Part 4: How to Write and Publish Your First Book in 30 Days – Self-Publishing, Traditional Deals, and Making Real Money

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1:13Steven, Brandon, and Bruno, the business owners of SandCloud, reinvested their 2 % cash back to help build the company's retail presence. Capital One, What's in your wallet? Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus Terms Apply. Many people debate, should I get my book published by a traditional publisher, like HarperCollins or Simon & Schuster or Random House, or should I self-publish? And for many years, for many decades, there was a stigma about self-publishing. It was called vanity publishing. You would pay a publisher to make a thousand copies of your book, and then you would hand it out to your friend and try to get it sold in a bookstore.

1:54By the way, some books were very successful that started off as banning me publishing. One example that I could think of is The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which eventually was published by a regular publisher and sold millions. But originally, he just printed up a bunch and was handing them out. And self-publishing is when, in a nutshell, you upload it to Amazon, you upload it to barnesandnoble.com, maybe you upload it to Apple Books, and you yourself are the publisher. I'm going to focus on that kind of self-publishing versus traditional publishing. We're not going to be talking about vanity publishing at all because there is no need for you to pay a dime to publish your book, except for services that we'll talk about in a second.

2:37But even then, we're going to do this on a shoestring. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

2:54First up, what are the benefits of traditional publishing using a HarperCollins? And I would say of my 25 books that I've written, about half of them were traditionally published. I've published with HarperCollins a few times. I've published with Hay House. I've published several books with Wiley. I've used other traditional publishers, and about half of my books are self-published. And I'll get down to the specifics of how well they've done in a second. But the benefits of traditional publishing are, in some cases, you get in advance, meaning they might say, Jack, here's$5 ,000, go write your book.

3:35And the first$5 ,000 that you would have made through publishing your book with us, we get to keep. We'll give you the money in advance, so we get to keep it when it comes in. And then every dollar that comes in after that, you get 15 % and we get 85%. So that's a typical traditional publishing deal. Now, are advances big or small? I will tell you, for my first three books, all my advances were between$5 ,000 and$10 ,000. So not a lot, even though they sold very well. My first book was more in the finance space, and it was considered a bestseller. Some publications had listed it as one of the best financial books ever written, but it still didn't make my next advance any higher.

4:18My next advance was about$10 ,000. And you get that advance in parts. You get the first part when you sign the contract. You get the second part when you deliver a draft. You get the third part when the hardcover comes out. You get the fourth part years later when the paperback comes out or something like that. I have received good advances, but that's only after I had millions of followers in social media. And I want to state even then, advances in general throughout the industry have been going down. Every year, the average advance gets lower and lower. And again, the average advance is zero.

4:52So even if you're used to a$10 ,000 advance, your next advance with the traditional publisher might be$3 ,000. So advances are getting lower and lower. So what's the advantage of going with a traditional publisher? Well, traditional publishers will say, we'll get your book in bookstores. But ultimately, the only big bookstores left are Barnes & Noble. So there's a Barnes & Noble in every major city. Barnes & Noble was criticized for a long time because they were driving out of business independent booksellers, just like Amazon now is driving out of business Barnes & Noble. But okay, there's Barnes & Noble, there's bookstores in the airports and so on.

5:31Can the publisher get your book into Barnes & Noble? Yes, but it's up to Barnes & Noble. The publisher doesn't make the decision. Barnes & Noble makes the decision. And a lot of people don't know this, but Barnes & Noble charges publishers in certain cases. When you walk into a bookstore and you see a table that says new books, chances are every book, the publisher of that book paid for that book to be on that shelf. It's not so easy for publishers to get your book into every bookstore. And airport bookstores, for instance, I believe an airport bookstore, and this price changes and it depends on timing and it depends on the airport.

6:12But airport bookstores usually charge about$20 ,000 to be in a chain on the East Coast and maybe the West Coast. Hudson Books is the chain that's in many airports. You have to pay about$20 ,000, maybe more, maybe less, maybe it's per month. I don't know all the details, but you have to pay to get your books in there if you're a publisher. And most books, again, the statistics change every day. Look this up for yourself. Most books are sold via Amazon. And I'm not talking about Kindle books, but paperbacks, hardcovers, audiobooks. In fact, audiobooks are incredibly important. And, you know, Audible is the main place people buy audiobooks.

6:48And you could just make your own audiobook and upload it to Audible. No problem. You could do that for free. Again, I am not sure about the benefit of a traditional book publisher. Now, that said, I think, again, self-publishing has had some stigma in the past. So it's nice to have a traditional publisher. It's nice to be chosen and feel like, oh, you know, Penguin Books likes me or Simon & Schuster likes me. But you have to figure out what your goal is. Is your goal to sell a lot of books? Is your goal to make a lot of money? Or is your goal to win a lot of prizes and bestseller awards? Let's talk about the bestseller list for a second.

7:31Very rare for a self-published book to get on the bestseller list. Now, it's not impossible. I've had several self-published books like Choose Yourself and the Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth, make it to the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. But in general, bestseller lists usually only have books published by the mainstream publishers on the bestseller list. The New York Times bestseller list, I don't know if they ever have a self-published book on the New York Times bestseller list. By the way, the New York Times bestseller list isn't the best-selling books. It's just a list of whoever the employee is at the New York Times who makes that list.

8:08It's just a list of books that they think are the best. There's no metric by which they decide what books go on the New York Times bestseller list. So there are companies out there that you can pay who will call those people up at the New York Times and lobby for your book to be on the bestseller list. And I know one guy, he's 71 books out of 71 that he's managed to get on the New York Times bestseller list. whether they sold well or not. So a lot of this stuff in the traditional industry, I consider kind of BS. But the most important reasons why I love to self-publish is I'm in control of the whole process.

8:45I'm in control of the design. I'm in control of the title. But even more importantly, I'm in control of the marketing and the pricing. And pricing and marketing go hand in hand. Maybe I want to price the Kindle at 99 cents for a while to build up a large audience of people who've seen the book. And then later they'll want to buy the paperback or the hardcover as a gift. Or because so many people bought it at 99 cents, it will get a lot of reviews. Then word will get out. Then I raise the price. A traditional publisher will never let you do that. They'll never let you publish the e-version at 99 cents to get a large amount of users.

9:20They just don't think that way. When they publish a book, the most important time for them is the first few weeks. And then usually they just forget about your book. So they're going to price it at the maximum price they think they can, let it run for a week, and then they forget about you. When Choose Yourself came out, I was selling it as a hardcover, paperback, audiobook, and a Kindle. So I think I had the paperback at$9.99, maybe I had the hardcover at$19.99, the audiobook, I had about$12, which was the lowest you could price it, and the ebook or the Kindle version I had for$0.99. And it was doing very well.

9:53But then one person called me and said, listen, I have an email list of millions of people and I would like to sell your book on my list, the hardcover version, but we need you to write a few extra chapters. We need you to not price the Kindle version so cheaply just for a week or two while we sell it to our list. And he listed a couple other things he needed. So I wrote a couple of extra chapters. Again, something that would never happen with a traditional publisher. raised the price on ebook to like$30, something like that. He sold the hardcover for$20 per book, even though he had them printed for$2 per book because I was involved in the process of how he printed up the book.

10:35And he split the revenues with me 50-50. So after two weeks, he sold 100 ,000 books for$20. We made$200 ,000, sent me a check for$100 ,000. Again, this would never happen with a traditional publisher. I was completely in charge of my own marketing, all the deals I made, all the special marketing ideas that I had. And we'll talk about marketing in a second. So self-publishing for me has resulted in more copies sold and more money made. And also, by the way, and this is very important for people who are trying to write a book in 30 days, you also control the timing. So with this book, and I love the publisher, I love the editor.

11:17They were really good to me. But when I signed the deal for this book, it was in mid to late 2019. I think it was around October 2019. The book didn't come out till April of 2021. So it's like a year and a half later. That's annoying. I really dislike that part. But I've self-published books. Sometimes I have the idea on a Friday, or at least in one case, I had the idea on a Friday, I self-published by Monday. When you can control the timing, there is so much freedom in that. And so I recommend self-publishing. Let's talk about the stigma for a second. Are self-published books worse than traditionally published books?

11:55So a friend of mine, Hugh Howey, he is the author of the science fiction series, Wool, and he's been on my podcast. He once did a study. In general, on Amazon, do self-published books have higher star rankings or lower star rankings than traditionally published books? And he found that self-published books actually have slightly higher rankings, meaning the readers think they're higher quality than traditionally published books. He also counted the number of reviews. And self-published books, on average, tend to have more reviews than traditionally published books. And they also had slightly higher ranks, on average.

12:29Not the highest ranked ones, but on average, self-published books had higher ranks on Amazon than traditionally published books. So self-published books were actually higher quality and sold better. I think that's got a long way to removing the stigma. Also, just make up the name of a publishing company. And it's not like when you hand someone your book at a party or someone you meet. No one has ever asked me, well, wait a second. Before I take this book, who published it? Who was the publisher? Was it Viking or was it Penguin or was it HarperCollins? No one's ever asked me if a book was self-published or not.

13:03But I am really happy to discuss and recommend self-publishing. Not against traditional publishing. There are benefits, but I think I went over all the benefits and pros and cons. And to me, the pros and cons of self-publishing are a little bit better. So the timing, the marketing, the ability to price, the ability to control the entire design and editing process and so on. Now, traditional publishing does give you a really great editor, but those editors, they're busy with 30 other writers. So you're not quite sure you're getting their full attention or not, but you might be. I don't know. So again, you decide, but for the purposes of this self-publish, it has a lot of benefits and my own personal experience, I've made more money and have sold more copies and more people know about my writing because of my self-published books than my traditionally published books.

13:57And again, I'm about 50, 50, 50 % traditionally published, 50 % self-published. Being an entrepreneur is a 24 seven job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing there, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

14:35And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. We're spending more than ever. I hate my job. The price of everything has gone up. AI is threatening my job. It's crisis after crisis.

15:13Nothing is working out. I can't find a job. We're one disaster. Take control of change. I need a change. Disruption is the force of change. Stop the chaos. Stop the madness. Take control. Read James Patterson's Disrupt Everything and Win. What do you do when you finish the book? Well, first off, don't forget to celebrate. It's very important to celebrate these small successes along the journey. You don't want to get too anxious immediately about what the next steps are and how many copies this will sell and who will get upset at me and how much money will I make. You wrote a book. This is great.

15:57Congratulations. And again, don't forget to celebrate it and enjoy that moment. Now, what do you need to do next? Well, you've written the first draft And the first thing I would do is make a second and third draft, meaning do some of the suggestions I have said earlier. Read the book or at least parts of the book out loud to see how it sounds and feel if there's any moments that you feel cringeworthy and feel if anything sounds funny. And then go through and do some of the techniques I recommend. And first check the FK score of the book and of the different chapters, which chapters are more readable than others and how you can edit them to be a little simpler.

16:38And then one technique I mentioned is go to each chapter and take out the first and last paragraph and see what it reads like. Maybe even take out the first chapter of the book and the last chapter of the book, see what it reads like. Just experiment with these different ideas that we've spoken about before and read through the book. Some things will stick out at you right away. Like, oh, I wrote about that in this chapter. I don't need to include it in this chapter. And you'll start editing. Do your first edit, your second edit. Make the language as simple as possible. Again, check the FK score.

17:09But now we have a serious first draft. What do you do next? Here's what you need to professionally self-publish your book. And we're going to do this on a shoestring budget. So here are the people you need. You need a line editor. A line editor is someone who will simply check the grammar for you and fix the grammar. You need a book editor. What's a book editor? Well, a book editor might say to you, hmm, maybe this chapter belongs here. Maybe this chapter belongs here. You don't really need this story here, but maybe you need a better story here. So a book editor will have real questions about the book that they'll write all over the book and you need to respond to them.

17:47Explain this better. You explain this too much. Tell a better story here. Or this story is not so clear to me. Or why is this story in this section? Or why is this section coming after this section? So you want a good book editor. Then you need a cover designer. Now, there are plenty of places where you can get a free cover done, even on Amazon. They have a whole process where they can give you a free cover. But I wouldn't do that. I would use a professional cover designer. And then this is a category many people forget, but you needed an interior book designer. So what does an interior book designer do?

18:22They look at the font of the book. They look at the margins around the pages. they figure out what kind of pages you need, what should be the color of the pages. You know, there's very small differences. Is it white? Is it manila? And so on. So you need an interior book designer. And finally, I do encourage you to make an audio book. I still get checks every month from Audible on books I wrote 10 years ago. There's over 200 million readers of audio books. I don't know if it's the United States or the world, but it's quite a big number because often the checks and royalties I get on audiobooks are bigger than I get on paperbacks or hardcovers or ebooks.

19:03So audiobooks is a big and growing category, particularly people listen to audiobooks just like they listen to podcasts. They listen to them on the commute to work. They listen to them in the gym. So these are times when they can't be watching something. You know, it might not be readers, but this is an opportunity for them to quote unquote read a book by listening into the audio book. So you want to do a professionally done audio book and we'll discuss that in a second.

19:31Congratulations again, because by the time this section is relevant for you, you will have written, produced, and published your book. So what do we do first? Again, be happy about it, celebrate, go out to dinner, take your loved ones out to dinner, Feel good about yourself. If anything, you could stop right here knowing you've done a quality book that is going to be read by people. You could send that book out to your customers or clients or depending on what you do, to family. Again, there are many ways to monetize writing a book, the least of which is making money from your book. So you could use your book to perhaps get consulting gigs, to perhaps get speaking engagements, to start a podcast.

20:17Many, many things. But right now, let's talk about some basic ideas for marketing your book. And again, there's no magic formula that this is the best way to market your book because if there was such a magic formula, everybody would have a bestseller. Some of it's a combination of right time, right place. Some of it's a combination of luck. Some of it is about how much preparation you put in advance of the book publishing. and by advance, I mean maybe years in advance, you start blogging or speaking or podcasting about the topics of your book. Let's talk about what you could do right now to market your book.

20:56The number one most effective method to market your book is through an email list. Actually, before I even say that, the number one way possibly to market your book is having ideas to generate publicity. But let's put that aside for a second. I will talk about that. But the number one most effective tool to market your book is an email list. First off, your email list, and then the email list of other people. So your email list is a list of people who maybe have been following your writings for months or perhaps years, and you've compiled a list of people who want to be notified every time you write a new article or make a new video or write a new book or have a new podcast, and they want to hear from you.

21:41These are people who have literally raised their hand and said, hey, tell me when you've got something new because I'll read whatever you write. So an email list is a great place to market your book. And it's also a great place to find test readers and reviewers for your book. Now, how do you build an email list? If you Google email list companies, you can find many companies that will support your email list. But let's just stick with something simple. go to substack.com and it takes a few minutes to sign up, call your email list, whatever you want. And now you have a link for people to sign up to your email list.

22:19You can put prior articles you've written, prior blog posts, and just kick off the email list within archives. And now every time you write a blog anywhere, also put it on your Substack email list and it'll go out to everybody who signs up for the list. Well, how do you get people to sign up? This is a process that happens over months, maybe even years or more. Some people grow their list very quickly to 100 ,000 readers. Some people struggle depending on the topic and grow to 1 ,000 readers. But it doesn't matter how big it is. Everything is a start. So whatever you do now is going to be useful for the second book, the third book, the fourth book, and so on.

22:59I will tell you how I initially built my email list was I was blogging quite a bit. So I would write an article almost every day, sometimes every few days, and I would put it, the article on my website and I would put it on LinkedIn and I would put it on Medium and anywhere else I thought people might be able to read it. So let's say your book is about positive psychology or about happiness or about habits. There are various websites out there that are niche websites that are always looking for articles about the topics you wrote in your book. So you can pitch them, hey, I just wrote this book.

23:36Can I write an article or write a bunch of articles for your website? And in each article you write, you put, if you like this article, here's the link, sign up for my email list. And over time, you build up your email list. Another place that's great to get traffic for your email list is places like Quora or Reddit. So on Quora, which has over 200 million users, I used Quora very heavily. I would answer any questions at all related to the topics I was writing about in my books. And I would really work hard on each question and I would answer hundreds of questions. Ultimately, I think I still am the fifth or sixth most followed person on Quora out of the 200 million users.

24:23And I've had over 110 million views on my answers on Quora. Quora is a Q &A site, a question and answer site. So again, I'm not saying this, that I'm such a great writer that this happened. I'm saying I put in the time and the work and answered lots of questions on Quora. And every now and then my profile would say, hey, here's a link to my email list. I wouldn't usually do it in my answers because I didn't want to seem salesy or like I was trying to push someone to do something. But sometimes I would. But definitely in my profile, I would have a link to sign up for my email list. Another great place, Twitter threads.

24:57Let's say you have top 10 ways to be more charismatic. Make that a thread on Twitter. And there are various tools like Typefully where you can make your Twitter threads. Or I just use Twitter to make my Twitter threads. And you can even boost those Twitter threads with a small ad budget. Not necessary, but you can. And at the end of a Twitter thread, you can say, if you like this thread, if you like the ideas of this thread, sign up for my email list at this link. And again, you provide a link to your Substack email list. Similarly with Reddit, just be a participant in the community on Reddit.