5 Genius Business Tactics Turning Broke Authors Into Millionaires

23:13But a couple of interesting data points that are in our world. So I think the top tier is like the J.K. Rowling's of the world. J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, which is like you actually are mainstream canon, right? You are you're a part of the meta. like you became the equivalent you know you're going to get a Netflix show type of thing so have you ever thought about by the way have you thought about JK Rowling and how she invented an entire universe and made up rules to like a game or a language that people refer to now like the word muggle I actually just thought of that word at least twice a week you know people do the Roman Empire thing I don't give a shit about the Roman Empire but dude I do think of like Diagon Alley I think about Hogwarts I think about all these places right like I think about that twice a week how cool that is.

23:59Someone just made it up. It's weird to me. When I think about that, I'm just like, that's so odd. No bullshit. What percent of you is like, might be real. Is there any part of you that's like, well, I mean, I am just a mogul. How would I know? The way that I think about it is she is so good at inventing this thing that she couldn't possibly have invented it. And she's just telling a true story. like you know what I mean like it's just impossible to think that one brain like our brains are each six pounds but that came out of hers I don't understand how that happened dude I've been at an airport where it's like you have the smart cart thing and I'm walking between you know nine and ten I don't run at it but like you know I'll take my finger and sort of drag it against the wall just in case there's a little give in that in that wall you know I'll play I'll see.

24:51So there's that tier, right? That's like God tier. Then there's the James Clear, Atomic Habits, David Goggins, Mark Manson. I think these guys have cleared like 30 to$50 million off of a single book. That's a lot. I would say more like 20. So James Clear, I think, I don't know how many he's sold out. It's his thing is escalating, by the way, which is really interesting. He tweeted this out recently and it was something like, I'll try to find it, but it was basically like, first year was like, you know, maybe like a hundred thousand. And then the next year was like 200 ,000. The third year was a million.

25:24And then the fourth year was like 4 million. And the fifth year was like 15 million. And he's just gone up and up and up. I think now he sold, uh, basically, I don't know, 20 million copies or something like that worldwide. And so, you know, way really that 20 million. Yeah. Yeah. His book is like a, it's like a runaway train basically um so i i think i'm pretty sure his book has grossed like 150 to 200 million dollars probably 150 probably 150 million dollars worldwide it's my guess you know i might be off by 30 million in either direction but but i'm not off by by half you know um and he's just a guy in ohio i think like he's just he's just a guy like i i knew him before theory i talked to him before the book and he was just like a blogger in ohio like it didn't seem particularly fancy and he He doesn't talk to us anymore.

26:11I knew him before he stopped talking to me. So I think that's like the next tier. David Goggins' book, I think, has done like$35,$40 million in sales. And he did it through Scribe. So he kind of like owns more of that, I think. Owned a lot of it. Tim Ferriss, surprisingly, didn't sell that many copies of 4-Hour Workweek. I thought 4-Hour Workweek was like a... To me, it was like that was a huge book. Obviously, it did super, super well. but I think it sold 2 million copies. So 2 million versus 20 million, 10 X more for Atomic Habits, which is pretty crazy. A fun one is Eric Jorgensen. So you know Eric Jorgensen, he was like a startup growth guy.

26:52He lived in some, I don't know where he lives. He lives in like Kansas City or something like that. And Eric Jorgensen wrote the Navalmanac, which is basically he's like, yeah, Naval's tweets are the shit. What if I printed them out? Basically, like, what if I printed it out and stapled it together, right? Obviously, he did more than that. But the core idea was he didn't write the book. He didn't study Naval's life and write a biography. He didn't create a bunch of original wisdom. He just took Naval's existing wisdom that was super fragmented, packaged it up into a really easy-to-use book. And he actually gives away, like, the e-book for free, I think, online.

27:27I'm pretty sure Eric, he's never told me this. This is my guesswork based on some back-of-the-envelope stuff. pretty sure Eric has made like three to five million dollars off of the Devalman Act himself no way I don't believe that that is so much money really 82 % confident that that's a real number dude if you're even half right I would be he's definitely made more than a million dollars I think it's like three to five million dollars off the Devalman Act okay well that's insane does Deval get anything Deval got distribution I don't think he gives Deval any money from it I don't know I'm gonna make you famous baby you're gonna be a superstar that's what I'm gonna tell I'm going to create the Sean O'Mac.

28:04Dude, you said that way too naturally. That was not the first time you said that. Is that what you told Trung?

28:14That's insane. Basically, the concept is ridiculous, right? I mean, it's good. The concept is genius is what it is. He took somebody else's genius that was fragmented. It was like, why would I write? Nobody wants to read the Eric Jorgensen book. But a lot of people want to write the Naval book. and Naval is kind of open source with it. He has, he's said this many times, he's like, the best thing you could do is let other people reshare your ideas. They're, you know, stealing your ideas, but really they're propagating your ideas. It's one of the highest compliments, one of the best strategies you can have to get more distribution.

28:46And so, you know, I think he was happy that, or, you know, and it took him like a year. He put a lot of effort into it. Not nearly as much effort as the guy who actually came up with the content. Well, Naval's made 500 million in his life. So I think he's done fine too, right? That's the whole idea. No, and Eric, by the way, I think Eric's now the CEO of Scribe, the company that did David Goggins' book. Yes. And the company that I think you might be using. Yeah, not yet. Okay, so another crazy story. So I've never heard of this book, and I doubt you have either, because are you a sci-fi reader?

29:18Not exactly. Only like the most famous ones. So have you ever heard of this book called Wool? No. Talking to me about science fiction is like talking to you about bison. You know what I mean? Ain't going very far. That conversation's got a lot of dead ends. That's a hard yes and. Well, basically, here's the idea. I was looking at the charts, and I saw all of the Game of Thrones books. So it's like, you know, A Song of Ice and Fire. And it's basically George R.R. Martin, George R.R. Martin, George R.R. Martin. There's five of his books. And there was one book on top of it called Wool. And I was like, I have never heard of this book.

29:51What is this book? So I went and researched it. So the author, this guy, Hugh Howey, which sounds like a fake name, might be, I don't know. his origin story is he's living in North Carolina. He's broke. He was doing some odd jobs. He was like, oh, there's a roofing gig. Yeah, I'll go help you out. You know, I'm a technician. Sure, I'll help you out. And basically at some point he's unemployed. And he's like, you know what? I'm going to write a book. His wife was kind of supporting the household. He's like, I'm going to write a book. And she's like, okay, honey, great. Sure, you don't want to get out there with the old resume.

30:21And she's like, no, no, no, I'm going to write a sci-fi book. Like it was like the idea was like something. He's like, what if aliens had this flying car or whatever? I don't know what it was. some crazy idea. This conversation could go way different. It'd be like, hey, by the way, I know that you love having these action figures in the plastic still, but can we make a little bit of room for the baby? Oh, you're going to write a book? I'm going to go find another husband. So he puts the book out. He sells less than$1 ,000 of the book. Okay, so first try and it failed. Most people would obviously quit.

30:51Strike one. He's like, oh, I'm just getting warmed up. He's like, that was good, but I can do better. and he still has no job. He needs to kind of start, you know, paying for the bills a little bit. So I love this part about the story. He gets a job, but he's like, he's trying to find not the highest paying job. He's trying to find a job that will make a minimum amount of money that he needs to live with the maximum amount of free hours. So he ends up finding this job that he could do for about 25, 30 hours a week. It pays only 10 bucks an hour, but he's like, I'll take it because there's a lot of downtime where I'm just sitting there not doing anything.

31:24I could be writing during that time and it's only 30 hours a week. So I can spend all of my free time doing this. And I also don't even want a good job that'll make it hard to quit later because I want to be an author and I'm not going to trap myself in a job that's like hard to leave. Then he changes his schedule. He's like, I'm going to wake up 2am every day. I'm going to write before my job. I'm going to write during my lunch break. I'm right after dinner. It became a compulsion for him. And in three weeks, he writes this book, Wool. Three weeks. So again, just like James Patterson wasn't precious about the whole idea of writing books.

31:54This guy was like three weeks, not three years. And so he bangs, he bangs out this book. He puts it on Amazon for 99 cents and he sells like a thousand copies. He's like, boom, thousand bucks. All right. Love it. And he's like, uh, and the, but like your, his small reader base, it's kind of like YC. They say you want like a small number of people. You'd rather have a thousand people that love you than a hundred thousand people that just kind of like you. So you had a thousand people that really loved the book. And they were like, dude, we got to write a sequel. So very next month, before they get cold, he writes a sequel.

32:24By the way, Wool's 530 pages. He did that in three weeks. So then he writes a sequel a month later, or two months later, whatever it is. And he sells 3 ,000 copies of that one. He's like, all right, I got to keep going. So he writes two more and he sells 10 ,000 copies. And finally, he puts out the collection, all five of the books that he's written in a very short period of time. And the first month, he sells 23 ,000 copies of the set. And now he's selling it for$6 instead of 99 cents. He makes basically 140 grand in gross revenue that month. And he's self-publishing this whole thing. So he's keeping 70 % of it.

33:01Whereas a normal author is going to keep 10%, maybe 15 % of it. And all of a sudden, the months roll by, he's now sold 500 ,000 books before anybody knows it, which is a shit ton of books to sell. That's like, you're in the top percent of a percent of authors at that stage. And he's getting approached by publishers. And he's like, okay, what's the deal? And they're like, we'll give you$250 ,000. He's like, I'm already making$250 ,000. They're like, okay, we'll give you more money. He's like, well, why would I take some money today for like, now I give up all my upside. And they're like, well, we can help you get distribution.

33:42He's like, I've sold 500 ,000 copies myself. and they're like, how the hell did you do that? And so his strategy, his guerrilla tactics to get his book out there where he's like, all right, I need to influence the influencers. So he sent basically copies of the book to bloggers and reviewers at Goodreads. So not like influencers, but book influencers. So people who review books and Goodreads, like high ranking Goodreads people. So then he's like, all right, that's good. Next step, he goes on Reddit and he does an AMA on Reddit for 12 hours. And so he's just like, I'm just going to like soak up all the Reddit love for this day on Reddit.

34:17All right, does that. Then he starts encouraging fan fiction and fan art, whereas most authors are pretty, again, precious about like, it's my IP. They try to like, you know, take down anybody who writes like variations of their book. He's like, no, no, no, go crazy. I built the universe, but you guys can fill up all the stories. And he would basically incentivize people to design other alternative book covers for it. So now their little audience would, you know, there are that artist audience would see them designing a book cover for this book called Wool. That was pretty cool. He picks 30 of the diehard readers and he's like, okay, how do I get my diehards to help me and become like, you know, super evangelist?

34:52And so he made them beta readers. Again, everybody's so precious. They keep everything under lock and key. He took his super fans and was like, you're going to be readers of the early editions of new books before they come out. So he did a bunch of community building, essentially, like stuff that doesn't really scale, that each one individually wasn't a game changer. But if you add up that and the 20 other things that he did, you can see how he like, that's not what made it successful, but he did start turning the crank. At the beginning, the crank is pretty hard to turn. But eventually, if you power through that first part of the crank, it'll start to move on its own.

35:25And that's basically what happened for this guy. And so then someone comes up to him and they're like, look, I don't think you should sell your book rights. But I do think you should sell your film rights. You haven't actually, you're not going to make a film yourself. So he sold his film rights and he kept his book rights as an independent person for a while. I think maybe he sold it now. I'm not sure. But he also met George R.R. Martin once. He went to a book signing for George R.R. Martin. And he's like, hey, George, it's me, Hugh Howey. And the guy's like, never heard of you. And he's like, I'm the number six guy on the sci-fi list.

36:00It's your five books. and I'm number six, said George R. R. Martin. He posted this thing that George R. R. Martin signed his book and said, to number six, keep trying. And then a couple months later, he actually hit number one. And so just a pretty cool story of a self-published author that really made it happen. An entrepreneurial hustle story. That's a great story. Do you use Goodreads? Do you know anything about Goodreads? I've used Goodreads, yeah. I met the founders of Goodreads. And I was like... Yeah, Otis Chandler. Yeah, they're really cool people, really nice people. it's a cool product but but it's old now it's been around for a long time but it's got a great mo i i can tell you a little bit about goodreads but this guy hugh holly he has so i'm i use good reads religiously i'm i'm i'm that's kind of like my it's where my library i keep everything this guy has 750 000 ratings which is huge and if you're in the hundreds of thousands of ratings and you have over a four-star review you're like the best of the best he has a 4.15 review out of five for almost a million reviews.

37:01It's amazing. Yeah, and it all started with a standalone short story, basically. It wasn't even like a full book. It was like a short story that he published at the beginning of that first three weeks. But again, that's kind of what you want. It's a prototype, right? He treated it like an entrepreneur would, not like an author would. He's like the blue-collar version of sci-fi. This guy's like the Larry Bird of sci-fi. You know what I mean? From French Lick, Indiana. Yeah. dude how insane is it that larry bird was so amazing and would just literally drink beers like on the bus to the game and like people used to smoke cigarettes at halftime of those games like isn't that absolutely insane now like now lebron james sleeps in like a hyperbaric chamber but like the guy who was basically the lebron james of his time was literally just like downing Bud Lights after games.

37:49And he was like so skinny and so pale, had the worst haircut, the shortest shorts. The best mustache. The best mustache, but he like kind of looked like a human version of like Big Bird and he just killed it. And he's considered one of the top five. Yeah, that guy's amazing. He gives the weirdos hope. Hey, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They're the fintech of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. I myself use it for eight different companies. The reason why we all choose it is because it has everything you need under one roof. So like my e-commerce company, it's super important for us to be able to easily wire transfer, pay all our different vendors and suppliers all around the world.

38:28And the old way with our more traditional bank that shall now be named, I try it online. It would say no. It would freeze my account. Then I'd have to go in, book an appointment, speak to a specialist who would try to upsell me on something I didn't need. And then finally, after 30 minutes there, then they charge me 50 bucks for the pleasure of that terrible interaction. and now with Mercury, I just go online, push two buttons, and I'm done. It's such a seamless experience. It's very intuitive. Everything's under one place. They basically took all the things any company would need for their financial tech, and they made it super easy to use and put it into one platform.

38:59So highly, highly recommend it. If you're not using Mercury, I question your judgment. So that's it. You've heard it on My First Million. For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details. This story is amazing. Hugh Hawley. that's a good story. Do you want to do one or two more things? Yeah. My shill. Use Shepard. It's great. You need to hire somebody? Go check it out. It's how I hire a bunch of people. If you want to hire people like I do, use Shepard. How's that? There was no thrill in that shill, but I kept it short.

39:34Do you have one more thing? Oh, well, I guess we didn't talk about this. This is kind of cool. James Clear just launched an app yesterday, which I think was the stimulus for this whole thing that we didn't talk about. Andrew Wilkinson partnered. Andrew Wilkinson, our friend Andrew Wilkinson, he put out this tweet where he said, we partnered with James Clear. Tiny owns 40%. James owns 60%. We made this app. I actually didn't look at the app. It's a productivity app or a habit tracking app? Yeah. What if it was just something completely different? It's just a social media app. It's just a network.

40:04It's a photo sharing app by James Clear. It's just some stupid game. It's like they recreated Snake from Nokia.

40:16by the way okay so let's talk about a couple things here great idea to release a habits app uh you want an app to be habit forming literally that's like only successful apps are ones that you use habitually so creating a habits app is a good idea there's lots of there's habits apps but they're not made by james clear so i think this is like no no brainer idea he just created anything that was a habit like just like some supplement or drug like i'm gonna get you addicted we're going to make this habit. Watch this. We're going to call it crack. So I think genius idea by him, maybe doubly genius idea by Andrew to pull this off.

40:53I think it's amazing what he's doing. He's done this now with Huberman. So he launched the Yerba Mate drink with Huberman, which I think is also a genius idea. I think what Andrew's doing now is the new playbook of what Chernin did. Remember I was saying like Chernin's playbook with the content to commerce. They did it with Barstool. They did it with Eater. They did it with a bunch of these media publications. That was a really good model. And it's played out over the last 10 years. I think what Andrew's doing now is going to play out over the next 10 years, which is he's partnering with these experts and authorities.

41:23And he's like, look, I already have MetaLab that can do the design, the engineering. I own a portfolio of businesses. I've made a billion dollars doing this whole thing. So let me find a CEO. We'll build the whole thing. You just have to promote it. And it's a perfect fit with what you do. I think it's just like such a good model. It's also really fun for him, right? Because he's going to get to hang out and rub shoulders with people who he likes and respects. He's got like a cool cocktail story of being like, oh yeah, we built the James Clear app. We did the Huberman drink. We did the whatever, right?

41:54They've done a bunch of these apps now. So I just think it's an awesome win all around. Like I'm really happy for him. We should have Andrew on to talk about it. But my prediction is that this won't make nearly as much money as some of his other boring things that no one would ever talk about. but it's cooler than all of the other ones. Like it's significantly cooler. It won't make as much money, but it's way cooler. Like to be able to like... I think this thing's gonna make a lot of money. Why do you think this is not gonna make money? Well, I just think that it's his other stuff just does so much better if I had to guess.

42:25I think the... If Palm can do like hundreds of millions on meditation, I'm pretty sure that you can get like 30, 40 million of ARR on a habit app. I think maybe you can, but Andrew also owns all these boring agencies that are like the thousandth most popular agency. And they also make many, many tens of millions a year in profit. No, no, no. If you add them all up, they do. But each individually does not, right? If you add them all up, they do. His agency. If you add up what he's going to do with Huberman, with James Clear, and the next five that he's going to do like this, those are going to add up to be much bigger.

42:59The Huberman drink is a brilliant idea. That is a absolutely brilliant idea. The James Clear app, like he's getting the right type of things. Like you don't want necessarily primarily the A-list celebrity. Because the A-list celebrity, for every George Clooney or Ryan Reynolds that you get that have a hit, there's tons of others that they don't really care about promoting it. They're too busy, but it's not a fit. They don't have a direct relationship with their audience because they're actually in Hollywood. They're not have a direct channel through social media. And so the people that he's finding are like, this is meaningful for them.

43:32It's a perfect fit with them. They have a direct relationship with their audience. and they have it like, they have like love from their audience. It's not just like people who are fans of them. It's people who have deep trust in them. And I think that that is a, I think he's picking the right influencers to do these shows. I would bet that he's going to make hundreds of millions off of these plays. If you add up the three to five that he's going to do in this category, I would bet that that's a three to three, like a$300 million prize. I guess we'll have to have him on and ask him about it. He's like a spider, man.

44:03He's like an octopus. He has his tentacles all over the place. I see this. I'm like, how the fuck did you weasel your way into that thing? He knows everything. He knows everyone. I don't know how he gets his fingers on all these things. I'll be like, hey, where's our email? We're influencers, Andrew. Where are you at? Where's our offer? He also plays dumb with me all the time. I'd probably be like, hey, have you heard of this guy named Huberman? I've been loving his podcast. And Wilkinson will be like, yeah, I think it's a nice podcast. I also enjoy it. And then like weeks later, like, yeah, we partnered with him and launched this company.

44:37Yeah, but we're on this deal for 18 months. Yeah. I'm like, okay, like he does that. He does that kind of on a regular basis with me where I'll be like, if you heard of this thing, it's kind of neat. And I'll be like, yeah, I agree. That is neat. He is a super networker. He is a absolutely like incredible networker. I am. I am. I admire his networking skills. Like he's like, cool. I like Bill Ackman. Now I'm friends with Bill Ackman and he's an investor in my company. Oh, Charlie Munger's my hero. Years later, I'm having dinner with Charlie Munger and he's offering me XYZ. It's like he is really able to, when he puts his mind to it with who he wants to meet, he is able to make that shit happen.

45:14And I think he does it in a way that's mutually beneficial. It's not like most people when they're like, oh, I want to meet this person. It's like just begging for time or attention in a way that's not additive to the other person. I think He's fascinating in the way that he's able to. But he also turns a weird networking opportunity into real businesses. Usually, more often than not, when I meet people, I'm like, that was nice to meet you. I'll see you never again. This is awesome, right? High five. That's where my brain stops. What a guy.

45:55That's exactly how I am. I'm literally like, you know, dumb and dumber when he's walking out of the 7-Eleven. And he's like, big gulps, huh? All right, catch you later. That's me at every networking event. Same. That's exactly how I am, where it starts and ends right there. It's just like a passing memory. And yes, Andrew somehow makes it into money and turns it into dollars. I don't know how he does it, but he's very good at it. He told one story on the pod where he was like, I wanted to meet Dan Gilbert. I met Dan Gilbert. And then they had this challenge with this, or he had a product. I have a design agency.

46:25So we just made him a website for free. That was really nice. Because he'll use that as his currency to like, you know, hey, I think you're awesome. And we did this thing. This is awesome, right? Oh, it's because my agency is awesome. Because I'm awesome. And he just uses it to sort of like open the door. He'll put in the work basically. And he'd be like, oh, whenever you're free, I'll fly there and let's, you know, I'll meet you. You know, I'll make the effort to come make this happen. The takeaway is to have an agency. To either have like an agency or like a sick house. It's like, oh, you're in town?

46:54Come stay in my home. And then, you know what I mean? You have to have like some like awesome excuse. Should I do that? Anytime someone's trapped, I'm like, oh, do you want to stay in my house? And I just rent an Airbnb. They're just absolutely indebted to me. Well, it's kind of a good tactic. Chris Saka said that he had this house in Truckee and, you know, he would like lure, which sounds weird, more weird than it actually is. Right. He would lure these like interesting founders. A white van in a house in Truckee.

47:22Come to my bed. Yeah, I got AWS credits. Come over. and even like get these guys to come up and to become friends with them and it was like they're like well i would love to hang out in truckie and just what happens you have a house and that's how we become friends with them but maybe having a great line about it he goes uh when i lived in san francisco i was just constantly getting like meeting requests or event invitations and it was like a good problem to have but it's still a problem he's like i was playing defense i was just reacting to whatever was going on he's like when i moved to truckie then i played offense i would figure out who who it is that i want to actually spend time with and then i would proactively plan and like set it up so that Travis Kalanick came for the weekend and stayed with him.

47:58He's like, we're not going to just get coffee. We're going to hang out for a weekend. And like for every 50 coffee meetings I do, like one weekend is just so much more powerful than 50 coffee meetings. And so he's like, we hang out, we spend time together. They meet my family. We chill in the hot tub. We brainstorm in the morning. Then later that evening, a new idea comes and I'm just very helpful for these people. That's how he did his Uber investment. He did the same thing with the founder of Instagram. That's how he did his Instagram investment too, was he invited Kevin Systrom to come stay at his place in Truckee and he stayed there for whatever, a few days, a week or whatever it was.

48:30And by the end of that, they were kind of bonded. And I think that was, Chris Saka did a lot of cool things and that's definitely one of them. I don't know if a three-bedroom place in the burbs is going to do the trick. I think both of us are going to have to step it up. Can I interest you in Walnut Creek? Yeah. we'll go to Safeway we'll come back it's like the only appeal you like marble countertops I got I got marble countertops like alright is that it is that the pod that's the pod I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on the road let's travel never looking back

49:20Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter, they shape us. And as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. And trust me, I've been there. Clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

49:50If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit Mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column N8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.