Scribe Media's Resurrection: How Eric Jorgenson Revived a Publishing Giant

27:00Telecom, they own a big pool building business in Phoenix, like some hilarious things like a motorcycle rental business in Hawaii. Like it is a long-term hold co hodgepodge. But I, you know, I like their ethos, which is like, we buy companies to be a high quality companies and run them for the longterm and just keep investing in compounding. Like I like that attitude. I'd met them a few times. I've been following them for years. How did you meet them? How did you come to know them in your circle of business? I met them for the first time either at the Berkshire Hathaway meeting or at Capital Camp.

27:38It's a great investor event in Missouri. What were you doing at this time? Were you basically considered yourself a writer at this moment? And a million and a half copies is good, so you were making money there. Is that what you were doing? Yeah, I had a beautiful, empty calendar. I had like one standing meeting a week. That was it. I was just writing and I was doing some deep tech venture capital investing. So I still have a small VC fund as well. But it was a great, it was a good life. And I just kind of felt like called to dive into this. I truly, I had no idea where this was going to end up.

28:14I thought I would spend 90 days trying to help this company, get them back on their feet, find the right team to bring them through this. And I'd get to go back to writing books. And very much to my surprise, after they'd bought the logo and the brand of the website from the bank out of the bankruptcy, and they hired over some of the team, they called me and said, we need a CEO to run this thing. We think it should be you. So they then contacted, or you introduced them to the bank, the main people that were owed money, I guess. And what were the assets of the company? So you mentioned a website and a logo and a brand.

28:50Did they have client contracts that needed – obviously, there were client contracts that needed to be fulfilled. But what is the benefit of taking over all these contracts where you're not getting any more money and you just have to fill the services? Obviously, there's good benefit, but what was the benefit to investors? Yeah, I mean, there ended up being – I don't want to overstate my intelligence on this one because I was not close to the deal. I wasn't involved in the deal really at all. I was a bookend on one side of being like, hey guys, go take a look at this. And they went to Austin, they met with the bank, they met with the team, they did all of that stuff.

29:26And then two months later, after that was all sort of done, called me and said, okay, now we need somebody to come in and be CEO. So I'm not a deal guy. I don't understand how all of the assets got sorted in different directions. I do know that the old Scribe Media LLC was completely and irreparably bankrupt and so what happened is a new company was formed, literally just bought the brand and the website and then hired over some of the team, hired me and carried forward. There was just no possibility of carrying on that previous company as far as I understand. During those two months, there are other companies out there trying to get it.

30:12I think it's selfpublishing.com, Chandler, Bolt. uh, there's a lot of decent companies in, in that, you know, Scribe is sort of the grandfather of that industry. And I say grandfather, it's a 10 year old industry tops, but, uh, uh, but there were other companies that were quickly trying to, um, I don't want to say poach because there were no client. I mean, there was no Scribe left to poach from, but they were scooping up Scribe's clients pretty quickly. Two months is a long time. Like, okay, so what you had the brand and the website, what, what, what, and you had some of the people, what good did that bring anybody?

30:48Yeah. And it was a chaotic time. There's also like people from the Scribe team that are leaving and setting up their own shop. And there was a bunch of like, it's hard to know what was what. Um, there were a lot of like opportunists, I think that like showed up and posted, uh, half truths or non-truths to their own benefit. Um, but ultimately, like you said, you know, Scribe is the, the godfather of this space. It's one of the pioneers of it. And for all of the chaos of last summer that affected, you know, hundreds of people, there are thousands of people who had an incredible experience with Scribe over that whole decade, and tens of thousands more who are aware of Scribe and the brand and what it does.

31:28So I think there's, there's a ton of good, I mean, you know, somebody else might have come into this and just said like, nope, too messy, not dealing with it. Like, we're just going to start a new company, start a new brand. But I don't think that's the right approach. And I don't think it's the honest approach. I don't think it's the right thing for the brand. I don't think it's the right thing for the customers. And by doing this, we were able to, we can't fix every problem, but we've been really working hard to bridge that gap with customers who did get caught and really took a loss in that last bankruptcy.

32:01We've hired a number of the team members back who had been let go during that bankruptcy. So, so, so this, so these guys, the investors, enduring ventures, they're the firm, they put, they bought from the bank, um, kind of these basic assets like the brand and so on. And then they infuse some capital in so you can rehire some of the old people. And what did you start when you day one as CEO, what did you start doing? Um, I started talking to, started talking to customers, um, met everybody on the team and I started talking to customers and I started understanding, you know, what worked and why and who went through this, uh, this tough position and how can we, you know, restart the presses basically, um, build this business back to, you know, like there's a whole host of things that it did really, really well in 2019 and 2020.

32:52And the whole order of business is just like, get back to doing what scribe does best, be flawless on the fundamentals, be service providers, um, do away with all the chaos of the last 18 months, which just takes a lot of untangling and takes a lot of, we're essentially rebuilding a company from scratch. So there's a lot of systems work to do. There's a lot of communications to do for sure, reaching out to the community and trying to show them, tell them the story of, here's what happened. Like what are some case studies of people you called and then, and what happened with them? Yeah. I mean, there's a whole gamut, right?

33:27Like there's a lot of people who are instantly understanding. They're like, shit happens. I understand you didn't control it. I understand you didn't cause it. You know, let's put the past behind us. What can you do? How can we move forward? Um, there's some people who really just paint you with the same brush until you work through things. Uh, and there's some people that frankly will never be able to forgive the wound that they, you know, received at the, you know, from that logo, from the Scribe logo. And, you know, try as we might, we can't, you know, necessarily reach everybody, but I try to sit down, I have half hour, hour conversations one-on-one with everybody from this community that will take the time to do it and explain as best I can and show them kind of where we're headed.

34:27So let's say there was an author who was like one third of the way done with their book and they had spent all the money and you wanted to get them back. Would they pay up or would you finish the book? Or even though you weren't the same company anymore, you were just the same logo, what would you do? What were some strategies that you did to kind of get customers and then keep customers? Yeah. So in that case, one third of the way through, what we decided is the policy here is like, we cannot possibly work for free. Like there's too many authors who lost too much money for us as a brand new company starting over to be able to make good on all of those promises.

35:08But what we can do is essentially work at cost for all of those authors who got stuck in that bankruptcy. So we have been with this author, we figure out exactly where they left off. We We figure out exactly what hard costs are left, what exactly the overhead is necessary to get the rest of their book done. And we give them a very clear price. So people do end up having to pay a little more than the money that they had spent with the old company that was lost for us to finish their book. But they get a top-notch team, in some cases, the same people, and being able to finish what they started for the best price they can possibly get for the quality.

35:44How many of the old staff were you able to hire back? Because obviously, if the same team is calling me as an author, I'm much more likely to say, yeah, let's just finish what we started. Yeah, I think we are, I mean, the company is about 27 right now. And 20 of those, I would say, came from the Scribe, from the original Scribe before that. And some of these are the most veteran Scribe team members. I mean, our executive editor was literally the first employee that worked with Tucker and Zach. getting the company started, Mark Chait. And I mean, our head of production is doing, like he's been with us since before Tucker even started Book in a Box, like more than 10 years ago.

36:28He worked with Tucker as an independent author and just quite a few of the most tenured team. And then how many of the old clients were you able to keep? Or let's say, how many of the people who were mid-book were you able to keep? What percentage? Probably 150 have come over now, That's great.

36:49And then, again, what sort of decisions did you do to get things upright? It's like a big statue that had fallen, and it's very heavy, and you have to drag it upright. Did you get an office space? Is everybody working from home? Just managerially, what did you do? Yeah, it's a pretty remote company at this point. And so we've got a small like co-working space, but like it's 90 % remote. You know, I think simplicity and speed and just, I repeat it here because I repeated it at the company, like being flawless on the fundamentals. Like we're rebuilding a reputation. We have to get close to a zero tolerance like mistakes or even zero tolerance like feeling of not being closely held and well guided through this process.

37:45Scribe has always given away all of our knowledge for free. It's all on the blog. It's all in the Scribe method. If you want to go self-publish yourself, do it yourself. But if you want to hire experts to do it, if you want to be guided through the process, then come to us. And so it's really, it's very much a service organization. We wanted to get all of our ducks in a row so that we're not missing deadlines. We're not shipping mistakes. We are nailing the basics. And so stripped away a lot of the complexity that had emerged over like a company growing and just simplified the services, dialed in the pricing a little bit.

38:18There had been some kind of wonky decisions made over the past year about pricing. So we just standardized that. I think in the heyday of Scribe, they were doing a ton of books and they were growing really fast. Basically, the simplest offering is you bring us a manuscript and we publish it for you. That's what I hired Scribe to do as an author. And those are a lot of work and they are our lowest price point. It's$26 ,000 to do that for all the formats. And I think people were just like, this is too chaotic. like there's too many customers buying this from us. We're going to raise the price. But like, it was an arbitrary price race, you know, and it's like, it made it inaccessible for a lot of people that just wanted to get their manuscript out there.

39:03So we, we lowered that price. That was one of the first things that we did. Um, the guided author service where if you want to write your manuscript yourself, but you don't want to be lost in the woods, you know, facing the blank page on your own, we'll basically pair you with a private coach and editor who will guide you through the whole process, check in with you, help you structure and plan your writing as you go. That had been really shaped around a workshop, an in-person workshop in Austin that kicked off quarterly. And as a remote company kind of coming out of COVID, that didn't make a ton of sense.

39:35So we made that much more of a one-to-one synchronous service that anybody could start at any time. And then that sort of leads into publishing. No changes to the professional, which is kind of our flagship thing. What's that? What is that? Oh, it's professional. So this is for basically this whole class of people who know they have expertise. They know that a book would benefit them. They either aren't necessarily a writer, don't want to write, or don't have time to sit down and spend 1 ,000 hours. Like a CEO of a big company. Yeah, CEO, executive, consultant, lawyers, doctors, all kinds of people to choose this option.

40:16And this option is basically as high leverage as you can get. So we will pair you with a scribe who is not just a great writer, but also a great interviewer. And they will help you position and structure the book. They'll interview you, and then they'll turn your words, your stories, your ideas into a manuscript that reads as though you wrote it. And you've got a lot of control over how that goes. I always thought this was a powerful, and I'll even call it innovation of Tucker's, which is to kind of almost formulaize the process of ghostwriting. So it doesn't have to be so ghost-like. It's not a mystery.

40:48It's just you need a good interviewer who has the basic skills of writing, and you could take someone's story into a book. Yeah, and he's got a really powerful talk about unlocking the world's wisdom. Books are an incredible format, and people find it so intimidating to approach. You need a good team, and you need a good creative partner, and we can pull these stories and these ideas out of you and structure them in a book for you with a relatively small amount of time. Do you think AI is going to replace any aspect of this? And just to kind of put in front of that, I think AI won't replace the best writers out there.

41:28There's a lot of things about the human condition that needs to be woven by a writer. And maybe I'm just being biased. But we know the human brain has more connections and synapses than the most complicated supercomputer. And I think that's where the writing comes from. But I do think basic good writing can be done by AI. So at what point do you get worried about AI or do you never get worried about AI? I'm not worried about it. I'm excited about it. I think I am a futurist, accelerationist, techno-utopia nut job, which is part of my job as an investor to be, but it's also just I'm excited about the future.

42:11So I believe deeply, use the best tool for the job. Um, like you, I agree that very, the highest end of writers are probably always going to have finishing touches at minimum, maybe more by a real human writer who deeply understands the craft. But I think it's going to give, I think AI will give a lot of leverage to the very best writers. And I think that's true of almost every domain. Um, I think it'll raise the bar for, for the mediocre. I think it'll make the mediocre good and the good great and the great prolific. and I'm excited to see kind of how the process can change. And we're running experiments internally on some projects and I'm using it as an author and finally have some fun experimenting with it.

42:55And the other thing is, do you think people are, I mean, this is kind of an age-old question, but are people reading? Like I feel like I'm the most avid reader I know and yet I feel like I've even declined in my reading because of so much demand on my attention from everything else. Yeah. I mean, I think books are competing for dopamine with some pretty super-powered things in the algorithms. But I think serious people read, and I think serious people will always read. I think books are an important Lindy format. And from a medium-is-the-message perspective, You know, there's nothing, there's no format more, more sacred, more prestigious, more high signal than a great well-crafted book.

43:44And this is why I always tell people also it's, it's for better or for worse, because there's a lot of criticism in this. It's a credential. If you're, if two people are going up for a job and one has the book written on the domain and the other one doesn't, then that the person who wrote the book is getting the job. Yeah. Or the customer or the partnership or the acquisition. I think this was originally a Tuckerism, but he's like, a college degree used to be a credential because 25 % of the population had it. Now 75 % of the population has it. Writing a great book is scary and hard and it takes years of work and it takes an investment and you have to put yourself out there to be judged.

44:25But if you do that and you do something impressive, that is a credential that is taking accountability. That's creating something that precedes you and establishes your reputation, establishes your authority, establishes your expertise. Um, and I think that's a tremendous single signal and everybody to some extent is trying to build that trust and establish and signal that credibility at scale. And you know, how you can't possibly spend 10 hours of conversation one-on-one with every potential customer or partner vendor that you have, but you can write a book that they read in their quiet moments and come to know you, come to understand your philosophy, your talent, your expertise, and your commitment to your craft.

45:07And, you know, at the same time, and look, I, I have a podcast, so I get pitched books. Probably I'm not, I'm going to, I'm going to try to not exaggerate because it's very easy to exaggerate, but realistically, I probably get pitched 10 to 15 new books a day, not from just, you know, PR agencies and self-published authors, but from like every, and Jay can attest to this too, from every single publishing company, we get about 10 to 15 pitches a day. Okay. Maybe that might be an exaggeration, but up to 10 a day, at least some days more, some days less. And some of them are really good and we'll say, Hey, I can't wait to have this person on the podcast.

45:50But a lot of them, everybody just publishes the same business self-help just junk. I hate it. Like, oh, 10 ways to be a leader. I built up a business to$1.3 million in revenue. And now I'm going to talk about it on a book. So have me on your podcast. And it's all the same BS advice, which actually doesn't even work to begin with. So, and it's not your fault. I'm not complaining to you. I'm like, I hope Scribe does more than just business self-help books. But that is the majority of books, unfortunately. Yeah, I think the thing that we always push authors to do is be really, really clear about who their reader is and what value they are delivering to them.

46:39Like, we don't care if your audience is five people or five million people. as long as you are like bringing your whole self, sharing everything that you know, and trying to do something unique through the context of your expertise and your unique, like the nicheness of some of these books would blow you away. But in their industry or in their particular like tiny little segment of the economy, they become a rockstar and they become the person that wrote the book in one specific room. And that's all they need to unlock another level of their career. And that's fine. Then nicheness is fine. It's when everybody's like, you know, the ABCs of leading and, you know, go from zero to one million in 20 lessons or whatever.

47:25That's like a memetic duck race, right? That's just somebody trying to be Tony Robbins because they've always looked up to Tony Robbins. Yeah, and look, Tony Robbins, his books are great. Like he kind of set the standard of him and other guys who wrote about leadership way back, like John Maxwell or Zig Ziglar. I don't know, all those people. And I think people underestimate – I don't know if they do this anymore, but I think they did initially. They underestimate how great a writer Tucker Max is. Like he – and this reminds me also of like how people think about Hunter S. Thompson. So Hunter S.

48:00Thompson is like a classic example where people think, oh, I'm going to take a lot of drugs, put myself in a wild situation like Las Vegas, and write about it. And that's not what Hunter S. Thompson does at all. Like he spent 20 years crafting his skills before he did that. And same thing with Tucker too. Like you can't just like go to a party, have a wild thing happen, and then write about it and be like Tucker Max. No, he is a writer first, and then he had these experiences. And by the way, people don't realize in his books how self-deprecating and how humiliating his stories are to himself.

48:39He's not bragging in those books. People think he's bragging. He's not. He's trashing himself in those stories and letting it bleed. And I think people don't realize that about, like, to be a good writer, you're fooling everyone that you're one thing, but you're really something else, which is a good writer. I talker is like he is a savant, not just at writing. He is a great writer, but at truth telling. Like, I think this is what makes his stories great. Originally. I think that's what makes his memoir great. I think that's what makes even blog posts like this one that we're talking about. He is unflinchingly truthful and deeply truthful.

49:18And he seeks that truth and he tells it like it is. And so few people are willing to do that as openly and as clearly as he is that that's what really makes him unique and his writing great. So, so like at this point, do you feel you've righted the ship? Like, how are things going? I think it's going well. I mean, you know, the weird thing about being a CEO is that, you know, you, you get your test results, you know, two years after you take the test. Um, so I'm, I'm, uh, not taking any victory laps yet, but, you know, given where we started, you know, a year ago and where we are now, um, certainly culturally inside the team, I think we've done a really good job of just reestablishing this as a new day and a safe place and a place to just, you know, calmly do good work.

50:03Um, after such a traumatic event that the team went through, um, I think publicly, you know, we're getting better at telling the story, bringing people along, bringing the community back together. Um, that'll be a long road to fully rebuild this trust and get described back to, you know, where it was in its greatest years of, you know, 2019, 2020, 2021. But, um, I deeply believe in this model and I think we're seeing authors respond and the people that are joining now and the books that are, that we're about to be publishing in, you know, Q4 and Q1, I'm extremely proud of. Like what? And I don't want to share books publicly that the author hasn't shared that they're working with us.

50:43That's like a pretty, um, that's a pretty like big no, no for us. Um, Um, so I will, I'll have to like send you those separately or something. Um, but you'll, you'll see some big names. Yeah. Yeah. I've had a lot of scribe authors on, look, I've known Tucker and scribe since before. I was invested in a precursor to all of this and then that didn't work out. Tucker in his graciousness offered me the opportunity to roll the money over into scribe or get my money back. No investment has ever made me that offer before. And I always had a rule. If I could get the money back in a bad situation, I would get it.

51:25And so I did that. But Tucker and I remained very close friends, obviously. And I always consider him a good friend. And I would say the model of – or one of the books and processes that he used as a model for Scribe was when he helped me – I wanted to professionally self-publish my book Choose Yourself. and the process that Tucker went through was almost became the process of what became Scribe. Because I really was serious about making it look as professional as possible. I think that's a very important thing and some authors underweight it. I want to ask for me and for all the authors that I work with at Scribe and for all the authors listening.

52:08So you get 10 pitches a day for new books to come on the podcast? Yeah. How does somebody stand out? How does somebody craft a great pitch to you that makes you excited to talk to them or to share the book? A good story.

52:24I've gotten all the advice in the world. I've done 1 ,500 podcasts. I have gotten 70 different diets. I've gotten 70 different ways to build a business from scratch. I've talked to 100 different billionaires about the keys to their success. And of course, it's all survivorship bias because there might be people who did the exact same thing they did who failed, but those people don't end up on podcasts. So I've gotten all the advice in the world. What I kill for is just great stories. And this is a good story. Scribe was so central to kind of this new thing that was happening in publishing. And look, I think it's an unbelievable service that you guys offer.

53:08And then to have this guy just go down in flames and bring Scribe with him, and then you bring it back from the dead like this rise of the phoenix, it's a great story. And I wanted to hear it personally. So it's an important story, not just for publishing, but just to see how to buy something that's dead, build it back up, create it again. And, you know, you're obviously in like inning two, say, of this journey, but it's going to be an exciting one. Like, I mean, how do you feel? You were, like you said, you had an empty calendar every week. One thing was on your calendar. Now you're, like, is your family upset that you're not around as much or what's going on?

53:58It is a change of pace for sure. But I, you know, I felt called to the story. I felt called to do what I could to resurrect this company and carry it forward. I think it's important for the publishing. I think it's important to show that a business with this model can work. It's like, I don't want Scribe to get taken down by one person and have traditional publishers then point at its failure for, you know, claiming that this business couldn't work. Like, we can't have that. It's not good for 10 people in New York to decide what books get published. like and and oh yeah i by the way i totally 100 agree with that yeah very very important so i i wanted to save this business like for my experience as an author for the future of publishing um and now that i've gotten to know the team like for the team like these are incredible people that are doing believing what they do care deeply for authors and just want a chance to you know a context that they can thrive in um and now seeing authors you know move from traditional publishing over to Scribe now that they see us on solid footing again and excited to have the chance to own all their rights, own all their royalties, and have their creative freedom back.

55:11That's inspiring to me. I can't wait to see where we get in a few years. Hopefully, we can complete the Cinderella tale and build this into quite a big company. I don't see any reason why this can't be one of the bigger publishing companies in the world. There's no natural limit on where we can go. I agree. And I've always felt that way about the business model. I 100 % agree with you. And look, let me know how I can ever help you guys out in any way at all. I'd be happy to just give advice every now and then if it's ever wanted for whatever reason. And again, I love the model and congrats on doing what you're doing.

55:52And I hope everything succeeds. Thank you so much, James. I mean, I appreciate that notion. I appreciate you having me on. You're helping just by being interested in the story and being willing to engage here. And if you've got another book in you, of course, we'd love to figure out how to get it out there. I have many books in me. I had a feeling that would be the answer. I did a book a year from 2003 to 2021. And then I've been sidetracked lately. I haven't, Again, a book a year. It's not even like on average. I did 25 books in those years and at least one every single calendar year. But I haven't done one since 2021.

56:37I need to do that. I need to get back into that. So we'll see. We'd love to help. I'm happy to brainstorm and see what you got cooking. See if we can't pull one out of you. Thanks once again, Eric, for telling the story. You got it. Thank you, James. Appreciate the support.