23x NYT BEST SELLING AUTHOR! SPECIAL GUEST!! Laura Morton (also Publisher of MY BOOK!!)📙📘📗📕📚 | Ep. 512

0:01Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This Not That, and we might have one of possibly the biggest guests we've ever had. I really believe that. So who is here today? We have Laura Morton. Now, Laura Morton, you may know her because she is a 20-time New York Times bestselling author. Okay, she's written over 60 books with some of the biggest celebrities on the planet, like Justin Bieber, the Jonas Brothers, Jennifer Hudson, Al Roker, Melissa Etheridge, Joan London, Susan Lucci, you name it.

0:46Okay, but she's not just an author. She also has her own imprint, her own book imprint called LaSega Books. And when I went out to the market and said, okay, I'm going to write this book. I just wrote a book called Stupider People Have Done It. It's coming out in June. And I scoured the world. And I asked everybody, who should I work with? Who should I work with? And everybody came back to the same name. They said, Laura Morton. Everybody said, Laura. I go, who is Laura Morton? Who is this person? She is the person. And I'm lucky enough to have my book coming out on LaSega Books. And the book world is so much more than I ever thought it was and i said we got to get laura on the show we got to dig into the world of books let everyone have a peek behind the curtain with the person that knows more about this than anybody else so laura welcome to the show jay thank you for that introduction although i am going to tell you i have 23 new york times right right who's counting well that's perfect because you are the goat of publishing that's the goat number 23 so that doesn't surprise me at all so let's jump into it for a second here.

1:48Give us from where you sit, because everybody, I love books. To me, I'm nervous. Is the book market okay? The planet's changing so much. Is it the end of books? How are books doing? Oh, I mean, Jay, it's absolutely the opposite. First of all, I want to congratulate you on doing something so phenomenal. You know, most people talk about wanting to write a book, right? And they sit around and, you know, their friends tell them, you should write a book, man. You're so cool. You're so smart. I love what you say. You should write a book. and they never get it off the kitchen table, right? It just, you know, it just sits and it's a thought and it's a regret for so many people down the road.

2:24So congratulations to you on your book, Stupider People Have Done It, which I love the title. And I'm so proud to be your publisher. You're coming into publishing at a really unique time because, do you know in 2025, there were, do you want to, do you know how many books were published in 2025? five? No idea. You want to take a guess? I'm going to be stupid. I have no, like 30 ,000. I don't even know. 4 million books. 4 million books. Yeah. Interestingly, three and a half million of those are books that are either self-published, hybrid publishers, direct to consumer, right? And the rest is in the traditional market.

3:12And what we're seeing now is there's been an increase in book sales. We've seen year over year over year that books are selling. And that's good news for publishing. What is even better news for publishing is we're seeing all these different paths to market now. So, you know, and the question is why and what path is right for you? And, you know, I think that that is what a lot of people are seeing is that they don't need a big publisher to get their book out into the world. And we're seeing, in fact, a lot of independent books that are selling big, big numbers, 100 ,000, 500 ,000, over a million copies.

3:49When, in fact, I'm going to give you another stat that's kind of interesting. Okay. How many books do you think the average book sells? Oh, my God. A thousand? 300. No way. 300 copies is what the average book sells in the United States today. A thousand copies, you know, under a thousand copies is a pretty safe number, but the average number is 300, which is basically your friends and family buying. I was about to say, right. I mean, that's like you buying your own book. Yeah. So, you know, the question, what is the differentiator, right? What makes a bestseller? What makes a book take off? And, you know, what makes somebody want to read what it is you have to say?

4:34Well, I want to ask you a question about that because, and this is me, I'm not being bragging or whatever, but when I was talking to Laura about the book, I had a lot of doubt. Can I even write a book? And I'm proud to say we hit number one on Amazon's new releases for marketing just this past week. And I was like, I can't believe this. Now I have to listen to everything Laura says. She's like the Yoda of all things books. But here, what you've said from the beginning is, you said to me, you know, you have a book in you. I really think you have a book in you. and I appreciate that your confidence, because I didn't have that.

5:05What is it that you have to see in somebody? I mean, yeah, great, you're Justin Bieber. That's not hard, good call. Okay, they have a book in them. But what is it for somebody that's not Justin Bieber that you look for and say, yes, you could have a successful book that you're not just selling to 300 friends and family? Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing that anybody will tell you is your platform, right? Do you have an audience? And the difference between someone like yourself who has an audience, right? You have a very large audience. You do a lot of speaking. You have this incredible podcast that you do.

5:37But the difference between someone like yourself and somebody who might be a doctor somewhere that just really wants to write about, let's say, mental health. And they're writing an important book, but they just don't have the audience. How are they meeting their audience where they're at? Certainly, there's a need for a book on mental health, but you still have to be able to market to those people. And really, ultimately, that's what this boils down to, is marketing conversation. But the first thing that I look for, Jay, there's actually three things that I look for. And you checked every single box.

6:07One, do I like the person? Do I genuinely like them? Two, do I believe their message? Right? Because if the message isn't believable, if I don't believe it, your reader is not going to buy it either. Right? And three, the book has to put good in the world. Those are my three boxes. I can't say that's true for every publisher. But as a publisher, those are the three things that I really look for. And in fact, even as a co-author those are the things that i look for um but to me writing the book is 10 of the work it is and you know how much work was it for you to write your book oh i was i have to tell you something um because i was talking to our mutual friend scott miller the other day he goes your second book you're gonna do bubble like a whoa i was like let's relax on that second book idea because this thing was way rougher than i thought it was going to be there was nothing more intimidating than staring at a blank screen like now I'm going to start writing a book.

6:59I felt like the biggest fraud in the world. Is that normal? It's totally normal. And in fact, it's normal for, I mean, I, as you know, I've worked with, you know, billionaire founders, Bob Parsons, the founder of GoDaddy, Glenn Stearns, the founder of Stearns Lending, now Kind Lending, Patty Arviello, Dave Linegar, the founder of Remax. And every single one of them have this sense of there's two things and it's remarkable here. You've had so much success in your world, right? And there is this notion of imposter syndrome. Like, was I, am I good or did I get lucky? And then the other piece of that is why would anybody care?

7:40Why would anybody want to read what I have to say? And funny enough, I actually deal with that quite a bit with my celebrity clients too. And, you know, I just think that there's this idea of writing a book is different than what you do every day in the role that you are as a marketing guru. And you know what you know. And when it comes to stepping into a world that you don't know, you better surround yourself with all the right people because then you're just going to get back in publishing. And I don't want to veer too far off from your question, but publishing right now, there's a lot of scams going on in the publishing world.

8:13And a lot of companies out there that are promising that they'll make you a bestseller, promising that they'll get this done for you, and they just don't deliver. And people are spending money, you know, hiring PR teams and marketing teams and, you know, trying to kite the list in the system when in fact there really is no way to do that anymore. So it's really important that you surround yourself with the very, very best in the business who have a track record, who know what they're doing. And that's how you start when when you're writing a book, know that you've got a message that you can stand in, right?

8:52That's the most important thing. There's one you. What differentiates you from every other marketing book, Jay, is you. Well, and I also think that's for people in general with their content, whether they're writing a book or maybe they don't have a big enough platform to write a book. I think the you factor, the human factor, you know, is so important in what's going on now with AI and everything. And so let me ask you a question about AI, because I'll be honest with you, when AI really started coming out, I said, books are screwed. All you got to do is, you know, upload John Grisham's latest book and say, now write me another one that's about a different thing using his tone or whatever, and write me five John Grisham books.

9:29But is AI screwing the book market? Does AI have an impact on the book market? Does AI not matter? That's such a good question. I think that there are, I think it's, and both, right? And, you know, I think that as a writer who writes nonfiction, and let's take your book, Stupider People Have Done It. Let's take that, for example, you tell a wonderful story where the title came from. It was your grandfather. AI would never be able to tap into a story like that. There is a humanness in writing books that AI just does not have today. Do I think it's coming? hard to say because you can train a chat you know to to learn your voice but it still won't have that human connection what we don't see right now is empathy we don't see a lot of emotion i can spot an ai written piece a mile away just look for the m dashes right look for the list there's always going to be five bullet points well let me ask you a question about that i don't okay, great.

10:38You can be in my imprint. I can't wait to have your book and we're going to publish it, whatever. And then they hand you the first few chapters. Like I had to send you like the first few that I wrote and you had to tell me, well, this is drawn the right direction or the wrong direction. And by the way, Laura's incredible because she's in it like the whole way through. And you were like, okay, this is good, but lean in this direction, that direction. You gave me a lot of guidance. Do you ever get something from like an author that you're working with? And you're like, they didn't write this. This is AI.

11:03This is garbage. Well, I'm going to tell you a great story. So there was a book that I was brought on to do. And ultimately, my schedule just didn't allow me to do it. So somebody that I worked very closely with said, you should go to this writer. He's written as many books as you have, if not more. And I think that he's a good person to go to. He happened to be available. He said, yeah, I can do it. And this is a great example of this. They turned in the first several chapters of the book. And I knew this author. I had worked with this author. I knew her stories. And when I saw the chapters, there were things in there that were not even her story.

11:47It was so bad and clearly so AI written. There's a dryness and a flatness when everybody listening has used AI for something, right? And what we do, if Most people will use it, take it, go, oh, that's great. Now I can just put my voice on top of it. Right. Well, when somebody hands you something that is so clearly not in the voice of the author that they're working with, you can spot it in a minute. This wasn't not only in the voice, this wasn't even her story. AI had the wrong story, wrong person. And it was, it was really disappointing, I will say. And, and then to boot this writer, and this goes back to what I was saying, this writer actually hired somebody else to do the work.

12:32So this person had never even met the author. And so what he did is he farmed it out to a writer who just chat GPT'd it. And so it happens all the time, but as a publisher and somebody who's been in the business, you know, for many, many years can spot that. Not only that, Grammarly can spot it. So your manuscript got ran through Grammarly. Like we know if you use AI and there's the difference between Grammarly restructuring a sentence and grammarily creating stories in your voice that aren't really your stories. And I think what's so important to understand is that there's a relationship capital that you build when you write a book and somebody takes the time to buy your book and read it.

13:17Okay. They're putting trust in you that what you have to say is meaningful and purposeful and will have an impact. And in order for that to have the highest level of impact. It needs to be authentic. Anything less than that is, I think, damaging to your brand. And I think it's super damaging to the relationship that you're trying to create with your reader. Yeah. And I think in general, regardless of whether you're making a book or anything else out there, if you are just taking the output of AI and then you're submitting that as your piece of content, your website or whatever, you know, to Laura's point, it's just flat.

13:51Everyone knows that you're just mailing it in and it's not all that. And I will tell you, you know, the book's coming out. My book's coming out. But I've given a couple copies to some people already. And it is so, I can't even tell you the words. When you hear that they're reading it and they'll be like, I'm on the subway, I've been reading it. Or I skipped my lunch hour and I read it. I read it before I went to bed last night. It is the weirdest feeling in the world to think that somebody is there with this thing that you wrote and they're spending time with it. It is the strangest experience I've had like in my career.

14:28It's just not, I don't know, you've done it so much. It's probably not that strange for you. Well, I have to tell you two things I want to say about that, Jay, is there's, I'm going to use the word intimacy, right? There's an intimacy involved when somebody reads your story. So one, you're vulnerable in sharing that, right? So that's why you feel that way. But secondly, if you break the word intimacy down, it really breaks down to into me you see oh i like that right and so that's what that's what you know for you and somebody who who we were talking about this just before we we started recording you know you have this sort of self-deprecating humor but at the end of the day that's what i'm talking about ai will never never as far as i can tell not today certainly not hopefully while i'm writing books be able to capture that.

15:17And I think that that's what a reader is looking for. Let me come into your world and see, right? And I think that's so important. And that to me is the difference between a book that connects and a book that doesn't connect. And we've all read things. I was on a webinar this morning about AI and writing and the moderator, the person who was speaking and the first four minutes he lost me. It just was it was a word salad, right? And here he was talking about AI. And I thought, this is a human talking to me and he's lost me because he's and so you know, I think that just finding those connectors and those hooks and you do that so well in your book, that's something you should be really proud of.

16:03And and I know it's strange. But the second part of your question, I want to say it never gets old. When I realized that something that I wrote, even if it's not my story, right, is having a positive impact on somebody else's life. That fills my bucket. It's why, it's my why. Yeah. Well, I will say, yeah, I mean, one of the things, and you know this, I was adamant with the book, was that all the net author proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research, because I felt, maybe it's imposter syndrome, whatever. I'm like, this is going to be a waste of people's money. I don't feel right about that.

16:36I need to make sure it's doing real good. And that's why it's going to go, you know, kick cancer's butt. And so part of that, though, you told me, you said, listen, if you really want this thing to circulate, you want to make this big donation, you need to get a lot of pre-orders because pre-orders really help to launch the whole thing, which now I'm jumping them down. Everyone pre-order it so we could, you know, kick cancer's butt. But why do pre-orders with books matter? Well, in today's market, 4 million books coming to market. All right. As a retailer, you don't have room for 4 million books, right?

17:08So you have to look at like, what is there already a demand for? A lot of people chase pre-orders because they're chasing, you know, bestseller status, right? That's not you. You really are trying to raise money for cancer and bestseller status, build it and they will come, right? So, but in today's world, you have retailers that have to make a lot of very hard decisions. So if they see that there's an interest in a book, especially from a first time author, somebody that may not be a household name, that gets their attention. And that algorithm, you know, we live in an Amazon world, that algorithm that pushes you up so that if somebody is searching for a book on marketing or life advice or whatever category your book is in, we want your book rising up.

17:54Sales will push you up in that regard. In the case of like Barnes and Noble, if you don't have any pre-orders at Barnes and Noble now, especially as a first time author. And even as authors who have had books previously, no pre-orders, no shelf space. They just don't have the room. So if somebody is going to pre-order your book, it's important that they go to Barnes and Noble and Books a Million. And yes, they can go to Amazon. 80 plus percent of books are bought on Amazon today. When's the last time you were in a Barnes and Noble? But it's really important that we keep the independent independent bookseller is so important in the world of publishing today.

18:32Those mom and pop stores and the New York Times evaluates that, right? That's also a big piece of the equation. And I, as somebody who's been in publishing for as long as I've been in publishing, I really support the independent bookseller. I really support the small businesses. And I think it's important that we don't let them fall to the wayside. And because I think a lot of people right now are getting very frustrated with companies like Amazon and they're turning away and they're going to other retailers and they are supporting their local bookseller. And I think that's really important. All of it matters.

19:07But pre-orders in particular are what set you apart so that when Barnes and Noble is making an order, when Books of Million is making an order, even when Amazon is making an order, they're looking at what kind of interest is in the book. So anybody listening to this podcast today could do Jay the biggest favor and me as his publisher and go and pre-order Jay's book. It is the kindest thing you can do. It makes a great gift for graduation. It makes a wonderful gift for anybody that is thinking about becoming an entrepreneur that is in business already. It's a small gesture that has the biggest payoff.

19:47Well, I appreciate that. and everybody should go in. We're going to put Laura's information, all her contact stuff in the show notes. You could find Laura Morton, obviously on LinkedIn, all over the place. And her imprint, Lasega Books, L-A-S-E-G-A Books. They've just been an incredible publisher to work with. I mean, guided me through the whole thing. I am borderline illiterate. So that's what they were starting out with here. And it's just been, it's been a fun ride. It really has. And Laura, anything else you want to share with the world about finding you, connecting with you? I just can't say enough good things about you.

20:18Well, I really appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm always looking, look, the reason why I started my imprint is because I know the business from the ground up. I was a writer who always got the short shrift when it came to publishing, right? And, you know, writers are remarkably undervalued in the world of publishing. And so I know the business from the very beginning of the process, which is inception, which we helped you with, right? Through the writing process, through the editorial process, getting the book ready to get shipped out into the bookstores. And then what? Then what are we doing?

20:52And I know the business all the way through marketing. We have a wonderful partner in our friend, our mutual friend, Scott Miller, who brought us together. and I think it's so important that you have somebody, if you are thinking about writing a book, ask the person you're talking to how many books they've written because most of them have written no books. That's crazy. Right? And how many of them are New York Times bestsellers? I mean, come on. Right, and how many New York Times bestsellers? So I understand the business all the way through. So I really, I started my imprint, Jay, as really as a give back because there's so much good content out there.

21:26To get a deal at the big five today is really hard, right? They really look at your platform. What are your numbers? They just want to know what your social media following is. They'll read your marketing plan before they'll read your book. It doesn't matter if you have, if they know that you're going to help sell books in a big way, it almost doesn't matter what's in between the cover. I think that that's not the right approach. I think there's a lot of great content. There's a lot of good ideas. And so I look for writers that have a little bit of both that we can cultivate. And Scott, you know, I know is talking about a second book, book, but that's the idea, right?

22:00Let's build something together. You have this foundational piece. And if you decide you want to do a second book, I hope you'll decide you'll do it with me. Of course. But if not, if you don't want to do another book, I get that too. But I think it's just really important. But early on in this conversation, I had mentioned that writing the book is 10 % of the work. What you do with it is the other 90%. And for most people, and I want make this point before we sign off writing a book likely is not going to be where your revenue comes from okay selling the book that's a piece of it but what is the book promoting what is the book doing for you how are you using the book as a marketing tool how many speeches do you do right now where you haven't had a book right if you want to get into speaking a book is the most important piece of the equation.

22:50So you have to think about how a book can help market whatever it is your business is. How can a book serve that? And that's the first question I ask any author. How is this book serving your reader and how is it serving you? And if we can figure that out, we dream backwards to figure out how to make that happen. I love it. So true. And that is what you asked me and you've been guiding me the whole way. So everybody connect with Laura. And if you get a chance. Buy stupider people have done it. We're going to kick cancer's butt coming out June 9th, but you can order it now on Barnes and Noble, Amazon, anywhere.

23:25Laura, thank you for everything and thank you for being on the show. Thanks, Jay. And thank you so much for being a part of the Lisega Books family. Absolutely. Wait, the party is not over. Go to jayschwedelson.com because I want to do stuff with you. I want to partner with you. When you click on the button partner with Jay, you let me know what you got going on. Work with my agency, work with me directly, Get access to all of my free resources at jschwedelson.com. And I got a book coming out this April. It's called Stupider People Have Done It. And all of the net proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research.

24:01Go on Amazon, buy Stupider People Have Done It. That way you can help kick cancer's butt with me. And if this podcast wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, it might have been, leave it a review, follow the show. You are awesome. go out there and crush it.