All right. So curious. I've already talked to some of you, so I know some of you have multiple books. How many do have a book already? Oh, not almost 100% almost. Well, we'll fix that, right? Yeah. You've been threatening. Okay. Okay.

So who has multiple books? Okay, cool. And books in progress right now? Progress. There we go. I am. I will say process. I will say progress. I'll say car. Okay, so what.

We'll make sure that we cover everything to help you that have a book as far as understanding how to position it, how you might be able to get more from it, as well as we will talk about, you know, the books that are in progress and also the books that you are thinking about writing, how to set them up for better success. We'll also talk about marketing strategies. So we'll go through some ideas about how to use your book as a speaker, how to just expand your reach so you can have more impact and income. And then we're also going to talk about leveraging this into an empire. And I chose that word empire very purposefully because I do believe that a book is the foundation for building what can be an empire. And we'll talk about some ideas for that, too. Now, my passion comes from the fact that books change lives. And that started with a book that changed my life.

And at the time, I was working at Kimberly Clark Canada, so you guys already caught the accent. I live in Las Vegas now, but I am still Canadian. And I was working at Kimberly Clark Canada, and one of my co workers said, you have to read this book. This book's amazing. And so this was 2001. So I did what you do in 2001. I wrote down the name of the book and. And I drove to the bookstore and I bought the book and I read it.

And she was right. Immediately my mind shifted and I thought, I need to get my money working for me. And I then dove in. You're going to close that door. Thank you. I then dove in and started reading all the books I could find on real estate. Does anybody happen to know what book I read? 2001. Any guesses? Rich dad, Poor dad, or There you go.

Ding, ding, ding, ding. Rich dad, Poor Dad. That was the book. So then I thought, I've got to get my money working for me. I read Robert Allen's books. I kind of went deep dive into it. But I'm not just a reader. I am an action taker.

So before the end of 2001, I had purchased my first and actually my second investment Property that was my first investment property. I lovingly call it Marsh Wren for the name of the street that it was on. And then I just kept going. I convinced my boyfriend at the time, who is now my husband, to buy the next property with me and another one, and another one. And by 2008, and we were all talking about this earlier, don't ask me for timing advice, but in 2008, I quit my full time job and I went full time as a real estate investor and I started a real estate training and education company. And as part of that, I started building this thing that, that publishers and people will call platform. Part of that platform, I had a newsletter, I had a YouTube channel. And after a couple of years, I got the attention of an acquisitions editor from Wiley.

And the editor said, we're really interested in doing a book with you. And all of a sudden the little girl inside of me who had been told that you don't make money writing books, writers don't make money. So I went to business school. But that little girl, she came alive. She, she was like, oh, I'm going to get a book deal. So I told Wiley enthusiastically about my book idea and they went, oh, no, no, no, that's a general real estate book. We don't want that. But they gave me an idea and they said, go write a proposal.

So I hired people and I worked on this proposal. Took me three months. And after three months I got an email from them and they said, we don't think you have a strong enough platform. There's that word again. To sell books. So they rejected me. So first they approached me, then they rejected my idea, and now they were rejecting me. I can smile about it because it actually was such a gift, but at the time I was not smiling.

And I also had the challenge of. Two of my friends got book deals with Wiley right around the same time. So I had to look at them and kind of go, what do they have that I don't have? Why did they get one and why didn't I? But thank you, Wiley. I went back to that original book idea because again, as I told you, I, I had read every real estate investing book, both for Canadians and for Americans. So when they told me that that general real estate book had been done, I knew it hadn't. And I thought, you know what? I'm going to write the book that I know needs to be written, and I don't need a gatekeeper to tell me whether it's going to sell or not. But they also gave me something which was, I was going to go, okay, Wiley, I'm going to do it better than if you did the book with me. And I took that book to number one on Amazon in print books, ahead of Dan Brown, ahead of Game of Thrones.