinking, oh, I’d love to do it, just actually do it right? Because my first one was crap, you know, from a literary perspective, but the content was valuable. So even though there were spelling mistakes and stuff, people were like…Yeah, they pointed out the spell of mistakes, but said “Jeff, we found it useful. It’s made us look at LinkedIn differently”. So it’s not a story, it’s not trying to grab people into a story. It’s trying to serve a purpose and help people, you know.
Zoe: I think you’re so right and if we wait for everything to be perfect, we’ll never move forward with anything. And I think that can actually hold photographers back when it comes to marketing content just for their blog, their website, et cetera. You know, people saying, “oh, I’m embarrassed to share my website link ’cause it’s not perfect”. And you’ve just gotta put it out there, actually, haven’t you?
Yeah. And in your case you had so much expertise around that and lots of photographers needed to tap into that network, and you obviously presented that information in a way, like you say, spelling mistakes and all, but who cares? Yeah. Because the information was there. And were you affiliated with LinkedIn at all in regards to the book, or was it more just purely from experience of using the platform?
Jeff Brown: I’m still not affiliated. I’ve got like over 60 odd thousand, 65,000 followers on LinkedIn now, you know? Right. Probably one of the biggest in the industry on the platform, but I’m not affiliated with LinkedIn. But no, I’m passionate about it because I can see how it changes photographers’ businesses, and they don’t have to spend money on ads. It’s not like plowing loads and money at Google AdWords and stuff like that.
Zoe: Yeah. I think you and I are of the same ilk in that sense. We are passionate about supporting photographers doing organic marketing and supporting them to not throw away their money on ads. I often say, you know, don’t waste your time sitting there waiting for the phone to ring.
Yeah, you’ve got to be proactive, as you’ve said there, make things happen, but, oh, that’s fascinating. So you literally had the idea, I mean, how long from the idea of doing the book to getting it out there, what was your process for that first one?
Jeff Brown: I always come up with a title. The title’s gotta have keywords because they always say, don’t judge a book by its cover. But on Amazon, you know, on the online world, the cover is the most important bit and, and my first cover was crap. My second cover wasn’t much better. They get in better. I’m learning
Zoe: You’ve evolved. Yeah.
Jeff Brown: Yeah. Because you gotta look at the competition and think, oh, what colors could I use? What words can I use to stand out, really pop? And if it’s a solution based, you know, so you’re solving somebody’s problem, then you’ve gotta have keywords in there. But also use the subhead to say. What that book actually does for them, you know, so you read the headline mine’s called the Photographer’s Missing Link, which is the LinkedIn book, and then build a premium brand and grow your following on LinkedIn.
So it tells you what, what it actually does. So the first thing is to get your book name, then get the subhead in and then say, right, what does this book involve? And I’m gonna write down the chapters. Normally, I have about in all of my books, and I’ve got four in total. I’ve got two journals, one on mindset in mindset and the other on goal setting.
And then I’ve got the two sort of businessy ones. One on website, and one on LinkedIn. They all have the same structure, so it’s about 10 to 14 chapters. Each chapter has about 15 hundred to two and a half thousand words with a solution-based chapter. It’s a solution-based book, people aren’t buying it to to get involved in a story. It’s not like Lord of the Rings. They don’t want like a thousand page counts. You know, what they wanna do is get to the end of the problem quite quickly, yeah.
So if you can produce a book that solves a problem or educate somebody in 20,000 words, great. And people will pay more for a solution book, whether pay 10 quid for a a story book, they’ll pay 20 quid for a solution book.
Zoe: Interesting.
Jeff Brown: You know, so I always say, get the title, right? The subtitles should tell people what they will achieve at the end, and then start laying the chapters out and then just start thinking about writing. A chapter every couple of weeks. So what I do is I set myself a very low, achievable target of writing 250 words a day. If I set myself a target of writing a thousand words a day, I would demoralize myself because…
Zoe: I get that could feel overwhelming. Yeah. Yeah, I get that.
Jeff Brown: But 250, some days I do. 250 other days, I’ll sit down to write 250 and I’ll do 2000. I just fly through it.
Zoe: …if you’re in the flow. Yeah.
Jeff Brown: Yeah, yeah. And I don’t keep going back over what I’ve done. My idea is I get to the end of that chapter, then I’ll listen to that chapter back on Word read aloud. And because I’m dyslexic, when I play it back through word read aloud, I can hear my mistakes. I won’t see them when I read them ’cause I’m dyslexic. But when I listen to it, I’ll hear it. It’ll also help me with my grammar and my punctuation because I’ll see when a sentence is too long because Word read loud doesn’t pause, so it just reads it as it is, right? Yeah. That’s far too long…and I break it down.
Zoe: And, I think actually as we speak, we naturally kind of end up blurring sentences into another, don’t we? Yeah. Because when we’re having a conversation with someone like you and I…, I always find that when I edit these videos, actually, I find that we’ve often speak in long, drawn out sentences and we knew what each other saying, but actually you do need to refine for a book in this instance, but a blog or whatever the use case is.
Jeff Brown: And I think the other thing as well that scares people about writing a book, and especially, well, like when I was at school, I was kicked outta school, I was expelled from school when I was 16 years old. I was a kid. I didn’t get any qualifications, and it was because I hated school and my dyslexia was a problem, but I couldn’t conform to the rigid sort of grammar and the way school…you know.
Now, you can write anyway you want. Now it’s all about the quality of the content and if people enjoy it, you know, so you don’t have to follow the structures….You can’t start a sentence with, because, or, you know, stuff like that. Yeah. That’s all in the window, you know, and it’s about educating people and giving people value.
And when you write from that and you put some of your personality in, so somebody feels like they’re sitting down with you in a pub and you are telling them how to do something, then that’s when the magic starts to happen, because that’s when. I’ve seen with my books, people message me and send us a photograph, or I’m just in a bar with Jeff, or “I’m on the beach with Jeff”. I’ve had people send pictures of themselves on the Sun Lounger and then people connecting with me on social media. I’ve just been away for three weeks in South Africa and Canada and speaking events and people are messaging me to meet up with me because they’ve read the book.
Zoe: And did you do that? Did you have like a bit of a book tour?
Jeff Brown: Yeah, I had one. I had one. One guy came and picked me up in Canada and took me to Niagara Falls for the day, and took me out for food and stuff. Another guy came to Johannesburg from Northern Congo because he knew I was speaking at this particular event in Johannesburg.
And it, it just, yeah, just shows you the, the power of, you know, you putting something out there and Yeah. And people enjoying it. It’s, for me, writing a book has opened more opportunities and doors for me than anything else. You know I’m an ambassador of different photography companies. I’m president of the British Institute of Professional Photography, and a lot of that has come through…I’m Ambassador for O Systems, Olympus Cameras – and that has come through because I started writing books.
I became an author. But when you become an author. You move from just being an average sort of person to maybe more of an an an expert. Yeah. Or somebody with an opinion that is taken more seriously. And that opened doors to podcasts magazine, magazine articles, ambassadorships, paid speaking events.
Zoe: Amazing. Yeah, there’s something about that credibility piece, isn’t it, around having a physical book, you know? Yeah. Because I think even though self-publishing has opened the doors and means that anybody could arguably become an author as long as you’ve got a great idea and the ambition and the will to actually create the thing.
Yeah, yeah. It’s still very much a highly coveted thing, you know, to actually have a book and it’s that instant prestige from being able to say you are an author and you’ve got a book and so it’s obviously an opportunity for other people to really jump on because you did and look, look where it’s taken you, as you say. Yeah. Podcast interviews, media features. Yeah, global connections.
Jeff Brown: Yeah.
Zoe: …Community, work presumably…for your mentoring as well.
Jeff Brown: Yeah. And, on top of that, the books actually do make you money. I mean, I, you know, I’m never gonna be like you know, the next Harry Potter. You know, I’m not gonna,
Zoe: I was gonna say J K Rowley style….Yeah, billionaire!
Jeff Brown: You know, my books don’t make me hundreds of thousands. They make me tens of thousands, you know, in sales, but they actually bring me hundreds of thousands in opportunities. So the opportunity I get because of the book that comes through is worth a lot more than the actual book sales itself.
And that leads to working with clients, speaking events, paid speaking events, sponsorships, you know, so that far outweighs the physical money that I get from the big sales. However, you know, I, redid my will last year and I put in my Amazon login details because, if I died suddenly or something like that, there’s still money through selling my books and that would go to my daughter. Yeah.
It’s what you class as a passive income stream and also with Amazon is, the way the Amazon algorithm works is Amazon wants to sell as many of your books as possible. So they say the best way to make more money on Amazon is to write more books. So my initial idea was to write a book on how to create a successful photography business. And then I suddenly realised, no, I don’t wanna do that because I’d have nothing else to write.
Zoe: Yeah, that’s almost everything covered.
Jeff Brown: So Amazon will say… And plus people want shorter bite-sized stuff. So if you have an idea for your book as a photographer, think, how can I write that in three or four books, because Amazon will say, “buy this book” and it’ll say, “also buy Jeff Brown, this one, or buy all three” for this price.
Yes, because Amazon wants to sell more of your books, because Amazon will ultimately make more profit by selling more of your books. And the way the algorithm works without Amazon is that it will give you 60% of the profit and it will take 40% of the profit. So there’s no upfront cost. It’s so easy.
You can be a published author now and get your book out there with other than your design fee for getting your cover done. And you know, I would recommend getting a proofreader, which I have now. It’s not gonna cost you a lot of money. You don’t have to order 10,000 copies of your books for an exorbitant price and store them in your garage and then start shipping them out. Yeah. It’s all done by Amazon.
Zoe: Yeah, it’s brilliant. And that’s the KDP publishing platform, isn’t it?
Jeff Brown: Yeah. Yeah. So, so with KDP, the other thing is you can also buy copies of your book at cost price. So Amazon will allow you to order up to a thousand copies of your book at a time at trade price. So they will then ship them to you, to your home and you can take them along to speaking events or…
Zoe: Yeah, events, giveaways …
Jeff Brown: …and sign them and hand them out and sell them. And what happens is when you upload your book to the KDP platform, it will tell you how much that book will cost to print and ship. So it’ll say, right, this book will cost, depending on whether it’s colour or black and white, how many pages you’ve got in, whether you want hardback or paperback or both.
This book will cost you two 50 to print ship. How much do you wanna sell it for? So if you say, right, I wanna sell it for 1250, Amazon gives you six quid. They take four quid. And two, then the two 50 is the printing and shipping costs. So that’s simple. That’s how it works, you know, and then it’s a case of getting it out there, pushing it, put the easy bit is writing it. The next bit is…
Zoe: I was gonna say, there’s so much in here I want to ask you about, because we’ve talked about the ideation part of it, and then you just created it. Did we talk about the timeline? How long did that take you to go from that point? I also wanna talk about pricing as well in a minute, and how you decided on the pricing side of things.
Jeff Brown: My books take about three to six months to write. I’ve just written my first travel book, which took a year. And a lot of that was a lot of research. But this book’s a bit of a monster. It’s like it’s 377 pages.
Zoe: That’s a different book, though, isn’t it? ’cause you’re going on location to different places and writing about those. I guess with the first book, anyway, the LinkedIn one, you are kind of just putting all of your knowledge about the platform and how to use it down.
So in theory that would be easier and quicker to create. Yeah.
Jeff Brown: And then with regards to pricing. Well, what I do is the, you’ve gotta remember that Amazon itself is a search engine. So what you gotta do is you type in the subject and it will start to say it will, you know, if you put LinkedIn or LinkedIn, it will give various things that people have been searching for based on those couple of words.
Zoe: Much like how Google works…
Jeff Brown: exactly like how Google Works and then you can think, oh, hang on, that might be good for title or need those keywords in. Then, one of the best ways to do it is to start looking at other authors and authors with the most reviews. More five-star reviews or, because if you see a book with 2005 five-star reviews, you know that that author is probably sold somewhere in the region of 22 hundred thousand of those books just to get 2000 reviews.
Yeah. Quite know how hard it is to get a hundred reviews and you just constantly, and people just don’t do it. You know, the, the, with all the will in the world. Oh, Jeff, I’ll leave you a review. Great. But whether they do it.
Zoe: You know, it’s the same with business reviews, isn’t it? On Google, my business type listings as well. It’s painful to actually get them, if you really don’t make it a focus of your workflow actually, yeah. And photographers do struggle with that. I know. So it must be the same with books.
Jeff Brown: One of the best things to do is look at your competitors, look at their book descriptions and actually physically buy the book and then get it and read it and think, what could I give? What’s missing from here? How could I improve this?
And that’s what I do with all the books that I write. And then also add that bit of personality into it. I don’t want it to sound like a robot. That’s why I don’t use chat. GPTI don’t use a ghost writer. Everything is written by me and then my proofread, my copywriter.
She’ll just go through it and make a few grammatical changes and suggestions to change a few words but not change the tone of voice. It’s gotta be in speak, you know.
Zoe: Yeah, absolutely. And I think because you’re so well known in the industry, and people who have seen you on video, they know how you talk. So I think it would be strange then to obviously have that different tone of voice in your book.
So I can see that’s really important to you. Yeah. I mean, what’s your take on that actually, with regards to now chat, GPT and authors like churning out books that they haven’t even authored essentially what’s your take on that?
Jeff Brown: I’ve had my experience with quite a few ’cause I love to travel, so that’s one of my big passions. And every time I go to a country, I’ll buy two or three books on that particular country before I’ll go and start reading up on it. So recently I’ve been to a few sort of like more obscure countries, like Mold, Dova and Transista. Got a few books on, on Mul model and Trans Street, and I ended up sending them all back to Amazon.
And Amazon actually just, well, I went to send them back, and Amazon said. They must have had previous complaints before and say, just chuck the books in the bin and we’ll refund your credit your account. Yeah. Because there’s so many people just churning out AI created books that have no personality.
It’s just been read like a robot and it’s just lists and lists of stuff and they’ve probably never even been proofread and just printed and put out there. And I think if you wanna build your personal brand. Which is what we want to do as photographers, then it’s gotta be you. It’s gotta be your personality.
Be unique, be yourself. You know, nothing worse than somebody from England writing a book in an American style voice using chat. GPT. Yeah. I don’t think if I, if I’d automated everything and done it like that, I wouldn’t get people messaging me on LinkedIn going, oh, do you want to come out for a meal? And stuff like that, you know?
Zoe: Yeah. You don’t think it would’ve had the impact? Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I mean, absolutely. I completely agree with you.
Jeff Brown: The other thing for me, I actually, even though I’m dyslexic, I enjoy it. I really do enjoy writing, and I’ve gotta work around and know where I make mistakes, and I know with Word read aloud and Grammarly and Hemingway app and stuff like that, I can spot them. Anyway, even if I don’t go the copyrighter will.
Zoe: You’ve got the support in place anyway. Yeah, and I think that’s really interesting that you’ve obviously done your first book without that support. And then you’ve obviously learned how to improve it and, presumably, then that’s your template now for rolling out future books because you’ve got those systems and processes in place. And it’s really interesting to hear how you structure your books and how you work diligently and have a time of a set amount of words that you wanna create each day, week, whatever.
That’s really interesting as well, in terms of that momentum and consistency for working on the book ’cause it is easy to start a project, isn’t it? And then lose the will.
Jeff Brown: One thing I do as well is I set myself a rough completion date at the very beginning. And then as soon as I’ve got that title and the subtitle right and the book laid out. Then the next thing I do is I actually get my designer to design the book cover and do what’s called 3D mockups, where you see like the finished 3D mock. Yeah. So you can start putting it out on social media and say, coming soon. You’ve made a commitment, but you’ve also brought the book to life, so you think, oh my God, I need to get this out.
Plus I put on social media, it’s coming out at the end of the summer. I’ve gotta, you know, I’ll be quite loose coming out at the end of the summer, so that gives me like a two or three month leeway, but. Yeah.
Zoe: Yeah. Deadlines really help and any more granular way that maybe photographers can relate to ’cause they, if they’re not publishing a book, is more just your content plan for your social media or your blog schedule. And I always tell clients to have that end point, that publish date, in mind. Yeah. And then work backwards from it. So if you’re planning to produce a blog every second Thursday, then obviously you’ve gotta make sure you’ve done the work before that Thursday.
And it’s, it’s the same by the sounds of it, with this. And I think that’s a really good idea to have that deadline in place for sure. So in terms of pricing, we touched on that, but do you get any guidance from Amazon or the industry on pricing?
Jeff Brown: No, it’s, it’s basically just looking at what the competition is and what the best selling books within that genre.
I’ve got a piece of software that actually tracks other books within my competitor’s genre for, for different and gives me a rough price. But if you, if you think, well, hang on, I think my book’s got more value in this. It’s got more pages in. It’s a deep dive. It’s offering more than, you know, put that extra five pound on it, you know?
Yeah. It’s, I’ve never had people come back to me and say, your books are too expensive. I’ve had people come back and say, they’ve been invaluable in helping me in my business.
Zoe: Well, quite, I mean, let’s be real. You are imparting your expertise, knowledge, all your advice for what? 20 quid or less, you know? And I think in reality, if anyone had a consultation with you or joined your mentoring program. Yeah. That, it would be hundreds, you know, possibly thousands. And so, of course, this is incredible value, isn’t it, for every single reader who’s purchasing that book at such a low cost. So, I mean, buying a book for 20 quid is a no brainer, surely, to get all your advice.
Jeff Brown: And, and for the latest book that I’ve done, which is slightly different, which is my first travel book. I’ve gone in a different direction as I haven’t published this on Amazon.
Zoe: Yeah. Tell us about that. ’cause I’m interested in hearing about… You’ve obviously done, like you said, journals where I’m presuming people can literally copy from templates in there, or write in the book physically themselves, as well as the more educational imparting expertise type of book.
Jeff Brown: Yeah.
Zoe : And now you’re doing something different again…
Jeff Brown: So I’ve always had an idea to do a travel book. I’d love to do a travel book and two or three years ago, Northumberland create what’s called the Northumberland two 50. So it’s a bit like the North Coast, 500 in Scotland. It’s a road trip around Northumberland, covering all the key parts. Now, Northumberland, I’ve only lived here 10 years, but I feel like I’m more aligned to it than my birth place of Sunderland ’cause I’m a country person. I love the out great outdoors and it has so much to celebrate. 60 Miles of beautiful coastline. There’s more castles here than any other county. There’s like 70 odd castles, loads of history, and beautiful places to eat.
And I thought surely somebody should write a book about it. And it also worked well with like every weekend I made that out on the motorbike. I’m out hiking, going different places and I looked through all my photographs and I thought. I’ve actually got probably about three quarters of the Northumberland 250 already just on Google storage from pictures I’ve taken. Right.
I mapped it all out and along with another author, Debbie, who’s from Northumberland, who’s really into our outdoorsy stuff. We started putting together the framework for the book. And then it started to run. I thought, well, we’ll do like the recommended sites to see, best hikes for each one of the areas will make it very, very photo heavy. So there’s lots of pictures in there, but, and we’ll also do the best recommended places to eat, but no chains.
They’ve gotta be bespoke, like the artisan bakers the mini gin distilleries. The good food pub places, the posh food trucks, all of that sort of stuff. So I ended up reviewing over 100 restaurants, like personally. My girlfriend was like, I love this project ’cause every weekend she was coming up, I’ve gotta go out and, you know, it’s a business expense, you know, so it goes through the business expense. So the end result is this, this book, which is a bit of a monster. This is the hardback version. And it’s full colour. And the quality, the 150 gram pages, the quality looks amazing. The pictures are fantastic. And a lot of these pictures have just been taken on a mobile phone. Nothing, no matter with that, you know?
Zoe: And they’re all your photos and your words?
Jeff Brown: They all, yeah. We’ve done the research into the history. So the actual journey of writing the book has been fascinating. I’ve learned…. So even though I’ve only lived here 10 years, I probably know more about the county than people.
Zoe: You’re like a local expert!
Jeff Brown: Because I’ve talked to people in the bar and said, oh, do you know this? Oh, I didn’t know that. You know, and so the whole journey’s been exciting. So what I did with this one is because I wanted it to be a really visual, stunning book with beautiful pictures in Amazon print quality isn’t that amazing for photo-heavy books.
Zoe: Yeah.
Jeff Brown: It’s okay, but not fantastic. So I thought, you know, I’m going to create my own website and we’re gonna do our own self-promotion and I’m doing our own self-promotion through building up a Facebook group. The strategy around this is we’ve got a website if you want to check it out. The website is Northumberland 250 adventures.co uk. So I built the website and I’ve installed an app called Book Vault. So Book Vault is available in the UK, the US, Australia and Canada, and Book Vault used to be a printer for publishers. And then in 2020, the change direction started printing for the solo author as well, but at High Street Quality Printing with runs of just one book.
Okay. This fantastic hard back book with a little ribbon in and I can buy just one of those. I’ve also got the paperback version of that as well. What we’ve done is what we’ve ordered, some hard back limited ones, which we sign in. We send into people who are. Many celebrities within Northumberland, well, we sent one to Robson Green. We’re gonna take one toCy King. The, you know, the hairy biker. Yes. If you talk about motorbikes and stuff like that. And there we wanna get ’em into hands of people who will appreciate it, who have an affiliation to the northeast.
But yes, so with these books you can put the app into your website where somebody goes and purchases the book, the order goes to book vault, your card gets debited for the cost of the book, and then you get the sales fee. So say for instance, the book sells for 25 quid and it across eight pound to print and ship, then. Of a sudden you’ll see 25 qui go into your account. Eight come out and go straight to soon as that money comes out, initiate the printing process and it takes them five to seven days to print and ship. Everything’s just dealt with. That’s it.
You don’t get involved in anything and then people start posting the Facebook group, oh, I’ve got my copy today. You know?
Zoe: Nice. So I think the point is it is superior print quality actually to Amazon. But for the other books you are using Amazon, KDP in your presumably planning to stick with that format for non-photography based books. Yeah. But that sounds like a great alternative because I think obviously photographers, if they were producing a book, they would be very, very precious about obviously the print quality as you are clearly with this one and rightly so. You want it to look amazing, don’t you?
Jeff Brown: Well, so we’re still selling it on Kindle, but with Amazon, you can’t put it on as a print book and then sell it on your own website as well. So you have to do it through Amazon. So we will only be doing the print version ourselves and then selling the Kindle version. But I have plans for other photography business books, which will still continue to be through Amazon.
Zoe: Well that was gonna be one of my questions, Jeff. Like you must have loads of other ideas and I’d be very interested to hear what you’re planning.
Jeff Brown: One of the things I wanna write about it, because it’s a lot of photography, you will come, come on board my program, we’ll say, you know, we get talking about passive income. ’cause I say, you know, you have all your eggs in one basket. You’re an event photographer, you are a landscape photographer, you know, an architectural photographer, surely there’s something you can write about or think about passive income, and then once we start diving into it, so I’ll give you a few examples.
I’ve got a boudoir photographer, Sam Davies, who last year published two books. On body confidence, which works perfectly with pina boudoir photographer and talks about her one party confidence journey. Then she did another one, body Confidence for teenagers.
Steve Campbell, who’s a landscape photographer, he’s written a travel photography journal for adults, a travel photography journal for kids, and he has written a North Coast 500 Travel book because he actually lives on the North Coast 500 route. Yeah. So he’s gone out and photographed it and that’s getting himself out there. That’s helping with his authority.
And then another photographer who I’m working with at the moment, Susan Allen, she’s an architectural photographer in Scotland and she’s writing a book, which she’s absolutely loving Once we’ve got the idea together, and it’s like mysterious and hidden Edinburgh in Scotland. So all these architectural buildings, castle graveyards, alleyways. So that again, fits in nicely with the niche that she’s. Yeah…
Zoe: …they’re not doing something completely random, but, albeit, you know, with your motorcycling and everything else, you could, you’ve proved the point that you can actually diversify from your perhaps core business or focus on in the working world. But like you say, they’re sticking with their niche and they’ve thought, what, can I create a book around under your mentorship, obviously. That’s really clever!
Jeff Brown: And, and I mean another one of my clients who’s also a photography mentor herself is Emma Dunham, who does food photography mentoring. And she’s written a book, the Food Photographers Journal, and it’s basically all the food photography dates, you know, like National Cake Week, national Fish and Chip Stadium. Oh yeah.
Zoe: I know all of those very well. As a PR person, I’ve been using those for donkeys years…
Jeff Brown: So that ties in great with her brand. Yeah. Well, you know, so once you do a book, then you can start thinking, oh, I could do a course on this. I could do workshops both in person and as an online version. So, that is one of my next projects is to get photographers to start thinking outside the box and think about passive income projects, and also writing as well, because writing increases your authority and when you have more authority, opportunities come your way, you know, amazing opportunities.
You know, it’s about pushing yourself and getting it. And if I can do it, somebody who’s dyslexic and was kicked outta school and hated the idea of writing, but always secretly wanted to write and, and I’ve always loved reading books. Then if I can do it, anybody can do it.
Zoe: Oh, I think it’s fantastic. And all those examples you’ve shared have been really useful, I imagine, for getting people listening and watching this, getting the cogs turning in their brain, ’cause like you say, there’s probably a book in everyone, at least one as well. Yeah. Yeah. And I loved what you said earlier about almost approaching it, you know, very niched subjects.
Because actually that reminded me again of blogging if you blog on your website. I approach content from like a content series perspective, very much in a similar way to what you said there about the book. You know, take an idea and then how can you extend that idea or talk about it in more depth or talk about another aspect of that.
And that becomes then a series of articles on your blog.
And I’m imagining that’s very much the same as what you’re saying here with your books. If you’ve got. One idea. There’s so many infinite ways that you can extend on it, expand, et cetera. Yeah. And yeah, it’s very exciting when you say it like that. You make it sound like there, there’s really lots of opportunities for everybody.
Jeff Brown: When you think about your life we all have experienced things in our life that other people want to learn from. Understand, I didn’t realize till, you know, talking about school and being kicked outta school and suffering from dyslexia, people coming up and Oh yeah, I had that similar problem and, those constraints of being bullied when I was younger and stuff like that, it’s affected my mindset.
That’s one of the reasons I wrote that mindset book. You know, I’ve seen people who’ve written books about, you know, giving up alcohol, women who’ve written books about how to cope with a stressful divorce. You know, we all have. Been through something that other people maybe at the moment in time want to learn from. And we’ve got that knowledge and it’s a great way to connect, you know?
Zoe: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’m an avid reader of books and yeah, I go down the library every Wednesday with my kids and try to get them into it, and they’re hugely into book reading as well, and there’s always something new to find. That’s what’s so exciting about books and always something new to learn. So if you’re in that kind of mindset of, yeah, trying to expand your personal brand as a photographer. I think absolutely. As we’ve documented in this conversation, like this is a huge opportunity!
Jeff Brown: That that travel book, you know, we’ve already identified… We’re onto our second one. We’ve got the third one, which we’re gonna be starting too. So we’ve identified five titles for the Travel Northumberland Book series. One is gonna be quite exciting, which is gonna be haunted in mysterious Northumberland. But what we’re gonna do is not just tell the stories, go and photograph it in black and white.
Zoe : Well, this is so cool for you because it means that you can utilize your expertise as a photographer as well, isn’t it? And get your workout there, try new things. I mean, that’s ultimately what’s so exciting. And I think for photographers, some people would probably say, oh, well I’m not a writer. So yeah, they wanna share their photography, but not necessarily do the writing part.
I mean, what would you say to people who have maybe that hesitation, but maybe that secret desire to create a book?
Jeff Brown: You know what? And we’re probably incorporating this a little bit in the haunted and mysterious Northumberland is we’ve identified 12 places that have a lot of history. Some of them have really bloody and turbulent past because Northumberland was at war. You know, England and Scotland were at war for 300 years and Northumberland separate and border between them. So there’s a lot of treacherous, horrible stuff went on there. But we thought, well, not just tell the stories and do the photographs.
What about if we go to all these places what about interviewing the people? So the Barron owns the most haunted castle in Britain. Oh, wow. Would he be prepared to tell us his story of living in this castle? The guy who owns one of Ann’s most haunted pubs, which is cursed, would he be prepared to tell us his story and then say, what’s your experience living here and what sightings have you had?
So go along, do it as a little interview, get that transcribed, and then that goes in. So maybe 50% of the content isn’t in our words, it is in somebody else’s words. So maybe that could be
Zoe: Nice.
Jeff Brown: Anything. And, I’m just speaking to a guy who, from Canada and he wants to do a project on the heroes of his local area. And obviously, he will do like a headshot for them and he will do an environmental portrait, but then also find out a bit of their backstory, what makes them who they are. So he is gonna put together a book, and then the money from that book will go to a local charity as well.
You know, so the heroes, the people who within the community go that little bit, you know, go that extra mile who give back a lot purely just because they’re amazing people. Yeah. Yeah.
Zoe: And like you said, that then puts the spotlight less on him as the photographer, but still creating opportunity to showcase his work and build that authority as the author of the book.
Jeff Brown: I mean, his book is really gonna just come together by asking a series of questions, maybe about six area questions, and then they will answer, and then that will become the. The content for the book. Yeah. Which is the easier way to start.
Zoe: So it needn’t stop you then if you don’t consider yourself a writer as such. There are ways around it and again, bringing it back to the blogging side, thinking more about that. It’s the same for your blog. If you’re really stuck for writing, you could absolutely…you know, interview experts. I mean, as I’m doing, you know, interviewing you, this is gonna become a piece of content on my blog and it’s just a conversation and it’s easy to create in a way.
Yeah. And it’s interesting stuff that people wanna hear, so Yeah. Fantastic way to kind of get involved in it, even if you have that hesitation about not being great with words. I mean, you, you’ve obviously your own story and your own success with this is absolutely proved that this is possible. And yeah, thrilled to hear about all your different books and things in the pipeline.
Jeff, it all sounds amazing. Thank you so much for chatting to me and sharing all this insight into this book marketing that it’s really, really interesting and I’m hoping that everybody who’s listening have got a lot from this and maybe go away and feel like, yeah, I could do it. Why not? Yeah.
Jeff Brown: And feel free to reach out, you know, if you have an idea, feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to drop your little voice message back and, and give you some guidance, you know? Yeah. You’re the guy to come to.
Zoe: Sure. Well, best of luck with your latest book. Is it just out recently, Jeff, or is it out soon?
Jeff Brown: So, so the big Northumberland one that’s out now. Yeah, that’s been out about a month now. And the next one, which is all gonna be about Holy Island Island off Northumberland we are hoping to have that out in about two months.
Zoe: Wow. Well, amongst all your travelling and your book creating and your mentoring, you’re a very busy man by the sounds of it. So I appreciate the time you’ve spent with me today talking about all of this. Truly fascinating, Jeff. It was really nice to speak to you again.
Jeff Brown: You as well. Thanks again. Take care.
