All right, so who already has a book? Okay, who doesn't have a book? Just a couple. All right. And who has a book that's in progress right now? Oh, quite a few of you. Yeah. Progress, progress. Okay. Guess where I'm from. I live in Las Vegas now, but I am from Canada.

All right, so today we're going to have something for everyone. So if your book is still in your head, this is going to be great because it's going to lay some foundation for you as you think through what you want your book to do and how it's going to set up your speaking business. If your book is in progress, great. Same thing. If it's already out, hopefully it helps you kind of think through how else you can be using it or even think about. Maybe there's a little bit of positioning that you might want to change to have it do more for you. And that's where we're going to start, is your foundation and the hook. And then come on in.

And then we're going to go through proven marketing strategies, and then we're going to wrap it all up by thinking about your empire. And Debbie kind of led into that. But I think the more you think about your book as being the foundation for your empire, the more income and impact you're going to have. And frankly, that's really what gets me excited. And it goes back to many years ago when I started to realize how powerful books can be. And a book changed my life. And it started 2001. I was working for Kimberly Clark Canada and Vancouver, and one of my co workers said, you got to read this book.

This book is amazing. And so 2001, so I wrote down on a piece of paper the title of the book and got in my car and drove to the store, because that's how you had to buy books then. And I bought the book and I read it single weekend. And I immediately thought, geez, I gotta get my money working for me. And anybody know what book, what that was when I say, you gotta get my money working for me? Any guesses? Rich dad, poor dad. And so then I bought books by Robert Allen, if anybody knows that. And I went down the rabbit hole. And I'm not just a reader, though.

I'm an action taker. Within that year, I bought my first two investment properties. So that was property number one. I lovingly call it Marsh Wren for the street that it was on. And I kept going. And I convinced my boyfriend at the time, who's now my husband, to buy with me. And we Just kept buying property. And by 2008, which, if anybody remembers what happened in 2008, don't talk to me about timing.

I quit my full time job and I went full time as a real estate investor. And I launched a real estate training and education company and I started building what Publishers today call platform. So I started a newsletter, I started a YouTube channel, and in 2011, a publisher, Wiley, contacted me and said, hey, we're interested in doing a book with you. And suddenly this little girl inside of me who always wanted to be a writer, but then somebody told me, writers don't make money. So I went to business school because I wanted to have money. So I was suddenly alive and I was going to, okay, great, I have this idea. So I told Wiley the idea and they went, oh no, we don't want a general real estate book. We have a very specific one.

So they gave me this idea and they said, go write a proposal. So I hired people and I wrote, spent three months, wrote this proposal, submitted it, and then it came back. An email from them said, the marketing department doesn't think you have a strong enough platform. There's that word again. To sell books. So they didn't give me a deal. They approached me, they didn't like my first idea and now they didn't like me. But I'm smiling because they did me a big, big favor because I took a little bit.

Truthfully, my ego was definitely hurt. And I had two friends that got book deals with Wiley right around the same time. So I had a little bit of like, what do they have that I don't have? But this idea that I had given them kind of haunted me and I was like, that book, nobody's written that book. I don't care what they said. I've read every book you in real estate. So I went back to it and I decided to write it. But I self published it because I didn't want anybody telling me what to write. And also they didn't give me a book deal.

So I self published. But I took that book to number one, not number one in a category, number one in print books, ahead of Dan Brown, ahead of Game of Thrones. And it was in the top 100 print books for almost 200 days. Still sells. And I'm really removed from real estate. Thank you. And the best part was when they called me a few years later and they said, so you working on any other books? I was like, I am. Exactly.