Mastering the Book Game: Charlie Hoehn's Playbook for Self-Publishing Success

29:27It's almost an insult to the person, right? They feel kind of on the defensive. So play it away. I think there's probably better variations of this, right? But it performed better than that because of that reason. And you bring up an important point. So a lot of people with anxiety might see a book, how do I cure my anxiety, and say, oh, I have to buy that. But the most important ways that books really spread is through word of mouth. So someone says, oh, I've read this amazing book you have to read how I cured my anxiety, but you're, to your point, it's not going to spread that way because it's an embarrassing, Oh, Oh, great.

30:14Thank you so much. I'm going to read it. Like people don't necessarily want to identify themselves as anxious. I mean, I have no problem with it. You have no problem with it, but a lot of people do. So, so you have to have a book that, Oh, you got to read million dollar weekend. That's fun. It's curious. It's kind of a pattern disrupt in that, oh, it's not really a way to make a million dollars from scratch in a weekend, but okay, what's his formula here that he's going to get there?

30:43And that fear of missing out phrase is interesting. I guess with Million Dollar Weekend, if everybody was making a million dollars in a weekend, I could see one would have a fear of missing out. Right. Yeah, well, the other ones that it scored against It's like, does it have a tight contrast? Does it evoke questions? Does it kind of give you that head tilt? Feels novel, right? So million dollars, one concept, weekend is another. These do not tend to clash with each other. Yeah, like four-hour workweek is like that. Right, which, by the way, the four-hour workweek in my scoring criteria, I've tested hundreds of titles in it.

31:24Four-hour workweek is the strongest title, number one. Wow, wow. And he had a different title initially. Yeah, drug dealing for fun and profit. He had a number of other ideas that didn't test anywhere near as well. But four-hour work week was, I think, at least double the runner-up, similar to Choose Yourself. You know, what I think was, yeah, what I think was interesting with Choose Yourself is that a lot of people hated the concept because they thought it might be selfish. So I think if the title also evokes controversy, then, you know, it's like, Like Naval Ravikant once told me this, that you don't want three-star reviews.

32:02You want a lot of five-star reviews and one-star reviews. Yeah. Like you want people to love you and hate you, not be mediocre about you. Right. And so that's another part is can people talk about it whether they want to read it or not? And so with the four-hour work week, it's a perfect example because people have visceral reactions to it where they're either super excited or they're actively angry. Like that's impossible. This guy's a scam artist. They are already emotionally worked up. So does it evoke an emotional response is a really good indicator of a good title. What about like Malcolm Gladwell books, like Outliers, for instance, or The Tipping Point?

32:44Well, I guess all of those are like, or Blink, you know, all of those are aspirational too. Like, can I be an outlier? Or can I judge someone just in a blink of an eye? or can I, is my company or is my life hitting a tipping point? So there's some aspirational quality to Malcolm Gladwell's books as well. What about Freakonomics? Freakonomics is fun to say. It's a fun concept, right? And for something that's so boring, it's like those two freaks in economics, they do not come together often, right? So I would say that's super strong on that front. and what other what other what other book titles do you like oh man atomic habits yeah it feels like a boring book title though i don't know it's solid it's it's not amazing but it's it's strong right and so like in the in the habits area maybe i like charles duhigg's title the power of habit better yeah that actually performed better and both of those books by the way have sold almost like it's it's in the grand scheme of things it's not that significant of a difference in how many copies they've sold they both sold incredibly well and so you brought up Malcolm Gladwell's titles those are real punchy titles that they almost contain the story they almost beg the story from the title alone right and so you know it it's funny you say that like so Nassim Taleb I love his titles.

34:17And in my last book, I even have a chapter. Basically, you don't have to read Nassim Taleb's books. You just have to read the title because he does the same thing. Like anti-fragile, you could understand the concept of the whole book, which is a very creative book. You could understand the whole concept and even enact it in your life just by really thinking about the title or the Black Swan or Fold by Randomness. Like these are all, the story is contained, The concept is contained completely in the title. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like a good title practically gives away precisely the transformation that you're going for or the understanding that you're trying to harness into your life.

35:19So I'm trying to think of books I've written that didn't do as well as I expected. Well, skip the line. My last book, it did well, but not as well as I expected. And the title maybe is a little boring. It's a little too easy somehow. It doesn't really challenge you. Yeah. So give me a second. I'm going to actually look up all the criteria. So we have it and I'll try and run it through my books ratings uh system while we're so skip the line was one and then choose yourself and then you had reinvent yourself you've had a ton of books but i'm just curious what it'll yeah rank these uh the the power of no did did well yeah that's a good title the power of often is is very good and so in similar like that goes to the contrast right is it's the power of something very simple that doesn't seem powerful.

36:08Same with like the war of art, right? I was, I was thinking about, I was talking to my wife yesterday as saying, I think a good title for a book, it would be the war of joy, where you always are trying to get yourself into that state and stay in that state. And it is a choice oftentimes, right? But you are at war still, especially when you have kids who are, you know, throwing you into an array of chaos and, you know, there's stressful moments, all this stuff. So, all right. So, uh, skip the line, had a decent score. Um, and so why do you think that book didn't perform very well or as well as your others, I should say?

36:50Yeah. I mean, it was, it was the first book I had done in a while with a traditional publisher. And so I wasn't able to do my normal marketing things as easily, but I don't really know. It was, I think actually it was my best written book. So I don't really know it to be honest, why it didn't do as well, except I just didn't do as much marketing for it as I normally would. It was, it came out in 2021. So there's a COVID thing, but I didn't even like, I didn't even call up people and say, Hey, can I come on your podcast? I just didn't do my usual stuff. And I don't know why it didn't, it wasn't like a huge bestseller.

37:25I felt it should have been, but it wasn't. Do you think it's just simply reflective of at that period of time, you didn't really feel like going into doing all this stuff? And so usually you're the one who can... I always think of a launch as like you're just lighting as many sparks as you can and hoping it catches fire, but you don't know if it will or not. Yeah, so to be honest, this was like in the aftermath of that New York City is dead article. And I let that, that the reaction to that affect me more than I should have. And I was a bit, let's even say depressed and I just wasn't doing anything.

38:05Like I didn't leave the house. Yeah. Should have is, is a strong word. I think any normal human being would react. I like the fact that you were able to get through it is, is great because to, to go through what you went through is really hard. And I think people don't realize how difficult that level of criticism is unless you've had already thousands of arrows in your back from little comments on YouTube, little comments in the blog. It's like those all kind of, you don't know how like the blood draining from your face down to your feet feeling is until you've experienced something like that.

38:46So my hat is off to you. I don't think you should have being able to get through that any faster than you did. So that one beat yourself up. It's unfortunate. I had two books come out during that time when I was basically depressed from this and neither did that well. I did zero marketing for all of it. And I did zero business stuff. Other than the podcast, I basically, other than the podcast and starting to play chess again, I basically did nothing. Yeah. I mean, it was a draining time. I don't honestly blame you for that. That's tough. And yeah, I mean, book launches are a lot on their own, much less or much more so after a global pandemic and an icon basically attacking you in a public forum.

39:40Yeah, it was weird because most people I would say, and my listeners have heard this, But most people, I would say, loved the article, except for all the people I knew and was close to. Oh, yeah, everyone in New York, right? Yeah, and my family and Seinfeld. I lost a lot of friends and family. Do you think it's because they identified with it? Do you think it's because they identified so strongly with New York that it felt like just a personal attack?

40:16maybe and then and then what happened is that uh but then it tied into all sorts of other things so like when joe rogan mentions it or rush limbaugh read it word for word on his show you know i didn't i didn't know rush limbaugh i didn't ask him to do that but then people in new york obviously thought oh this is uh some alt-right-wing opinion about new york it must be Like you, you are the company you keep. So that would create another wave of attacks. And, you know, I owned a comedy club that was vandalized. Jay, the producer on this podcast right now is, uh, it was, was, you know, harassed physically and, you know, just lots of things happen.

40:55Family members would write articles against me and it's just, it was just a weird thing. So I really kind of, I didn't, and I had been attacked before I've had controversial articles before, but this one somehow everybody knew how to press the right buttons and I fell apart for a little bit. I get it, man. Yeah. I've had heroes of mine dissect my stuff as well and poke flaws in it and kind of question me or my character and which is hurtful because you, you try and do things with an intention behind them of balancing, hey, I'm trying to be helpful or to state my truth. And at the same time, balancing what you know about, will this get any attention whatsoever or will it just be completely lost?

41:49And so I remember the feeling of terror I had after the Vegas shooting where I wrote an article about why men keep doing this. Basically, it was something to that effect. And that article went viral very quickly. And I was terrified of the reaction to it, which was by and large positive, but the negative ones were frightening, right? Right. And so you only really hear the most from the negative ones because everyone else is a normal human being and goes on with their lives. Whereas the negative ones, they sort of get attention from how negative they are. Right. And that's how our brains are hardwired, too, is to look for the threat and to look for the attack.

42:37And so that's why everybody only remembers their one star ratings and not their 105 star ratings. It's like, oh, you only remember the attack. And so I don't know, I've gained an appreciation for not coming down on people and trying to offer some level of constructive criticism because it takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there like that and make a bold statement that you know is a potentially painful truth. And I think probably if you'd said that at any other point, like that people weren't hypersensitive to the realities of the global pandemic, I think it was a timing thing. It was a zeitgeist.

43:21Yeah, which is why I wrote it, really. Like there was issues in a time of global emergency. There was issues that New York wasn't tending to. But anyway, I don't want to. Sure. I, you know, I've talked about this article a lot, but I do think that's why those books, I just didn't put any love and attention. I had already written them, but then they had to come out. You know, it takes a year for books to come out. And that's the benefit of self-publishing really too, is that you have an idea you're excited about. You write the book in a state of excitement and you literally can publish the book still in a state of excitement as opposed to waiting for a year and then like other things are going on in your life.

44:06And, oh, this book, I wrote this a year ago. I'm not that interested anymore in marketing it. That's so true. That is so true. That's a huge benefit of self-publishing. I don't really know what the benefit is anymore of traditional publishing, other than that feeling that, oh, they like me. Yeah, I talked with Nat Eliason recently and he - he's coming on the podcast in the crypto book he'll be a great guest for you you guys will have a lot to talk about but he had a nice kind of filter for it which is if you can't get at least a hundred thousand dollars from a publisher just self-publish and yeah that's that's absolutely right because then the publisher is not committed either yeah uh to marketing the book exactly and And it's also not going to make that much of a dent in your life.

44:59And the cost of self-publishing professionally used to be exorbitant. I believe they've fallen considerably if you know what you're doing. But that's the challenge, or that's another challenge in and of itself. But yeah, I largely agree with you about publishers. And I like them. I like the people. but I have just seen over and over that there's just not that significant of a value exchange. And I know that folks like some of the authors we've mentioned, right? Ryan Holiday, James Clear, Tim Ferriss, they would probably argue there's lots of benefits, right? Potentially their legal team defending you.

45:43But I don't know. I'm largely on your side. I think most people should self-publish and just do it as well as they can. Well, and it's interesting because you see, there was one phenomenon that I think still occurs. Like, let's say after James Clear wrote Atomic Habits and Charles Duhigg wrote The Power of Habit, and I think they were within a year or two of each other. Suddenly everyone realized, oh, the word, people are more interested in habits than we thought. So there became like a little cottage industry of people self-publishing 60, 70 page books about habits. And there was like hundreds of them.

46:20and they would all do pretty well actually oh really like so yeah there's there's a bunch of writers out there they they they publish like a book a month on whatever they think is like the hot trend like maybe now you know having the word millionaire in a book for million is is going to be a trend and and so i've noticed that happens occasionally you know like there would be people write books like the 60 second habit or you know nuclear atomic habits or whatever and uh uh so so there's also this industry of self-publishing really fast like you don't even have to care about the book you just publish like 100 books and some of them will do well and you make a living yep yeah it is a strategy and i know that that's a way that a lot of fiction authors have done it where they look at all right what are the leaders in the categories where the overall trends can i create a book with a cover that screams hey we're one of you and it's a very similar style.

47:19I haven't looked into that much from the nonfiction category because the volume seems like it's significantly lower. So I feel like there's less upside to doing it. But even more so, I don't know, I'm more fixated on can we offer something unique to this author that we're doing with this topic rather than just kind of a distillation and rehash? Have any of those books been noteworthy to you? No, zero, zero, zero noteworthy. Like it's what you're saying is you have to be an expert in the space, spend years and not necessarily a credentialed expert, but an expert, like someone who has life experience that makes you an expert.

48:05Like Ramit Sethi, I will teach you to be rich. From his college days, he was giving people personal finance advice. Like that's just what he did. And then he had a successful newsletter doing it. So he had a lot of experience knowing what issues were important to people and knowing what advice worked. And he wrote a great book. And you have to have that kind of life dedication to it, to write a book that stands out and becomes an iconic book in the category. All those other things are just moneymakers. So you're right. What you offer an author is that extra step of like how do they turn into something that people will read?

48:42because there's a lot of nuance to writing a good book, but then there's nuance to getting people to read your book. And there are a different set of nuances. Yes, yeah. And so to add to your point about Rameen, it's what Naval said, before you write a book, you have to become the book. And I think if you look at what Tim Ferriss did with the four-hour work week, he didn't claim necessarily to be the utmost expert in startups and entrepreneurship. he just came from a place of like, I had all these problems and this is how I fixed them. These were my recipes and how I did it. And so he could speak from such a place of authority.

49:23Tim's a genius, but he could speak from that strong place of authority. He didn't have to be brilliant. As long as you come from a place of like, I went through this, it was really hard for me. This is what helped me. That makes a great book. And that was what I did with Play It Away. I said up front, I'm not a healthcare practitioner. I'm not a doctor. I'm not an expert on this topic. All I know is what I got, what caused me to get here, and what helped me get out. And so when does someone, like let's say someone wants to write a book, how do they start thinking about what topic can they be the Tim Ferriss of, the Charlie Hone of?

50:06I think that's the place to start is, can you write a book for your former self? I think is the easiest kind of thing you can say is, could I be a hero to my previous self if I'd written this book? And that's why I actually wrote Play It Away and Recession Proof Graduate in 2008. I was desperately looking for advice that worked and nothing worked. And none of it was in the category that I wanted it in. That is such a great way to think about it. Like, that's kind of like how I did Choose Yourself. Like, I wish I had read that before I spent 15 years begging people to choose me instead of me choosing myself.

50:47Yes. So what book can you write your former self where the former self could become basically the hero if they follow the advice of your current self's book? Exactly. Yeah. And that's, it's kind of the paradox of these books that sell millions of copies is they're actually written for one person or two people maybe, right? And so the four-hour work week was written for two people. I hope they serve beer in hell, was written to impress four friends on an email thread. Harry Potter was written to entertain J.K. Rowling exclusively. She wrote those to entertain herself. And obviously, you know, the market comes in and affects things.

51:30But I think that's the strongest way to write a book. and the death of a great book is the person thinking during the production process, I'm going to change the world. This is a book for everybody. There is no such thing as a book for everybody. Right, and I think another, there are a lot of things that can kill ideas, but let's say someone says, oh, everybody already knows this. It's useless for me to write a book. And so let's say everybody has unique experience. So let's say someone, and I'm just going to take a topic I've seen a lot of people talk about. Motherhood is difficult, right? So being a mother is a hard thing.

52:11And everyone complains about their mothers anyway. So you know motherhood is a hard thing. So if someone loves being a mother, I can easily see them saying, I should write a book about being a mother. But oh no, no one's going to want to read this. Everybody's already written that or said something or I'm no expert. So there's a lot of ways to talk yourself out of it. But if you write your experience, it's going to be a great book. 100%. Yeah, absolutely. And it's like if you're worried about other people have already written this book, I mean, why do we listen to the national anthem? It's for many reasons, really.

52:50But like it boils down to we want to hear a new voice and we want to reinforce what we want to believe or what we need to hear, right? And so we want to be unified together. And so it's similar with books where it's like, I told somebody recently, they were like, I don't know, I'm just like, there's been a bunch of books written on this topic. Like, what else, what unique angle do I have to add to this topic? And I was like, I've literally read at least 25 books on your topic and not like an exaggeration because it's so interesting to me and I want to be the best at it. And so if your book comes out, I promise you I will read it.

53:28It's not going to sell 100 million copies, but it will sell a lot to the people who care about that topic and it will change them and make them want to work with you. and and that's there's a couple interesting things to unpack there too and it's it's like what you said about the national anthem why do we all listen to it again and again you're right we want to hear a new voice and hear it in a beautiful way that's unique but also we want to reinforce beliefs that we all have not just on ourselves we have these beliefs together we want to we all we let's say you go to a baseball game you sit everybody 40 ,000 people in this in the stands, sing it together.

54:08People want to be part of a tribe. And I think the goal of a good book too, is to build a tribe around your ideas. So the four hour work week built literally a very strong tribe around the idea that, Hey, there are better ways to work than the 40 hour grind that we've scheduled our lives around or for economics. Hey, here's a really cool way that we can all look at economics together and you could take into new situations and impress your friends looking at economics this way. Or, uh, you know, what's, um, oh, the million dollar weekend. Yeah. We're going to, Noah gives all these kinds of challenges in the book and Hey, I'm the type of person who reads the million dollar weekend and does these cool quirky challenges like Noah Kagan does.

54:59And you build a tribe around your book. Yeah. And I think a slight step back is that it makes people feel like they're not alone. You know, it's like, you don't have to necessarily go in with the intent of I'm going to build a tribe around this book, but more so this book is going to find the tribe that is fractured out there and feeling alone. And this will be this like unifying force of there are people like you with this problem who are trying to figure it out. And this is a calming solution right now, right? So I think of like the subtle art of not giving an F, I thought was perfect timing with the cultural zeitgeist of millennials feeling like the media did not match, traditional legacy media did not match the social media.

55:57And the problem was that people were dealing with the struggle of social media and the weird social dynamics that it created. And so the subtle art of not giving an F was just like Buddhism with a modern millennial spin. And it found and struck a chord with all these people who were like, I'm not necessarily looking for God as the answer, quitting as the answer. But I want to have an identity of a person who doesn't really care so much what other people think. And yeah, it was brilliantly timed with a title just as strong as the four-hour work week. And by the way, then suddenly there was a whole bunch of books with the F word and the title.

56:43Yes, that was the other thing. It created a category. And so to that not matching social media, legacy media, books were kind of stiff and you knew what you were getting and it was all kind of whatever. To my knowledge, it was the first book that did that. Can you think of a book that did that before it?

57:08I could think of one novel with the F word in it but it wasn't like the book and I'm trying to think if I could think of anything else. I can't really think of anything. Yeah. So I, I felt like it was a category leader in that regard and was automatically remarkable in a way that hadn't been seen. Yeah. So, okay. So let's say, but let's just, let's take it one step further. Let's say you really have a hard time. You want to write a book, but you have a hard time thinking what to write about. Is there any way to explore topics and see which one resonates with you. Yeah. So I like to think of what have you helped at least three people with or transform into?

57:54What is a problem that people consistently come to you asking for help with and paying you money to solve? Those can be great, right? Because it can add fuel to the fire that You already have, and you already have irrefutable proof that this is valued among other people, that it's not just you. And I think the common mistake I have made, and a lot of other people make too, is I'm just really interested in this notion right now, and I'm interested in a bunch of things. And I've done a bunch of different experiences. Maybe I should just pile everything into one book rather than what if you just had like one problem or one person that you were trying to help with one problem get to that outcome and it's your you have one solid idea that gets them there.

58:50You can have multiple steps in the process, but like there's one core idea for this one person in this problem. That's kind of how I think of it. Yeah, that's very good advice. So, okay, then what's the next step? You have to, you could write down your stories. You could write, or the next step always for me is just making a list of topics that fit under this broader topic and stories and experiences that I've had, not necessarily in chronological order. Yeah. And stories that I've read about other people that kind of exemplify the topic as well. Again, not in any kind of order because I actually appreciate sometimes things that are out of order and then you sort of weave them together in an unusual way.

59:35100%. Yeah, I do a few different things. So one thing that I do think is useful from the traditional publishing process is the book proposal where they make you look at comparative titles. I do think it's actually useful to put in Canva, okay, if this was on a shelf, what would the books around it be? you know um so i've done that for like tedx talks too is like what are the other tedx videos that this would be suggested with kind of thinking around that um and so that's that's one and then i agree with you a hundred percent where it's stories what are all the stories can i get like 25 to 50 stories on a on a piece of paper that are related to this topic and then i just like drawing a line of from here's where the reader is starting over here to this is the reader completely transformed.

1:00:32What are the most efficient steps to get them there? Usually between six to 12, because those are kind of conventional book lengths and they're things that we expect. Sometimes I'll preface and proceed that with, let's talk about your book business idea, right like your book business plan so to speak where how does this fit are you trying to make money with this thing or not and a lot of people are if they're not if they don't care they just want to get the idea out sweet skip that step and go into the next one but i think looking at positioning is useful and then i completely agree with you that the stories and then the steps well this is an interesting thing the the book business plan why should people write a book and now let's compare now to like 40 years ago or 50 years ago uh where there was no social media tv outlets were hard to come by like you couldn't just get yourself a tv show or a radio show and then there was sort of a reason to write a book that was like a path to to fame and a career and and and credibility and so on what are the reasons to write a book now as opposed to a LinkedIn article or a viral TikTok video or whatever.

1:01:48That can still happen, by the way, that they can break through. So books are magic, right? They're a product and they command your attention and respect and they still have that authority to them, especially if they're done well. People immediately have an air of respect and honor for a good book. And people at this point are very much conditioned, I feel, to seek a book for important problems that can't be resolved through like a YouTube tutorial. So the reasons I see that work really well for authors to write a book is do you want to raise your authority within your particular niche topic and your credibility?

1:02:41Do you want to have people automatically take you seriously? Just like a subtle thing that has made a huge difference in my life is it's kind of like, would you rather be at a networking event trying to introduce yourself cold or would you rather come off stage after an hour keynote and everybody in there kind of like knows what you do and they're interested? One, you're lifting, you're rolling a ball uphill each time. The other one, it's like piece of cake. Everybody's coming to you. There's that dynamic with books where if somebody has seen your book and read it, especially they come to you at a level of not just excitement to work with you, but like readiness.

1:03:23It's almost like if you have some type of business where it would be helpful for them to know your process, what it's like to work with you, what your values and beliefs are, it can make some of your best clients. And so, um, but you know, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that people fall into is they're like, I'm going to make my money through selling books. And I think it's the worst way to make money. Usually it is a way, yes, uh, but it is, it's a way, but I don't think anybody should really write a book for the money. even when you get a big advance, okay? Let's just hypothetically say, I'm gonna make up a number.

1:04:05You get a half a million dollar advance. The advance is usually broken into four parts. Like you get 125 ,000 upfront. You get 125 ,000 when you deliver the book. You get 125 ,000 when you publish the book. And then maybe you get 125 ,000 a year after that. I don't know. But it's scheduled out. An agent takes 20%. So now you're getting, I don't know, 97 ,000, something like that. And then taxes takes half. And so basically every couple of years, you're getting$50 ,000, which is great. But it's not like a light, even a half a million dollar advance, which seems huge, is not a life-changing experience.

1:04:50Yep, I agree. And so what I tell authors is like, if you can't give away your book for free and hate your financial goals, if you're using a book to actually like grow your business, then you have the wrong business model or like your offer isn't priced high enough or whatever. Just seeing, it was one of the benefits of working at Scribe was I got to see the authors that kind of like really did well financially and how with their book. And what was fascinating to see was there were many authors who made millions of dollars just giving their book away for free. And I'm not even talking about like the free plus shipping and handle Facebook ad funnels.

1:05:28I'm talking about literally didn't list it on Amazon, printed off a thousand copies, and then went to like law firms that catered to wealthy clients and just dropped their books off and asked them to hand them off. And so it's similar if like, you know that scene, Did you ever see the WeWork show on Apple TV? Do you remember that show? No, I haven't. I remember it, but I haven't seen it. Is it worth seeing? Yes, 100%. It's a great show. But there's a scene where the founder of WeWork, he just goes to, he figures out where the main investor of WeWork, the big one, I forget his name, but he goes to where he knows he's in the audience.

1:06:12He figures out how to get a speaking slot on there and then delivers a speech that is solely intended for that person to raise money. And he ends up making a ton of money from giving that speech. It's similar to a book where I'm like, look, if you only had like three copies of this in print, they never went on Amazon, but if you put it into the hands of the right people and you care about growing your business by this much, like assume one or two of those people convert and they become your clients. does that hit your financial goals? For a lot of authors, if they break it down, and consultants in particular, they do these big offers that are six figures.

1:06:59Yeah, it can be really profitable just to mail your book out with a letter. I think it's true. And you don't get, for whatever reason, there is a certain cultural significance to writing a book. It's a stake in the ground. It's an event that says, I am special in this area. A LinkedIn article won't do it. A YouTube video will not do it. No matter how great the YouTube video is, it just won't do it. A book, though, like a friend of mine is upset. He sold only a couple thousand copies of his book, but he was also just asked. Yeah, by the way, that's solid, but he's a little upset. But he also was just asked to give workshops in all these countries on the topics of his book.

1:07:47So he's got like this worldwide tour happening where he is the expert. He never would have gotten that without the book. Absolutely. Yeah. YouTube, I think, is the closest thing I've seen online to like having the staying power of a book. but nothing compares to if you want to have the respect of the types of people that you really want to collaborate with, work with, connect with. I made one of my best friends through, he read Play It Away, then he reached out to me. He's like, I've been a professional speaker. If you ever want advice, consider it repaid because you helped me a lot with this book.

1:08:30Yeah, I've had a lot of that as well. Yeah, writing, the writing of Choose Yourself, other than the book and any experience related to the book, just the friends I've made. Actually, the wife I made. Like my wife encountered me because she read Choose Yourself and then sought me out when she saw that I was speaking. She didn't know I was in New York City. There was an event I was speaking at, and she went, and that's how I met her. That's amazing. And I will double down on that and say the same thing with me. I'm married and our third kid's on the way in like two weeks. And I don't know if we would have gotten married had I not gone through that journey, first of all, right?

1:09:14And made that book. Her dad, my father-in-law, read the book while we were dating. And he was always kind of prickly to everybody else. But he read that and he was like, Charlie's not bad. Yeah, see? Yeah, there's a level of trust, especially if you do it in a sincere way where you're only trying to help the reader and you're not trying to take. I think a lot of books try and take and try and exploit, but the irony of that, the paradox of that as well is if you let go of that, you will get everything that you wanted if you just focus on helping, helping, helping.

1:10:06Now, what if the writer is not a writer? So a writer means you write a book or write a story, but also there's the other kind of writer, which is someone who develops the skills of writing. Everybody now thinks because they can publish every day something on a blog or whatever, everybody thinks they're a writer. but there's actually hard skills to write. You got to put in the hours and the time. You have to read a lot of books. You have to really study writing to be a good writer. Can you write a book without being a good writer? You know the answer to this question, but yes, you absolutely can.

1:10:44And some of the greatest books of all time have been spoken. And so we all have technology now that allows us to speak and have it instantly transcribed for cheap or free. and so it's something I require my authors who work with me to do now is to speak their first draft because so many great writers will say, yeah, you have to get that C plus first draft out. The first draft is shit. You know, Hemingway said it, Jordan Peterson said it. They all say it. But what I really admired was watching Brene or learning how Brene Brown did it, which she would rent an Airbnb, invite a bunch of her girlfriends to come drink wine and listen to her speak her book, her first draft of her book.

1:11:27And so you just get, if you're not a writer, you focus first on structure, like nail the table of contents. That's the foundation. Don't screw that up. That's an important part. But then give yourself chapter talking points. And as long as it meets kind of the general structure of chapters, which is you have a hook, you have a thesis, you have a body, which contains your stories and supporting content. And then you have the takeaways and a segue into the next chapter. If you can speak that in that order, you can get your first draft in 12 to 15 hours of speaking, right? And I would say, I like to say, speak it to your target reader if you can too, because then it's like a comedian being on stage rather than, you know, practicing in their apartment.

1:12:13It makes it more real. It opens up the dialogue at the end to, hey, that was really interesting. That was boring. I was confused. And so you're kind of testing the material as you're making it. But like the beauty of that is you can very likely speak 3000 words an hour and to get to a solid first draft, just get to 30 to 40 ,000 words and you just do the math. And so the result of that is it's eight times faster than typing. And the, the, I had to show an author recently because he went from, I have an idea for a book to finished first draft in 39 days. and I had to be like, he was like, this is awesome.

1:12:53Let's keep going. I was like, hold on. You just ran a one minute mile. I have to show you the quality of yours, which took place over 39 days versus the quality of a best-selling author's first draft, which took them years. And I think that's one of the biggest myths in writing books is that you have to do it in the way that we all have romanticized of sitting in front of a typewriter for months and grinding it out and hammering and hammering and being a tortured genius alone. I think it's totally wrong. I think the way that you produce books needs to be modernized and socialized so that it's a more rewarding and efficient process specifically for creating and writing the first draft.

1:13:37And then from there, if you're in editing mode, it gets fun. You can take your time and that can be a longer process where you make it great. But you need clay on the table before you start shaping it. Yeah, and you're right. So the key is you cannot judge anything at all in that first draft. Correct, yeah. And so many authors do that. And it's why it takes so long because you're editing while you are typing, which is taking a road trip with the emergency brake on the whole time. It's super inefficient and it doesn't guarantee a better outcome. I've seen it over and over. and and also you you know you've obviously worked with the scribe method and you've worked with many authors after that first draft again if you're not a writer with the skills of a writer there's no shame in using a writer to help you write your book 100 yeah i think what i recommend is i kind of teach here's how to self-edit and you should do at least two to three passes of your book kind of following these structures, like read it aloud.

1:14:43You can use Speechify to turn it into an audiobook that you can listen to if you want. But go through the act of self-editing. And then, yeah, there's literally zero shame in hiring an editor because books are team sports. Look in the acknowledgement section of any book. There's tons of people required to make it. And then I think, have you heard of helpthisbook.com? No. So it's a great site where you can use it to work with beta readers. So in the past, you had to use Google Docs and have everybody commenting on a Google Doc and it was kind of sloppy. With helpthisbook.com, they can highlight sentences and mark, this was confusing, or love this, or bored, or whatever.

1:15:26And then you can see it as data of, okay, these chapters are weak, this chapter is particularly strong, and you can dive in right into those sections. And so it's like 30 bucks. and it's a really useful tool to be able to see where your book is weak. And who are the beta readers? So this is an ad now to helpthisbook.com. I have no affiliation, but I think that they should have an upsell that pairs you with beta readers. Right now, it is your responsibility as the author to go find beta readers, which is generally speaking, it's a pool of people made up of topic experts all the way to complete novices who are just either fans of yours or just wanting to learn about it.

1:16:15And so the benefit of doing this is, and I never recommend skipping beta reading, not only will it make your book a lot better and prevent one-star reviews, or I guess two-star reviews, it will actually make these people feel like co-creators, which is a really important psychological shift that you need to have. Like, James, how many emails per month do you think you get being like, hey, James, I know we haven't spoken in 10 years, but I just wrote a book. What I'd love for you to do is buy a copy, leave a review and share this on social media today. And do you get those emails? I get them a lot.

1:16:57Yeah, right. And they don't work. And it's also like guilt inducing all of a sudden, It's like, where's this even coming from? But if you, it's almost a guarantee that I'm never going to talk to that person again. Because then I have to explain why I didn't read the book and spend the time writing review. Right. But, but I get why they do it and why it's so common because people suck at marketing and they're so isolated during the creation process. When in reality, you have to be inviting co-creators in because they're like exponentially potentially more likely to do the things you want them to do when your book comes out, if they feel like they had a hand in how good this book is.

1:17:38You know, another way, it reminds me of the technique I would often use, like I use this for choose yourself is basically, you know, I wrote articles on almost every topic and, you know, related to the concept of choosing yourself. and the way I beta tested each chapter was, was that article successful? And then I'd rewrite that article into a chapter in the book. Exactly. And so, you know, because the thing is, you can say, oh, well, that's not fair. It's just a collection of articles. No, it wasn't because I did rewrite everything to kind of fit into a book format, but also, so what? Right. Like not everybody who's read those articles is going to read the book and vice versa.

1:18:21And maybe somebody who read one article didn't read the rest. and there's different audiences for different things. Like it doesn't matter if you plagiarize yourself. Like just very few people are gonna even, they might not even remember, oh, I read this in some kind of, in a different format before, but then, okay, now there's the rest of the book. So they didn't really read it. So I found that was a good way. Like ultimately you can beta test and get feedback per chapter by writing it into an article first and then just rewrite what you want, take the best chapters, the most popular articles, and make a book out of it.

1:18:59A hundred percent. And I would say it's negligent to not do that because going back to stand-up comedians, literally all of them do this process. And if you see them twice in six months, they will tell you the same jokes usually, but there's variations, there's different beats. They've placed them at different parts of the set, et cetera. And that's the only way they can make a good set, a good hour, right? And it's the same with books. If you aren't testing this stuff, you're setting yourself up to have zero clue what the market is going to do when it's in their hands. Like often I would start off, I would go on Quora and I'd answer a question like, oh, what are the five best life hacks I can learn in 30 seconds or something like that?

1:19:46So I'd answer a question. And then if it got a lot of upvotes, meaning I helped people as per your earlier point. Like, can you, you know, have you helped people? So I would see which things got the most upvotes of my answers. I would write on Quora every single day. And then I would turn it into like, let's say an article and publish it in either, you know, any of a number of different places that I could publish. And then if it was popular there, I'd rewrite. And that would be kind of my process to getting a chapter into a book. It's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah, and so that's perfect. And another similar thing is YouTube retention graphs, right?

1:20:28You're trying to create a book retention rate that's high, that doesn't have a steep drop-off after the first page or the first chapter. You're trying to sustain them, right? And so if you don't test this stuff on individual slivers of ideas then the chapters and then the book itself you have no idea where that retention graph is going to be and very likely because a lot of authors just assume i got to spend the first part giving them kind of uh the history of this topic or like catching them up on the theory behind it it's like that's the most boring stuff and people are going to drop off immediately you have to treat it like Like they're going to give up at any time.

1:21:17Neil Strauss talks about this, of like any sentence they could drop off. And I think part of this, if you develop the skills of a writer, part of that helps you avoid some of these issues. Like if you have a skill at knowing how to keep readers going, and it's a skill you developed over tens of thousands of pages of writing or whatever, then that's fine. But again, most people don't have that skill. So these are excellent techniques to kind of skip having that skill. And so once you write the book, and let's say you self-publish, by the way, people don't realize still that self-publishing doesn't mean you print up a bunch of your books and you have them sitting in a warehouse.

1:22:01You just have to upload the document to Amazon and they print on demand for paperback books and so on. I will recommend you do Kindle, paperback, and at least audiobook because those are the ways, those are the three different ways people, audiobooks are more popular than paperbacks now. So you have to make an audiobook. You cannot skip that part of the process. But how do you now market the book? How do you suggest starting to market? Yes. So I'll add one more thing to your point. I think people get done with the book and they've spent some money and they're afraid to invest in the most important part of the book, which is the design, the cover.

1:22:43Yes. You know, that is a good point. It's, it's, I see it a lot where it's like you wrote a good book, but you paid the internal designer at your company who specializes in, you know, something completely unrelated to book covers to design your cover on the cheap, bad move. Like you should also like Amazon provides these templates, but I'm sure you could, I'm sure you could tell just by looking at a book, if it comes from an Amazon template, like I, you can always tell a book that's not professional, what I call professionally self-published and professionally self-published means you have to hire not just a designer, but a book designer.

1:23:25Yes. And so the best place to look by the way, is I need a book cover.com. It was made by a traditional book cover designer named Zoe Norvell. It's a brilliant service. She just consolidated and made a directory of the best book cover designers in the world. So you can connect with Pete Garceau on there, who did Adam Grant's covers, James Clear's covers, and he'll charge you several thousand dollars, but it'll be 100 % worth the investment. especially if you have people who are really high-end clients. You do not want a bad cover. Oh my God, I'm actually looking at this site right now. I am definitely going to use designers from this site.

1:24:16It's got My Struggle on there. It's got some of my favorite novels on here, actually. Oh yeah, and the brilliant thing about it, and this is what I noticed in video editing too, is people with good ideas fail to communicate them to creatives because there's such an information gap between what you think is good and what they think is good, what you think is right, what they think is right, what you think is wrong and what they think is wrong. And if you can't clearly articulate these things visually, you are... I heard the CEO of a major publishing house say, sometimes it takes us 20 rounds to get the cover right.

1:24:57And I'm like, that's a broken process, man. You know, like it's, it's a lack of a creative brief that's adequate for a professional designer. Yeah. And you know, I find a lot of the covers made by publishers to be not that good. Right. And I do think it's because of this, like they have the resources, they do invest. and just to give you an idea of like what it typically costs, I think to get a really excellent cover, I think you want to spend$2 ,000 to$3 ,000. If you want like Epic, you can spend up to$5 ,000 and the bare, bare minimum I would spend is$1 ,000. And so like in the grand scheme of things, it's not much, but it's literally the YouTube thumbnail for your book.

1:25:43People who make these great videos and then they'll make the thumbnail in Canva last minute as an afterthought, wonder why it only gets 100 views. It's like the packaging, man, it's the packaging. You should have invested in an amazing thumbnail and you'd have way more views. It's the same with book covers. So anyway, that's kind of a rant, but I think self-published authors in particular neglect it to their detriment all the time. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So, okay, but now marketing. Marketing, yeah. So again, I would be leaning into a kind of, can you get these people kind of involved, your following, so to speak?

1:26:26Are you having them vote on titles, covers, participating in surveys of like problems? And so once you're past all that, right, I think the next step is to think in terms of what are the proper incentives that will get people to buy this book in numerous copies. and numerous copies that make sense, right? And so don't just arbitrarily try to sell 1 ,000 copies. No one, generally speaking, wants 1 ,000 copies of your book. But you might speak to organizations that want 100 copies of your book at their next speaking event to give away for free. And so my colleague, Rory Vaden, who's brilliant at bulk sales, calls them bilfs, which is books in lieu of fee.

1:27:13and so it's like Tucker used to say this all the time at Scribe he said no one wants to buy your book they want to buy what your book gets them and so people are already paying you money for the thing that your book promises to get them most likely so if you can tie these bulk sales into what people are already wanting to pay you money for it makes it a lot easier is that clear? does that make sense? no so what's an example? An example would be you're a professional speaker. You get paid$15 ,000 to speak and you say, hey, I'm running a promotion right now where you can book me for a full keynote.

1:27:55And as a bonus, you get to have 50 books or 100 books to give to all the people in your audience. Because you're self-published, it is cheap for you to buy those books at a couple bucks a copy on KDP. And so you just use the profits, part of the profits to distribute and send out those books to them and give them as a gift. And so you're doing it as a self-published author that way because traditional published authors have to worry about bestseller lists and all that stuff. And it's a miserable game that I really hate to play. But as a self-published author, you can think of your book as a seed where you're just trying to get it into people's hands.

1:28:42And so if you can just couple that with the purchases that are already taking place, you're in a good spot. So Ryan Holiday, he recently did this for his upcoming book. I think he did packages of buy one book, buy five books, or buy 125 books. And they're good packages because they make sense to his kind of spectrum of readership, right? So one book might be, you know, you get a video message from Ryan and an early instant download. And you'd have to look it up, but I'm just guessing here. If you buy 125 books, you get access to a live in-person dinner with him and a small group of people. And so if you're running a company that you have 150 people there and you can give away those copies of the book, it's great.

1:29:40The reason you're doing this is because it's very difficult to sell 10 ,000 copies of a book to 10 ,000 individuals or one copy to 10 ,000 individuals. It's a lot easier to give them the option to buy multiple copies of your book that they can then distribute and give away on your behalf and you can end up selling more copies. But if you're a first-time author and you might not necessarily have that fan base yet, how do you get the word out even that you have these packages available or how do you get people interested in those packages? I would challenge you on that. If you're a professional, if you're an expert who's getting paid to do something that you've written your book on, you likely have connections on LinkedIn, Facebook, family, friends, et cetera.

1:30:29And then it's a matter of just making them available and telling those people about them. And I think it's kind of like your Kickstarter campaign built that audience for you. Exactly. Exactly. It was one of the big things I learned from that was that, and I'd seen it with the four hour body too, when we marketed that we did all these different packages. So I saw, yeah, we, we'd made this really outrageous, compelling package. If you bought 30 books and then another really good one, if you bought three and And then all of a sudden, those two packages were like, whoa, those are moving a lot of copies.

1:31:03We've got to double down and just promote these two. And so I think it's just that it's an easy way to move a lot of books and have people distribute on your behalf. But to your point, if you don't have a big following or an audience, I don't think it really matters. If you have people in your network that know, like, and trust you, you likely have a lot more than you think. If you go through your contacts on email and social and your phone, you have more people who want to support you than you think. That's definitely true. Now that I think about it, at every point in my life where I was writing books, I never really suffered for that first initial group of people who really wanted to read what I was writing.

1:31:46So if you use that to kind of sell more copies, that's doable. Yeah. So I think that's the easiest way. And it gets your investment in the book back usually if you're offering kind of higher tier things. And so often people are surprised. It's just a matter of sending those emails, right? If I told you, you can get all your money back and more before you've ever promoted or, I'm sorry, before you launch the book officially on a publication date, you can get an ROI, be like, great. Okay, that's going to require more than a dozen emails, maybe two dozen, right? Are you comfortable with that? Oh boy, I don't know, right?

1:32:25So it does require some element of work and communication, but it's worth it. People want to support you. The ones who don't, they can tap out. And so then what? Is there any kind of market? Do you recommend any kind of advertising? Oh, man. So it totally depends, I think, on your overall goals and your budget, right? So with traditionally published authors, it makes sense to play the horrible game of climbing Mount Everest and trying to hit the New York Times bestseller list, right? Where you have to sell 15 to 20 ,000 copies depending on the time of year. But if you're self-published, what do you do next?

1:33:08I think it goes back again to what do you want the experience to be? And generally speaking, a template that I've seen that works for authors pretty consistently is deciding on what is going to be a compelling, fun thing I can do on my launch date that I could share as an experience with my audience for an hour, right? And so I've seen this at the very, very high level, like Alex Hormosey doing his hour-long, I don't know if you saw, for$100 million leads, He did this world-class presentation. I don't know how many people they had signed up, but he's a self-published author. And I know they sold, I'm pretty confident they sold over 100 ,000 copies of that book just from that launch day alone.

1:34:07Wow. And they offered one book, three book, 10 books. And so they did a world-class presentation. And I think I've seen authors do all day long events where they're having people on as guests and they're streaming it and whatever. But I think it can be as simple as you do a Zoom meeting that you're genuinely excited about. And buying a book is just the ticket to go to this event. And so if you can give a great presentation on your topic that can really help people who are interested and care about it, and then at the end, you make the offer to, hey, if you buy the book, you can do these things.

1:34:47I'm only doing it for this week. thank you so much, and then follow it up with a series of emails. Generally speaking, you'll do pretty well. And so the average nonfiction author sells less than 1 ,000 copies over the entire life cycle of their book. So 20 years goes by and they've only sold like 700 copies. But they don't really do things to give it a chance at the beginning. They don't really take a stand and be like, it's my moral obligation to sell this to people because I believed in it so much that I worked on it for a full year, giving it my all. And you're just going to hope that people just discover this thing and believe in the message as much as you?

1:35:31It's literally such a huge barrier to that. And so Hal Elrod is a great example of an author who beat the drum of his own message for years and ended up selling, he's sold over 3 million copies now. But that first year, he did it full-time, 200-plus podcasts and sold 13 ,000 copies, I think, which is incredible for a self-published author, but also a far cry from a million. So it is a matter, I think, of how much do you really believe in this? If this actually saved your life and improved it so drastically and you know it works with others, why wouldn't you be your biggest fan? yeah and how's a great example where he really worked hard building a whole community around his book and around everybody who reads the book helping other people you know also who read the book yeah and and you're gonna love this if you didn't know it already this is my favorite example of a self-published author doing something really smart how continued the process of improving the book after it was published.

1:36:38And so every three, two, and one star review, he would take it in, go back to the manuscript, and fix that. And that is genius, right? And you can't do that with traditionally published. It's set in stone. You're done. You might get a chance on your 10 year anniversary to update it, but good luck, buddy, right? Self-published, you can do that. And so what I love about that is he treated it basically like software, like let's get in, fix the bugs, and then release a new update. I didn't know he did that. That's a great idea. That's the first time I've ever heard of anyone doing that. That is a really great idea.

1:37:17I also like how he almost franchised the book. Like he would then get other authors who are experts in their field. Oh, The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneur. I even wrote a foreword for The Miracle Morning for Writers. Like he, you know, kept on going with franchising the book. It was just really genius. Yeah, I love that. It's, yeah, once you get to a certain level where you can figure out other means of distribution and scaling it up, that's great. And so what's your next book? My next book is very likely going to be something to the effect of the million copies method or something along the lines of all the hidden DNA I learned from seeing authors who've sold millions of books.

1:38:05And so I gave like a two-minute talk on this at a conference and just to test the idea and it went really well. And the talk was effectively, I held up two books. I said, these two books are on the exact same topic written by credible experts with big online followings who hit the New York Times bestseller list when they came out and they promoted it on podcasts and traditional media and everything. This one sold 200 ,000 copies, which is amazing. And this one sold 15 million copies. And it was Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg and Atomic Habits by James Clear. And so I just talked about like, and I have respect for both of those guys.

1:38:49I'm not trying to rain on BJ. Books, great books. Yeah, they're both great books. But when you actually sit down and lay out, there really is kind of a hidden DNA to these books that you don't notice until you study them. And a lot of the best-selling authors that I've worked with study the structure of books and they study the user experience of books. And if you're not deeply familiar with those, yes, it can be hard to write a book that reaches a lot of people. And also, I looked at authors who've sold 100 million copies of their books. The average number, what do you think, of number of books they publish and the median number of books they publish?

1:39:35Someone who sold 100 million copies of their books? I would say the average and the median are kind of similar, but since you're asking it that way, it's probably different. but I would say on average they've sold about 50 books. 56. And the median I think was 165. That's interesting. Yeah, so when I learned that, it kind of also gave me a perspective of similar, I think you probably had when you were writing a book a year, is if I really want to make an impact, I can't just count on this being a hyper, hyper quality. Books like Mark Manson's and James Clear's are uber outliers, right? And James, you could argue, and both of them took the same path of writing, writing, writing, writing, writing online, testing, figuring stuff out, and then finally coming out with a golden book that they worked really hard on.

1:40:32Ryan Holiday did the same thing. His books, sales numbers dropped the first three books, and then he hit on stoicism, and sales went through the roof. And so I think it is like overall a numbers game. And can you just keep the wheel going and not count on this is my only shot at this game, but can you do it multiple times? Yeah, that's critical. And like you see this for fiction too. I mean, this happens most with fiction that you'll have like three, four, five, ten, you know, worst selling books before you have your first best selling book. And then it changes your life. Like Mario Puzo had two books that failed before The Godfather.

1:41:15And, you know, a ton of stories like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you're throwing it at a target. The million copies method. I like that. Thank you. So you'll definitely have to come on the podcast when that book comes out. And Charlie, such valuable information. And I'd also love to hear all your stories about the different writers you've worked with. and your experiences with them, like David Goggins and all that crew. So definitely come on again to talk about this. And I think this is such an important concept. It really still is equally important, as important as it ever was, to write that book and get that stake in the ground that here's who I am today.

1:42:02This is the book about it. And make it as good as possible. So this is really valuable. Thank you, James. And I'm looking forward to when your book comes out as well. Me too. I'm looking forward to figuring out how to finish it. You're doing the High Wire Act, which I always admire. Any creative act is a vulnerable one, right? But you're doing something new. And so I'm fascinated to hear how, have you decided on the finale, the ending, or is it still in the works? No, I haven't at all. And that's unusual for me. So this is a very new type of book for me. After writing like 24 books, this is like a new experience.

1:42:42Awesome. And I'm enjoying that aspect of it because the writing can go in any direction. And I know I have to tie it all together. So it'll be interesting. I'm excited for you, man. Thanks so much for having me, James. It's always a pleasure. Yeah, thank you, Charlie.

1:43:11Injury