Hello, I'm Tina Tower, and you're listening to Her Empire Builder. For my first decade of business I thought grinding and hustling and working harder than everyone else was my path to success. It was pretty successful by a lot of measures, but it led to burnout and adrenal fatigue. Then, when I travelled around the world on my family gap year, I discovered the simplicity and the reach of online business and I completely fell in love. You have so much knowledge and expertise that's within, and I want to help you to package that, so you can also help to lift others up.

So, how do you build a thriving million-dollar business based on everything that's in your mind? This is Her Empire Builder, the podcast.

Hello, and welcome to Episode 52 of Her Empire Builder. I am so happy you're joining me today, and I'm so happy you're joining me this week because this week is actually one of the most exciting weeks of my life. It is the, the launch week, release week for my new book, “One Life - How to Have the Life of Your Dreams”, and I am so excited to bring this to you. It has been a long time in the making. Some people think it's been very quick in the making and that's what I'm going to talk about today, but look, it's something that I know for everyone who has written a book, or dreams of one day writing a book, it's something that is in the back of your mind for a really long time and you write it mentally, over and over and over again, before the real thing actually comes to fruition.

So, today, this is going to be a bit of a different episode. I have a feeling it's going to go a little longer. Most of the episodes that I record for the podcast, I have kind of my topic and then I have a couple of points, and I just kind of see where the world takes me. Today though, I have about a page of notes, which for me is big. So, it means that with a page of notes, I could be here a while, because through the process of doing the book, a lot of people have asked me, “Have you got a publisher? Have you self-published? What have you done? How have you done it? I want to write a book one day, how can I do this?”, and so I thought, “You know what?” When I was deciding between the two, and I was doing a lot of research, it was very difficult to get honest information, really, and so you know, that's what I like to do. I like to share all the honest information. So, I'm going to share with you exactly what decisions I made, what I had to do when and what it cost which is a big thing too, and I've just remembered as I've hit record, I forgot to get the book budget up on my screen, so I'm going to get that at the same time, so that I can have that out there. Look at me multitasking. Recording, opening files, all of it.

Okay. So, to give you a bit of a ballpark. So, what I had to decide first was, do I go with a publisher or do I self-publish, and in the end, I decided to self-publish. I say self-publish, but I kind of didn't do it all myself. I did what they call a hybrid model. So, I got a book co-ordinator to do all of the role that a standard publisher would normally do. So, it's more self-funded than self-published, but I'm going to go through exactly what that means.

So, the reason that I made that decision was we had a deal with a with a really well-known Australian publisher, and I just, I just didn't like it. I think that, you know, the main reason that people would go with a publisher and the main reason why going with a traditional publisher is definitely advantageous, is placement. So, when it comes to getting your book in airports, at the, the front of Dymocks and all of the big stores, getting that kind of placement, publishers have it light years ahead, but with everything else, not really.

So, for the way that I wanted my book to go, I wanted to be able to sell it at events and when I'm speaking and all of that sort of thing, and for me my book’s a $29 book, is its recommended retail price, and so to buy that book, to then sell at a speaking event under a publisher, I had to pay $17 for the books themselves, and buy them in lots of, like 1000, and keep them all in my house, which is very expensive, and, you know, not a big profit margin. So, that kind of turned me off. The other thing that turned me off, was kind of the relationship around IP, and who actually owns the IP in the book, and, you know, as, as the type of entrepreneur that I am, I like to have full control and ownership over absolutely everything that I produce, and so, you'll kind of lose that when it comes to publishing. So, that's why in the end, it was the best decision for me to go, “Alright. I want to do this myself so that I have control over all of the marketing, the distribution, definitely the IP, and can do more with it, without being constrained by a traditional publisher.

So, that's why that was right for me. So that meant self-funding. So, at the beginning of it, before I even started writing the book, I made a budget because those of you who listen to the podcast regularly or follow anything that I do, knows that I'm quite money conscious. I'm quite money savvy, and that comes from being broke. Once you have cash flow issues, and once you've experienced that sort of thing, you're very careful about not going into it again, and so I was going, “Okay, is this going to be the right time for me?”

I have wanted to write a book for donkey’s years. I did my first, How to Write a Business Book course at the, at Valerie Khoo’s Australian Writers Centre in, I think it was 2006. So, a very long time ago, and it's taken me this long, I think for a couple of reasons. One, I needed to be sure on what I was saying, and secondly, I needed to have the time and space to be able to immerse and write it, which kind of hadn't, it hadn't been at the top of my priority list. Although I've always wanted to do it, I really haven't been able to go, “You know what, I'm going to just carve out months to be able to do this.”, because I'm going to explain the writing process, and the actual writing of it with the least time consuming part of the whole thing, which sounds really, really backwards, but it was very true.

Okay, so when I first came to write my budget, this is where I went into a whole lot of research for different things, and came to about going, “Okay, my budgets going to be about $60-$70K to get this book up and running, and I know that sounds like a bucket load of money to get a book out there, and it is, but I'm hoping it's all going to be worthwhile. It is launch week, so who knows, but hopefully it's going to be worthwhile.

So, at each stage, I'm going to tell you what, what I did and how much that cost. So, you can do that. Now when you go to the show notes, you can go to tinatower.com/52 for this episode, which is Episode 52, and I will have an actual copy of my spreadsheet there that you can download the budget that I used for my book. Now I will be totally transparent and say $5,000 of that budget was my trip to Fiji to actually write the book. So, not everyone will have that in their budget, but I'll go through it so that you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Okay, so if you want to write your own book, first thing to do is work out if you want to do a traditional publisher or if you want to do self-publishing or hybrid publishing, and that's going to be different depending on your goals. You know, if you don't want to muck around with all of the, like pushing it yourself and marketing it yourself, and having kind of all that control, then getting a publisher is, is definitely easier. They do shortcut a lot of things for you that you then don't have to do yourself. It also, you can do it without having to fork out a lot of money at the start. So, a lot of friends that I know, that have written business books, some of them if they're pretty superstar-ish, they actually get paid to write the book. Very, very, very rare. So, most of the people that I know that run kick ass businesses that have published a book with a traditional publisher, still are having to pay $10-$20K at the beginning, because they're not necessarily paying to get the book published, they're paying for a certain number of copies to make that book fly right from the beginning. So, you're still going to have to fork out a little bit of cash either way. I know other people that have self-published books that have paid nowhere near the amount of money that I have, that, you know, you can get it going for about $5-$10K, and that's totally okay, too. So, it's looking at what are your goals? What do you want out of it? Why you’re doing it, and then finding the best solution that you can for that. So, the first thing is deciding your, your kind of avenue, then you can decide on your budget and whether or not, you know, how, how far you can actually go with this thing.

So, then the next thing is the most important part. Do you know what it, I bet you know what it is? You know what it is, don’t you? It's writing the book. Actually going there physically writing the book. So for those of you who have read One Life already, you will know this story, but if you haven't read the book yet, I do actually include in the book, the process of writing the book, and talk about you know, in the intro, where I am, and for me, I wanted to get out of my normal life, to be able to write the book, because I know that, you know, the way that days are structured and the way we work with, with family and kids and everything that goes on, if I had to kind of dip into writing the for a couple of hours, and then dip out, and then back in and then back out, I knew that would frustrate me a lot. I'm kind of an all-in kind of gal. So, I wanted to be able to go completely immersed, and this book is extremely personal for me. I talk about a lot of things, especially from childhood, that I've never talked about before and never really had much of an intention of talking about, and I knew it was going to be pretty emotional to, to kind of get all of that together initially, and, and it worked well, because when I was writing quite a few of the chapters, you know, I'm sitting there just typing and bawling my eyes out, but I had to have the time and space to be able to do that. I wouldn't have been able to go that deep and do that type of thing if, you know, if I'm in my home office with the kids buzzing around and that sort of stuff. They would have been like, “Whoa, what's going on here?”, and I would have had to pull that back a little bit. So, to be able to get in the right frame of mind, I booked a week in Fiji. So, I booked a beautiful, adults-only resort, so that I could have this bungalow on the water, and I literally just sat there, woke up, typed, ate, swam, typed, and did that constantly. So, that was a beautiful way to do it. It worked really well for me. If this book goes well, and I end up doing another one, that's how I'm going to do all my books, which is quite a clever thing to do, is to pick somewhere wonderful to go and use it as an excuse to run, but I still think, you know, from, from that point of view, it got the best book out of me, that, that could possibly be written. You know, some people will say, “Oh my gosh, you wrote a book in a week.”, but my kind of theory is, it took me 16 hours to write the book, and I think if I had done that, like most people would do it, kind of dipping in and out, I reckon, because of productivity lapses, it would take around 100 hours by the time you kind of got back in, back out and stopped and start, and doing that hundred hours over a few months, you know, it's the same, same sort of thing. So, same time, just a lot more productive. So anyway, that was the first thing, was actually writing the book.

Then, so this was back in August. So, this whole process, August, September, October, November. August, September, October, November, three months. Three months from when writing to when it's out on the shelve. I am told that is super-duper fast, but to me, it's actually, it feels like it's dragged on. People are like, “Oh my god, it's just come out. You were just writing it.”, but it's, you know, it feels like it's taken quite a while.

So, what I did is, I got a book co-ordinator. So, I didn't want to do everything myself because you know, you don't know what you don't know. So, I'm happy to hire professionals that, that, you know, are absolutely fantastic at what they do, and so, I got a lady called Linda Diggle, who has a company called Book Boffin, and for $5,000, she did all of my co-ordination. So, that is, helping to design the cover, the, arranging the copywriting, so the editing, the type setting, getting it on Amazon, getting the distributor organised, all of that sort of stuff, she did it all. She's an absolute legend, and I will also put her details in the show notes there as well if you're ever thinking of doing that.

So, the next thing was to design the cover. Now we had a bit of debate with the cover because, for those of you who have seen One Life, it's, it's quite punchy. It's definitely out there, but if you look at a lot of books written by business-women, it has their photo on the front, and I very purposely did not want to have my photo on the front. I wanted to have the writing only, because most of the books that I admired by men didn't have the photo on the front, and so that was something that I kind of, Iike, clung to and went, “You know what? I want to kind of take a stand on this.” No one will probably notice, but to me, it was pretty important and so I wanted that. We chose the fonts. We chose the colours. I wanted it to look like fun, but I also didn't want it to look so girly that a man would never pick it up. So, the cover design was quite, quite tricky, and then on the back, you know, I put the photo on the back so that it's there, but the hardest part was, was trying to fit everything on there as well, there's so much that you can put on a cover. Anyway, so cover design was next.

After that the manuscript was then sent to the editor. So, we went through a couple of different editors. We went through first, the structural edit, so to make sure that everything kind of made sense and that all the stories were congruent and it was in the right order and all of that sort of thing, and then after the structural edit, we then go into copy editing. So that process took about three, four weeks for that. So, the editing cost me, I think, nearly $2,000. $875 for each, for the structural and for the copy edit, and then at that point while it was in the editing, was when I got the lawyer to take a look at it.

So, in my book I, I referenced, you know, a few different legal things that we talk about, and so we had to make sure that I hadn't broken any, any contract, any confidentiality, caused any defamation, because you know, I share a few, you know, touchy stories in there, so I had to get that checked by, by a lawyer. So, that was another couple of thousand there, to get that checked, so kind of everything starts to add up at this time, but that's what the budgets for. You know that, you know what's coming, so then at that stage, so we kind of got everything checked, they were happy with everything, then I decided to get a PR firm.

So, I've never had a PR firm for anything before. I've always done my own PR. I've always loved doing my own PR. I mean, how we grew our last company, so well, was being able to get a lot of media opportunities and personal brand, and building on that and doing all of that, but for this, I kind of thought, “You know what? I think I'm going to be consumed with everything that I don't really have time to be peddling myself, myself.” So, I looked at getting a PR firm. The other benefit of that was, I wanted to get placement in bookstores and in the airports, and as someone who's self-publishing, you don't get taken all that seriously because they think, okay, self-publishing, you’re just going to print a few copies, stick them in a garage, sell them at your speaking engagements, chuck them on Amazon, and that's kind of going to be it. So, I really wanted to, kind of, be able to keep the presentation of going, “You know what? We're really serious about this. We don't have a traditional publisher behind us, but this is a serious book and we're going to do all the things to make it fly.”, and so that's why I ended up getting a PR firm. I have an amazing PR firm headed up by Angela Ceberano at Flourish PR, and so, for that couple of months, to be able to do kind of the pre-stuff, and then during, set me back another $20,000. We're adding up here, but well worth it.

So, if I do the math, and every time I do the math on something, I go, “Okay, how many copies of the book do I have to sell to make that worthwhile, and do I think it's likely to get a return on investment?”, and I look at it with the book. I know that from the book, you know, they'll be speaking engagements, they'll be consulting, they'll be all different types of things that will come from that, but I'm looking just from an immediate ROI, do I think that's going to be worth it, and for me, it was 100%, yes, and it definitely looks like that is going to happen. We’re day three of the launch and we're chugging along just beautifully.

Okay, so I got the PR firm back in September, so a couple of months before launch, so we could start getting everything ready. There's been heaps getting ready for that, all of the media kits, the different interviews, you'll see everything flying out over the next couple of weeks, but they've done a great job of getting me on a whole heap of podcasts on online publications, print publications, TV, all of the things, so that we can spread the word as much as possible.

Okay, so then it was down to getting everything indexed. So, like all of the technical stuff that goes on behind the same like getting your ISBN number, and, you know, all of the stuff that has to actually go into all the systems that I don't fully understand which you can tell, by the way, I just said that, but that's what Linda the book co-ordinator is for, to make sure that all of that is cool, and so then, next step, was to get any endorsements and acknowledgments.

So this is the, the quote that goes on the front cover, which I was lucky enough to get the incredible Naomi Simpson to do that, and then all the endorsement quotes that go on the inside, which pretty much I hit up every friend of mine that has a recognisable name to go, “Hey, can I send you an advanced copy of the book?, you just send them the manuscript and the overview, “And can I get a bit of a quote to go in there?” So nice and simple. Everybody said yes which was fabulous. Oh actually, not everybody said yes, I did ask someone that I didn't know, that wasn’t a friend of mine, who, who's like a famous American, which I know, I had a 99.9% chance of them saying no, and you know, they didn't even get back to me, but we can only try right? I'll get Sara Blakely on the next time.

Okay, what did I do after that? Where am I up? So, we got the endorsements. Okay, then we put it all together and then had to do the proofread. So, there's lots of different types of proofreading. Like, it got sent to me, like, five different times after things got added. Then, when we were happy, the manuscript had to go to the type setter to figure out, “Okay, what do we want the inside layout to be? Do we want to have lots of dot points? Do we want to have pretty things? Do we want to have pictures? Do we want to have quotes pulled out? How do we want to do it?” So, we had to decide all of that sort of stuff. Work out the word count, the page count, all of that sort of thing, and then it came audible time.

So, when we did Audible, so what am I up to so far? I'm looking at the budget going, “What else do I have to say?” So, looking at the budget, actually, most of it's in the promo, but for the actual publication, so audible was next. So, it cost just under $3,000, $2,838, to record for audible. So, what that meant was I went into a sound booth thing and read the book, which was so much harder than I ever anticipated, because it's got to be perfect. So, you can hear as I, you know, say the, say the podcast here and I go up and down and sometimes I stop and think, I just did it then, I don't realise that mid-sentence, I like have to swallow. Doing an audible recording, I did kind of at one stage think, “Do I even know how to control my own bodily functions?” Like the amount of times he would stop me and say, “You just swallowed again.”, or, “I can hear saliva in your mouth.”, like, eww, oh no. So, that was challenging. So, anybody that listens to the book on Audible, you'll realise it's a much calmer version than the Tina that you hear on the podcast because it was three, seven-hour days of reading, and so the concentration level required and how many times, like, I'd read one sentence, and he’d go, “I don't really like the way you kind of had that inclination there. Let's do it again.”, or “Your mouth clicked a little.”, or, you know, you, you, I would move my hand so much that I would knock something or clap. Anyway, and you have to do it again and do it again and do it again. So, I'd have to, yeah, by the end, it kind of sounds like, like my meditation voice, but it's really, really cool, but I would suggest maybe listening to it, like, on one and a half or two times, just to make it sound like I normally would. So that was an expense but the reason that I did that was because, oh now I can't remember the figure. It was something like, no, totally would be making it up if I told you. I cannot remember. I should have written this down first. So, it's a huge proportion of non-fiction business books are now sold through Audible, not through physical. Can't remember the exact percentage but it's, when I heard it, I was like, “Well, okay, you can't not do audible.”, and so we did that. When you decide to do Audible, you can either list on Audible through Amazon and go okay, if you want to go exclusive through Amazon and Apple, so Apple I-Books, then you can, you get 40% back. So, whenever they sell a copy on Audible, 40% of that as a self-published author is yours. Or, you can go non-exclusive, which gives you the right to sell your Audible recording anywhere and then you get 15%. So, we chose to go exclusive Apple and Audible because I honestly went, “Is there anywhere else?” Like, I've never even heard of anywhere else to get, to get that. So, we decided to go exclusive and get the 40% back. So that's how that kind of worked. So that gets released on the same day as it gets released on Kindle and it gets released on print in all of the different places.

Okay, so that was the Audible recording. So, we did that. Then we got the sample books done. So, the sample book place that does kind of your, like, one off prints. So, you can pay, you know, $10-$11, to get just a one-off book. So, if you’re ever wanting to do like a short run of books because you're not quite sure, you can just get them from this really great place called Ingram Spark, that just does one of books and it costs about $10-$11 for that one book. So, we got a few of those just to see what it would actually look like and that we were happy with the cover and the inside and how everything was, and then went yes, sweet, and then went back and then got the full print run done.

So, that kind of brings me to talking about distributors. So, we're getting our book distributed by a company called Woods Lane. So, there one of Australia's most prominent book distributors, but the tricky thing is, so I was talking to a friend of mine the other day because, I was asking them about, you know, “Is this normal? Is it not normal? How's it going?”, and they said that, you know, when he used to do book runs, they used to take 2,000 straight off the bat, and then with the last book run, on his 11th book mind you, they took 500. So, it's really, really dropping, and so our initial order for bookstores was 200 books, which, you know, made me shit my pants quite frankly, because I was like, “Okay, we've done all this for 200 books? Like, there's more bookstores than that, like, where are these books actually going to go and end up?”, but that's what they start with. So, they started with that, it goes out, and then, so our job is to get people to buy those 200 books as quickly as possible, so that we get refilled and refilled and refilled, and then and only then, does it kind of go big and we get the chance to go in airports and at the front of bookstores and all of that sort of thing. So, that's where at the beginning, when I said the advantage of being with a traditional publisher, is you don't kind of have to prove yourself in that way, you go straight to the front of the line. So, for us, we kind of have to do it as a slow burn. So, that is the goal is through all of November, December and January, to keep going into bookstores, to keep doing all these things, and I could do that by, you know, through December we're doing a lot of bookstore signings because when we go into the bookstores, and we host bookstore signings, the bookstore itself buys 20 or 30 books, so it chews up that amount really quickly, which then makes the bookstore and the distributed go, “Hang on. This book’s starting to move. Let's order more and let's put it in a more prominent place in the stores so that we can get it. So, it’s kind of like a chicken before the egg, because if you don't prove yourself, you don't get it out there, but if it's not out there for anyone to buy, it's not going to do well. So, that's kind of been the most challenging thing is really working out how can we get it out there really quickly when it's not going to be out there. So, if you are listening and you haven't walked past a bookstore with my book in it, can you let me know, because it's not in all that many places, and I need to know where it is so that I can go there, sign the books, make a big commotion out of it, so that we can get that traction going? So, I'd really appreciate that. Let's, let's go on a treasure hunt for Tina’s One Life book.

Okay, so distributors. Okay, so it launched on Monday. Now this is where a lot of the expense has now kicked in, because I always figure, if you're going to do something, you may as well do something really, really well. So, I'm going on a seven-city tour which kicks off tomorrow night, which is super exciting. So, I'm recording this on Tuesday, it's going out on Wednesday. So, first book launch event is Wednesday kicking off in Sydney, which will be so exciting. If you haven't got your ticket yet, actually, and you're listening to this, like, near publication date, go to tinatower.com/tour, and come and celebrate with me. If you haven't got your ticket yet, I really don't know why. You should come.

So, this is where the expense comes in, because even though we're charging for the ticket costs to come, it doesn't nearly cover it. So, what we're doing is we've got flights to fly to all of the different places, so I'm up to about $3,000 in flights, about $2,000 in accommodation, about $8,000 for venues, about $5,000 in photographers to photograph the events, about $3,000 in promotional stuff like bookmarks, media wall, packaging, stickers, all of that sort of thing, postage satchels to send books to all of the people, so it all adds up quite quickly. Quite quickly, but totally worth it. Hopefully.

My media wall is insane. I mean, when we got that and got that delivered, and I put it up, I did an Instagram story if anyone saw that, but it was kind of like, “Oh my gosh, what have we done here.” I got a little carried away, which I, which I tend to do, but it's really cool, and so I figure, you know, we've got this one chance to get this book out in a really short amount of time. Like when you launch a book, you've really got tops, three, four weeks of hype, and then it either dies a really quick death, but if you do that three or four weeks really well, your book can last years and years and years, which is obviously my goal, and so with that I'm like, “I want to do everything that I can.” So I want as many people to be a part of the book tour so that all of that can be shared on their social media as well, which is where the very egotistical looking media wall comes into play is, if people are going to have photos in front of something, I want it to have One Life all over it so that people can then see that, look it up and purchase it. So, it's kind of all roads leading back to being able to do that.

So, that is the whole process of how I got the book on. So now, like, we've got it on, it’s on Booktopia. It's on Amazon. It's on Kindle. It's on Audible. It's on my website, and it's on, I'd like to say all good bookstores, but I've just told you the truth in that there's 200 copies currently floating out there, and I don't know where they are. So, yeah, we've got to find them. We've got to find them and grow them because my goal, you know, I may as well tell you, my goal is by the end of January to sell 10,000 copies of this book. So, we're up to just over 1,000 already with the bookstores and Amazon and Booktopia, and with my pre-orders off my website. So, you know, we’re 10% of the way there, three days in. So, I think we're going to be okay. That's the goal. That's what I'm going for, and it's not that common for a self-published author. So self-published, I think I read, well, you never know with these statistics, whether they're true or not, but it's about 1,200 copies, which, you know, we've nearly reached already. So, that's what we're trying to do. So hopefully, if you're looking at publishing a book, that helps, because that's as much information as I can give you. That's kind of been the process that we've gone through and how much it’s cost and what's been involved, but as I said, you don't have to do the same path that I did. So, you know, a lot of people that launch a book will have a book launch party, not seven, which I appreciate, because in the last 48 hours, I've been doing all the logistics not only for the actual locations in terms of, you know, “Have we got the microphones right? Is the music right? Is the, like, all the things there? How are we getting the books there? How are we doing all of this?”, but also down to, like, I've got to remember, “Oh yeah, I need my hair done too.”, like all that sort of stuff, and to do that seven times, like, it's just a bit nutters but, you know, as I said, you've got to give it your best shot.

So it's pretty much my entire month, this month, is dedicated to the book and that's why at the beginning I said the, the writing of the book, is kind of the shortest amount of time because that took me a full on week, but since then, doing all the, the marketing and the promotion and the checking and the editing and the, all the decisions that need to be made between that point and when it's live, it's so involved and now the actual promoting of it is going to consume kind of the next three weeks and then I'll literally just be running from one bookstore to another, trying to sign the books, trying to get it going and trying to get its traction because, in the end, I really do believe in the message of, of One Life and you know, it's, it's that we do only have this one life to lead, and it's over before we know it, and too many people live life not loving it and have regrets and wish they were doing something, wish they had the courage to actually follow their dreams, and I want that for you. I want that for everybody, and so I want it in everyone's hands to be able to do that and go, “You know what, I'm ready for greatness. I'm ready to step into this. I’m going to do it.

So, wish me luck. If you've got any questions at all, you can email me [email protected]. If you want to drill down on anything that I've talked about, if you're thinking of doing your own book and you want to ask a specific question, let me know. Otherwise you can go to onelifebook.com.au if you don't have your copy yet and get it, or you can get it from the multitude of places that I've talked about in this episode as well.

Okay, so I hope that was super helpful. What am I up to? 32 minutes, I actually didn't go to badly. That's nice and quick. How to Publish a Book in 30 Minutes. There we go. Alrighty everyone, have the most fantastic day and I look forward to talking to you next time on Her Empire Builder.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Her Empire Builder. If you loved it, please share it on Instagram and Facebook for your friends, and if you really want to deliver me smiles, you can pop a review on iTunes. I'd love to hear from you so if you have any questions, email me at [email protected], and if you want to know more about what we do, head over to tinatower.com. Now I truly hope this podcast gives you so much value and you can use it to dream big, plan well and take massive action in building your very own empire that's perfect just for you.