Unleash Your Self-Publishing Success | Chandler Bolt

23:46Well, I remember at one point, I don't know if he's still doing this, I don't think he is, but Hugh Howie, who self-published the science fiction series Wool, which now is, I think as of next week is going to be an Apple Plus TV series called Silo. But he first published the series back in 2012. We met, you know, because he was self-publishing, I was self-publishing. Amazon got, I think it was like 2013 or 2014, Amazon got a bunch of self-published authors together and I met him. But Hugh was telling me then that the average, he collected all this data and the average self-published book actually had higher star ranking on Amazon than the mainstream, average mainstream published books.

24:29So on average, the books were higher quality and they were ranked higher in sales. So they were selling more than the average mainstream published book. But it makes sense because you're in charge of the marketing. So - And incentives are aligned. You get instant feedback, whereas the publisher is gonna give you the data from like three months ago or whatever. but as a self-published author, you just log in your dashboard and you say, how many books did I sell yesterday? Yeah. All right, I went on the James Altucher podcast. Did it move books or not? It's so powerful to have that kind of control.

25:02And it was so exciting to me. I wish I had started a business around self-publishing then because it seemed to me like, I think it still is a frontier because there's a lot of avenues to explore, but you're doing the right thing. So you published this book, you got all these skills. And like you said, you know, the Katie, you know, first off you made it a kindle but you could have easily and you did you made it a paperback but it's you can make it a paperback at the same time a lot of times people think self-publish just means ebook but amazon just lets you click a button and it turns into a paperback as well or a hardcover now yeah which that's a pretty so that used to be through create space now it's through kindle direct publishing but it's it's really pretty amazing because print on demand i mean my newest book right published this is a print on demand and it used to be people thought okay this is a crappy quality you know it's print on demand like it's not as good and and it's really come a long way where you look at this book and what we tell people all the time is your self published book shouldn't look self-published and so just because you choose that route like it needs to be a professionally published quality book and then like you said you know i've got some uh hard backs back there but those are printed through amazon which that was a game changer because that you know, that was kind of one thing that you couldn't, you know, you have to go through Ingram or traditional publishers that hard back.

26:17And, you know, those are more expensive. That matters for some people more than others of having that. But now you can also publish those through Amazon and not to mention Audible and ACX and all that. I mean, just the royalties that come from that alone. I'm sure you see it from, from your books. It's, it's pretty sizable. I didn't really want to do an audio book because I have never to this day in my life, listened to an audio book. I just, I don't know why I just am not really interested in that, but so I wasn't going to do it, but Tucker Max, who's also very much a guru of self-publishing and a massive bestselling author as well.

26:54He said, you have to do an audio book. And, and then he called my wife and he said, don't let James do some crappy audio book by recording in his closet. Like use John, any name, John Marshall studios in New York. They did the Harry Potter books, he's going to use them. It's worth it. And so I did it. And I still get bigger checks from the audio books than the paperbacks on every book. Like people love a lot of people's audio books. I bet. Well, and because I mean, if you think about, I mean, if people listen to this podcast, they probably like audio form content. So the bridge from this podcast to listen to your audio book is not that far.

27:32Right. And then there's the audio or audible bounty stuff, which a lot of people don't know about, but we tap into that a lot with our authors. What is that? I don't know about that. So you basically say, um, you know, if someone downloads a book on audible and your, yours, your book is the first book that they download, they can come from you, but they don't have to. And they stick with an audible subscription. Um, then Amazon gives you, I think they changed the amount, but 75 bucks. And so what we do and what you could totally do as well is make a simple link. I think mine's like publishedbook.com forward slash audible.

28:09And so it's a short link that goes to a referral code where we just say, hey, if you want to go get the audio book, go get it. And they can get it for free by signing up for a trial of an audible account. Then if they keep the account, you get 75 bucks. So for a lot of our authors, that's hundreds of dollars a month in royalties that they get just from that piece of their audio book. Wow, that's valuable information. I didn't know that. So you wrote published. At this point, so published is, the title is published, the proven path from blank page to 10 ,000 copies sold. By the way, again, just to underline it, 10 ,000 copies sold is 20 times more than the average mainstream published author sells.

28:52So it's a big number. And you're claiming to do it in the title. It was at that point, Like when did you start your business helping people self-publish? We started in, we launched in 2015 for self-publishing school. And then we've published about 7 ,000 books. Oh my God. Let's start from the draft. How do you publish 7 ,000 books? Like what do you do? Yeah. I mean, we have a big team and a lot of authors that we work with. So we publish one to five books a day now. And so we have courses, we have training programs. We now have services. and all that stuff. But those are just that we can track.

29:31I know that the actual number is probably a lot more than that. And not even if you count people who just read my book and then published a book, we don't. These are people who have paid us and we can track that they have published as 7 ,000. But we just, we try to make the process easier and more frictionless and then kind of do a lot of the services and things that helps people actually get published. But I don't know. How do you get 7 ,000 customers? And then what do they write about? Yeah. It's all over the map. I mean, we're really good at content marketing and business development and partnerships.

30:05Those are kind of our two main things. I see you are on your, you actually on my, when I Google self-publishing, you rank higher on the first page than Amazon. Nice. Shout out to the content team. So, I mean, and that's not even, so we have multiple sites. So you probably are seeing self-publishing school. You might also be seeing self-publishing.com. Selfpublishing.com is what I see. There you go. So we have a bunch of sites that we own where we produce content that helps solve people's problems around the topic of book writing. And then that kind of feeds a massive funnel to come into our world where people are Googling or searching.

30:44And then they find our content and they say, hey, I want to work with you guys on my book. And then we publish, I mean, all over. It's all over the map. Predominantly nonfiction. We have a fiction arm of the company and a children's book arm of the company. but it's predominantly nonfiction books that help people grow their businesses is kind of the sweet spot. But pretty much any genre, we've done it. Why do you think, like, basically the intersection of business and self-help, like, for instance, a book about productivity, for instance, or a book about entrepreneurship, this seems to be the biggest genre for self-publishing writers.

31:19Why do you think that is? It's a great question. I mean, probably because it's the most straightforward. And so if I've done that thing, then I can easily write about that thing. Now, it's a double-edged sword. I mean, it definitely makes it way more competitive. So you have to be specific and you have to niche down if your book is gonna be successful. I mean, the riches are in the niches, as you know. And so it's more competitive, but there is still a spot to be carved out there, I think. you know it's interesting because i find that both the best and the worst books are in that category because i would say business people you know and and i count you and me and that and a lot of other people you kind of need now to have a book to stand out like let's say you're up for a consulting gig or a speaking gig and let's say you're against someone they're trying to choose between you and someone else with equal skills one person wrote a book the other person didn't the person who wrote the books getting the gig.

32:18So it's really, it really helps you stand out when you have something to give someone, this is my book. It's like a college degree in a sense. Like I sat down and had the discipline and I wrote this book and published it. And no one says, well, were you self-published or not? No one says that. Yeah. Did Penguin Portfolio publish your book? No one asked that. Right. But the same time is, you know, business people are not on in general, business people are not writers. Physicists are not writers. Chemists are not writers. Athletes are not writers. You know, there's a skill to writing. And sometimes I find, not in every case, but sometimes I find business books very boring because there's no stories.

32:56Yeah. Well, I think there's two things there. I mean, number one, the content needs to be able to stand alone, be great. You need to be good at what you're doing. And if the content stands alone is great, sometimes you can get away with not being as good of a writer. But even still, like that's why we recommend you need to work with great editors because they're going to make your book a lot better. And you need to make sure that your self-published book doesn't look self-published. And so I'm not a big fan. A lot of people subscribe to it of just like, oh, get AI to write a book or just spit out something and just, it's a business card, just throw it up there.

33:30I want to make the book great because it's a virtual handshake that brings people into your business like crazy. It'll be the best thing you ever do to grow your business. But pretty much, maybe not only if it's a good book because a lot of people will just see that you have a book and then that'll open up doors. But if you want it to really stand the test of time, and if you're playing the long game, the book needs to be good. And we always joke kind of internally is like the joke of real authors write fiction, like the fiction side of our business. Like those guys are really, really, really good writers.

34:00And to succeed in fiction, you have to be a great writer. Like I think that's honestly, I think is a lot of your magic, James, is you are an amazing storyteller, an incredible writer with great content. and so that stands out. It's not just another self-help book when you look at your books. What I did was very specifically, A, first I quote unquote paid my dues, which is a phrase I don't like because I don't always feel you have to pay your dues on certain issues, but I wrote four unpublishable novels when I first started writing. I spent 10 years writing fiction that didn't get published before I had my first published piece of work and I read fiction every day.

34:39I read the best fiction writers. I really studied writing from the point of view of fiction writing. So I made sure all of my writing, even nonfiction writing had the feel of like literary fiction, which, you know, there was, there was a story, there was a plot, there were characters. The phrasing was picked specifically to make you feel like you're at on the scene, which I think is very different from a lot of nonfiction writing. I agree. And I think that's what it makes a lot of your writing compelling. It's always interesting. It's provocative, usually. You know how to find the hook within the thing so you can tell the thing that needs to be said, but you can also make it interesting so that people actually care.

35:19Yeah, like when I sit down to write something, even if I roughly know what I'm gonna write, I make sure at the end, basically three things. It's very entertaining. It's gotta be entertaining first and foremost. Everything in life that has to be entertaining, basically. Like this podcast has to be entertaining. TikTok videos have to be entertaining. A PhD thesis has to be entertaining, but never is. Books have to be entertaining. So it has to be entertaining. It has to be educational. And by educational, I mean, you have to say something new that's never been said before. And you can't be controversial for the sake of being controversial.

35:56You have to say things you believe, but you just have to push the frontier of some area that you love or else no one cares. And you have to tell it with stories. Third, I have to be afraid to hit publish before I hit publish, because if I'm afraid, then I know I'm going to create some emotional reaction among the readers. And that's what happens. Like my most viral article ever, I asked myself, so this was the New York City is dead article. Oh, yeah. Yeah. 30 million people read that article. It was like probably the last viral post ever. I think it was the only time a LinkedIn article made the news.

36:34But the thing I was afraid of, when I asked myself right before getting published, what am I actually afraid of here? And I'm afraid because normally when I'm pessimistic about something, I end on an optimistic note. And this was the one time I couldn't find anything to be optimistic about. And so I was afraid to disappoint people and that people would think differently of me because I'm not being optimistic. Little did I know that that particular fear was what really blew this up. So 7 ,000 customers, they come to you, they get services like what? Yeah, so we coach people through the process of writing and publishing.

37:09So our goal is to save people hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in that process and to help them write a better book that they're proud of, that sells more copies and grows their business, right? So coaching and education, that's been predominantly, like that's the bedrock of the business. And then we now have a bunch of services. So we would refer people out because we didn't want to do the service side of the business to cover designers, formatters, editors, kind of all that stuff. And now we've put a lot of that in-house because we just feel like it's the final mile of publishing that can be really frustrating.

37:44And people just kept saying, hey, can we just – I don't want to pay seven different people and hire all these people. I don't want to do that. I just want to pay you. So we started rolling out a lot of those services. So now we do all that final mile of publishing for people. So it's really interesting because this is a really great way to test the concept, which is first coach people, which means you just talk to them like, here's how you self-publish. Here's who you should use, blah, blah, blah. And then they go off and do it. And you charge for that some minimal amount. It probably wasn't a lot.

38:11And then the next step, now that people are coming to you and you're known, and in a sense, you validated the concept. Now you could go from coaching to project managing. Like, okay, you don't want to hire everybody. We'll hire people. And then the next step after that is you're getting enough business. You could bring some of those services in-house. Like you can hire a full-time cover designer, hire full-time editors. You could hire full-time people to bring books to Katie Kane. All that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. All the ISBN stuff, all the nuts and bolts, which is actually, it's easy, but it's scary because you don't want to mess that stuff up.

38:45Right. That very final, you called it the final mile. That very final foot is the scariest part because if you mess it up, you went from having a published book to an ugly unpublished book. Right. And it's a growing business. Oh yeah. I mean, it's exploding. We've been on the Inc 5 ,000 the last few years in a row is one of the fastest growing private companies in the U S helped me land on Forbes 30 under 30. I mean, wow, we can, we consistently, we consistently grow. We just had our first million dollar month of, of, oh my gosh, that's great. And not just, not just like, I think a lot of people say it's after refunds at like no big promotion, no live event, because we've hit that number before.

39:26But that to me was like, all right, I want to build an evergreen engine that just keeps running and not just celebrate a one-off thing. So we're growing and scaling and changing a lot of lives through books, which is what we love and get excited about. So the big goal is 100 ,000 books published by 2035. So that's what we're working towards. We've made a lot of progress, but we got a long way to go. So if you did a million dollar a month, that's a runway of 12 million in revenues a year. And let's say you have some profits in that. Has anybody approached you to acquire the business? Definitely.

40:00Have you raised money? Haven't raised money. I bootstrapped. I own 100 % of the business. We've definitely had acquirers come knocking and some that are chasing me down currently. But I'm not currently interested in selling. I mean, it's a great business. There's a lot of competitors. There's a lot of competition. So there's definitely headwinds, but it's a great business and I love what we're doing and I'm really passionate about it

40:39Let's say you have after all costs everything Let's say you have a million dollars in profit per year hypothetically. I'm just making this up You could have less, you could have more, whatever. The problem you have is in the publishing business, people don't understand that your business is not the same as Simon & Schuster. Like you're much more scalable than a Simon & Schuster because they have to pay advances and they only pick a limited number of authors a year. You're providing a service essentially that people pay you for. So you're not dependent on their book sales to make money. But a private company or even any company that tries to buy you, they're going to try to buy you for five to six times earnings.

41:17So you're probably getting offers like five, six million if your profits are around a million. And honestly, that's not enough. Like, don't do that. Because if you're growing every year, then, you know, wait until, I don't know what your personal goals are, but wait until you're worth like 10 to 15 million. You own 100 % of the business. So let's say you sell for 15 million, means you have like 3 million in profits. Okay, you clear 10 after taxes, then you can decide what to do with your life. and that's how I would view it. Or just keep growing. If you're making three million a year, why not just keep doing it?

41:48That's fun too. Exactly, especially if you love it, right? And so I think there's two things that I would touch on there. One is an advantage that big publishing companies have over someone like me is they have a backlist and that is really, really, really valuable. So that's why they're disproportionately, it's not good for authors, but it's really good for them in that business model because they know that they have their backlist of books that are just gonna keep selling. And so it's almost like a recurring revenue model. Kind of like you said, hey, if your book gets over 1 ,300 reviews, you now have a backlist as an author, right?

42:20And so that's definitely an advantage there. But then as far as to sell or not to sell, I mean, I look at it as, and maybe this is the wrong way to look at it, but if I'm getting 5X EBITDA, so 5X multiple on the profit of the business, well, that means if I sell, I've got five years to build something bigger, which I wouldn't personally bet on that. We've got a lot of momentum and yeah. That's a great point. And look, there's a lot of different magic numbers, but you're a young guy. So two, three million, you're not, you'd have to move to a different country to live forever on that. Because if you think about like, let's say you put it in dividend stocks, like forgetting that stocks go up or down.

42:58So you could lose money on that. But let's say you put it in conservative dividend stocks. Okay. You might make an average of 3 % best case on your money. So let's say you cleared, let's say you sold your company. for 5 million, clear 3 million after taxes, you're getting a 3 % dividend on all the money, which by the way, would be crazy if you put all that money in just dividend stocks. But let's say you did that, you'd still be making 90 ,000 a year, which is basically the country's average. So you're not gonna be able to do everything you wanna do. You might even have a hard time starting a new business because your money needs to be generating income in a safe way and not be risked.

43:32So again, I'm not knocking 3 million. If anybody has that, that's a great, fantastic number. congratulations. You're in the top one half of 1 % or whatever. How old are you right now? 29, 29. You're in your twenties. Like, and yeah, it's hard to build. I keep thinking like, oh, I don't need to make that much money. I'm going to easily start a next business and make even more. No, it is hard to start a business like your business right now. And obviously like you love the publishing business. Anybody I know has ever been in the self-publishing business just loves it. Like it's such an exciting area of, of, of life, but how do you get people to sell?

44:09Like what, first off, what are some of the biggest successes in terms of the writers you've helped publish? Oh gosh. Um, there's a bunch of different ones. I mean, some of my favorite ones, I mean, this is like, not like the most monetary success, but this is one of my favorite ones is an eight-year-old Emma Sumner, um, saw her dad write and publish a couple of books with us. She said, dad, I want to do that. And she wrote and published a kid's book called the fairies of Waterfall Island. I'm looking at it right now. It made a few thousand dollars in the first few months. She donated a bunch of that to an autism awareness charity.

44:42And now she has an allowance, quote unquote, every single month that's really just her royalties from her books. And so I just think about like the trajectory of her. We always talk about how books change lives. They change the lives of readers and of authors. And I just think about how the trajectory of her life has forever changed from writing a book at eight years old. So again, that's not like the biggest monetary success, but it's definitely one of my favorite success stories. This is really great. And let me see what year she published this. 2016. So I guess now she's about 15 or so. Yeah, still getting checks.

45:16This is something, yeah, this is something she carries with her forever, for life, is that she published this book and it looks beautiful. The cover looks beautiful. And again, only 132 pages. That's great. So who would you say, if you know this, who would you say is the author who's generated, who sold the most copies? Oh man. I don't have great stats because we're not a publisher. That's good for our authors, but not good for us for data purposes. One of my, one of the biggest monetary successes is, um, AJ Osborne wrote a book called, um, oh man, it's how to invest in self-storage, uh, or investors guide to self-storage.

45:51And that book I know has done tens of thousands of copies sold, but also has generated, I think he's raised over a hundred million dollars for his real estate investing fund through that book, if I'm not mistaken, or that book has certainly helped with that. I'm going to buy this book, not because I want to be in the self-storage business, but ever since like 2002, I was invested in a lot of self-storage companies because this is an industry that is only growing. It can never decline. The population of the country is bigger, more people move because the population's bigger. And whenever they move, they got to store stuff.

46:28So, and all you got to do is you got to buy a big box to store stuff in. Like there's no way to skip that. Yeah, he's certainly been, I mean, it's a great book. I've read it and it's certainly been a good for him and his real estate investing business. But like, we've had examples of that. We've had examples of, you know, a memoir by one of our authors, Redefining Normal, about growing up in the foster adopt system and redefining normal in that. I mean, I know they've sold 10 or 20 ,000 copies of that memoir, which memoirs are really hard to sell if you're not famous, you know, as you know. And by the way, I want to, I want to mention, there's a lot of reasons to write a book.

47:09One is of course to make money and to sell a lot of copies, which might not be the same thing, by the way. The other is, you know, I wish right now that my great, great, great, great grandfather or grandmother had written and self-published the book. Because then, like, and so a memoir doesn't have to sell a gazillion copies for it to be incredibly valuable. For one thing, your descendants are going to read it. And it's something you could leave behind so that people could know who you were, people who care about it and want to know. It's a gift you give to your descendants when you write a memoir, whether it sells even one copy while you're alive.

47:47So that's important. Memoirs are hard to sell. I'm surprised publishers publish so many crappy memoirs, but they're such a valuable thing to self-publish. I encourage everyone to do it. Let's say someone's a first-time author. Your book published says you're going to get them to 10 ,000 copies. What's the best marketing techniques? Yeah, so there's kind of, I call this the launch triangle. There's three core components. There's a launch team, there's getting reviews, and then there's doing promotions. So a launch team, there's a group of people who support your book. It could be friends, family, customers, colleagues.

48:22That's 50 people, 100 people, maybe more, right? So launch team, and then that launch team helps get reviews along with a bunch of other stuff. And then there's promotions, which that's the difference between what I would call like the MVP launch, the minimum viable product launch, and a traditional book launch, which is, you know, any traditionally published book that you've seen has probably followed that format, is the amount of promotions. So that's depending on how much time, money and energy you have to put in this book. That's kind of the accordion of promotions. And so those are the three things that I recommend for people to launch their book successfully and sell more copies.

48:57And then I think probably the most important thing is just the mindset of this is a one year launch, not a one week launch. So many people focus on launch week, which is definitely important. But then they just drop it like it's hot. And it's like, oh, what book? It's the book that they launched like three months ago and they're not even talking about it anymore. And so it's important that you really follow that one year launch and keep talking about and promoting the book long after you publish. I think that's really important. And that's very different from mainstream publishers. Mainstream publishers, I hate to say it, and maybe this is not true for all of them, but all the ones I've experienced and I've published with every major publisher, they really just care about the first week or two.

49:38And it's unfortunate that that's true. yeah and i i hate that aspect of them but you're right with self-published for instance take a very well-known self-published book originally self-published eckhart tolle's the power of now he wrote it he self-published it initially like in 1997 and for years it was just it didn't sell any copies but then suddenly it slowly started to take off and now it's you know the rights were bought by a major publisher. I forget who. And it's, it's a massive, huge, you know, 10 million or more books sold bestseller. So self-published books, I think have a more opportunity to be, you know, sleepers that take off later.

50:20Yeah. And even if you sell less copies, you'll make more money. That's the thing. I mean, unless you're getting a massive advance, which like you said, you're not getting a big advance unless you have a massive audience and, and a big name and all that stuff. But so take that off the table. If you're talking about actual money that you make from your book sales, you're going to make more self-published. But, but okay. So what are promotional techniques though? Yeah. So there's, I mean, the biggest one is the launch team. Like I mentioned, like that's a, that's, that, that's one of the, if you just do one thing, do that.

50:53But then when it comes down to actual promotion stuff, there's a lot of different ones. There's podcast interviews. There's Amazon ads or BookBub ads. There's promotions. Do BookBub ads work? You can run deals and stuff. Yes. Now, it's just like any other ad. I mean, you're going to have to kiss a lot of frogs before you actually get to the point where the ads are working for you. But a lot of our authors, those BookBub ads work well. Amazon ads work well. What do you mean? Like, who do I have to, which frogs do I have to kiss? Why can't I just pay for an ad? Meaning that you're going to launch a bunch of ads that won't, like you, it's not going to work from day one.

51:28You'll probably lose money for the first month or two, but then you kind of narrow in your targeting. The algorithm gets smarter, like all of that stuff gets better. And so we have a lot of authors that have success with that long-term. So BookBub, if people don't know, and I don't know if I'm describing it correctly, there's a bunch of sites like this. They kind of send out an email list of like what book deals are happening that week. And you see this on their site and so on. I think I'm getting it right. And then how do I, so I'm on their site. I don't see an ad, but does the ad go on their emails or how does it work?

52:01Yeah, good question. So the ad goes in some of their emails and they've got kind of like a little marketplace and they've become known as a place where people come to buy books, right? And a lot of times they're discounted books or they're books in a specific category. Maybe you're running a 99 cent promo on an ebook or something like that. But those are the main places that they get run and you can do cost per click ads. You can do impression ads. You can do all different kinds of stuff. I'm on their site right now. Like, where are the ads? To be honest, beyond the scope of my knowledge, I know that my coaching team is in there all the time and they teach on it.

52:37And a lot of our authors have a lot of success with it. I wonder if like getting on the different lists is a paid for, maybe that's the ad. Oh, I see some ads here, yeah. All right, I'm gonna look into this because I've never used BookBub ads. And you know, here's another interesting thing. I've used Amazon ads, but you cannot use Amazon ads on books you haven't published. So even if I'm trying to do an ad for my book. Super frustrating. And by the way, the publisher is not going to pay for an ad on Amazon, even if it's$10. It's just not their thing. So I tried to do an ad on my last mainstream published book and they wouldn't let me.

53:12You could only do it on your self-published books. And Amazon is, of course, a great place to advertise. Where else, would you advertise on Facebook? Not as much. I mean, Amazon is kind of the bread and butter, although that's gotten more competitive over the last year or two. But the model works if you're self-published because you don't have big margins, obviously, but you've got a captive audience on a site where a lot of people buy books. So Amazon ads have been the primary mechanism that we've used. BookBub is kind of more of an emerging thing. We were just doing a training last week or the week before.

53:44And one of the guys on my team was breaking down the whole thing on how he does it with his book. And it's working really well for him and some of the other authors were teaching. and then beyond that, Facebook wouldn't recommend it. Some people have success with it, but it's just hard to get the numbers to work. I mean, you've got to be able to acquire customers for five bucks or less to be able to make any sort of profit on that. And then Amazon and Facebook don't give you great tracking or visibility into is that ad actually leading to a sale? And so that's kind of the hardest part. Oh, some people do.

54:16I don't know if this is still a thing, but every now and then I see someone who's written like, 200 books, like 200 Kindle books. I mean, there was a Scott, well, Steve Scott is one. I'm sure you've heard of. There's another guy, Patrick King. They write like all these books, like how to have small talk, how to be, you know, the science of getting started, how to speak effectively, read people like a book, social fluency, awkward silences, improve your people skills. And so they write book after book after book. And I call these KDP businesses. Yep. Is that still a thing? It's definitely still a thing.

54:50I mean, I think that market got flooded because people saw people having success with it. And so it's kind of an SEO play. I always talk about Google is a search engine of browsers. Amazon is a search engine of buyers. So when people go to Google, they go to search for information. When they go to Amazon, they go to search for things to buy. So I think that's one of the most powerful things about a book is if you have a book that solves a specific problem where you're one click away from a purchase with all of that traffic. And so these folks are kind of tapping into that, which is What are popular search terms?

55:21How can we get that to show up in Amazon or even on Google, but with an Amazon link? Because it's a high SEO term. And then that turns into clicks, which turns into book purchases, which turns into kind of serialized book-based businesses. And then you kind of have a following around that where you have a bunch of small books around specific topics and people buy all the other books and that sort of thing. So it's very much still a thing. And if you want to be full-time as an author, it certainly is a path. Finally, what's the role of AI in all this? Like, I'm sure people have already used AI to write books.

55:55AI, I would say, is not a good writer. It's very generic. Even if they improve it, it's going to be hard for it to be a great writer, you know, because it's never experienced anything. It doesn't really draw from that emotion. But of course, you know, AI is going to improve. What's the role of AI in writing books? And then I have one final question after that. Yeah, you know, I don't think it'll ever learn how to write better than James Altucher. That's for sure. That's definitely for sure. But I think the role that it plays is in helping reduce friction throughout the process. So some ways that we're using it is to help come up with titles or subtitles, to write potential book descriptions.

56:37And then some of our team is testing it for editing, which it's actually really good at. Especially a lot of the basic, more commoditized editing. It can do content improvement and some editing. But as far as first draft output, I think that will be like the last frontier that will continue to live with the author. And then AI can make a lot of the other fringe things better. And what's the best place people can find you and your site and self-publish their book and so on? Yeah, thanks for asking. So I'd say two main things that would be most helpful. So first and foremost, I'd love to give a copy of this book, a free physical copy to anyone who wants it in the U.S.

57:17when you say this book, since it's on audio. Yeah, so published my new book. So all you have to do is go to publishedbook.com forward slash altucher. So published, like I published a book.com forward slash altucher. Put in your shipping address and we'll ship it, pack it, print it, all that stuff for free. You don't have to pay anything. And if you're international, we'll send you a digital copy. So that's the first place, probably the best place. And then the second place is, James and I are hosting a training on May 2nd. at 3 p.m. Eastern, Confessions of a New York Times Bestseller. It's going to be a lot of fun.

57:52Even if it's after that date and you're hearing this, we'll have the replay there. Go to selfpublishing.com forward slash altucher, and you can register for that training. It's going to be a lot of fun. And that's May 2nd. I'm very excited about that. I am getting nothing for that, but I just, I love this business. I love this industry. Oh, and I was going to tell you an idea I had, and then I'll let you go. I know you have to get going. You should contact every podcaster, every episode is a book. Like let's say I interview Richard Branson or let's say, look, I have a book in my background here, Think Like a Billionaire.

58:25It's just a collection of 10 of my podcasts with billionaires where I get the transcript, I heavily edited it, I wrote an intro and an outro. And so the audio book's already done because it's all the podcasts stapled together. And there's 2 million podcasters out there. This is another outlet for them to get their word out. Agreed, it's a big market. Yeah. All right. Well, Chandler Bolt, founder, CEO, owner of selfpublishing.com. You've published 7 ,000 books. Your books do really well. Your book published, everyone should get. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Always great to talk to you.

59:00I'm looking forward to May 2nd, where we're going to do this training together. A lot of fun. Thank you so much. James, this was a dream come true. Thanks for having me, man. I've been looking forward to this day for a long time.

59:17Thank you.