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

[00:00:07] Charlie Hohn has quietly become the expert on self-publishing your book, self-publishing a best-selling book. He's worked with authors ranging from Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, David Goggins, Ramit Sethi, Cody Sanchez. Actually, Jay, a lot of those authors have been on this podcast many times

[00:00:28] because they've written such great books. And Charlie has helped work on every aspect of these books, not necessarily all at the same time, but over his broad range of experience, whether it's coming up with the right idea, how to put your book together in the best way,

[00:00:43] the most efficient way, maybe the cheapest way, or at least the highest quality way, how to then market your book. I've been writing books for over 20 years now. And in this one hour podcast, Charlie has given me so many ideas that I never even thought of before.

[00:01:02] So listen to this podcast, share it with your friends who are writing books. Also check out Charlie's site, Charlie Hohn. Charlie is C-H-A-R-L-I-E-H-O-E-H-N, charliehohn.com where you can subscribe to his newsletter and all this stuff and self publish a book.

[00:01:21] I think this is important stuff to listen to. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show. Maybe I forget everything. I forget literally everything. I have Alzheimer's now. We should call this the Alzheimer's podcast

[00:01:53] where I describe my slow descent into Alzheimer's. What's been new on your end? Like since we last spoke, I guess I've gotten married. I've moved to Georgia. I wrote the last viral article in world history and then got punished for it by my neighbors and family.

[00:02:14] So I had to move to first Florida and then Georgia. And one of your heroes too, that was ridiculous. I know, I know. It was ridiculous. I like Seinfeld. I still do some financial stuff, but mostly I do private investing.

[00:02:30] But I am writing a new book and I'm having trouble with it. I've never had trouble with a book before. I've always like no. I wrote a book a year, one to two books a year between 2004 and 2021. And then I have not written one since. How come?

[00:02:52] Other books I sort of knew, like events would happen to me and then I'd write the book afterwards. And I had a lot of stories and experiences from my past, like going broke and doing this, doing that.

[00:03:04] And I always kind of knew the stories I wanted to tell. But now I'm sort of like in real time having the story and writing the book at the same time. So a common style for many authors, but a new style for me.

[00:03:18] And then you don't really know. You think you know how something's going to end or how a story is going to work out, but you don't really know. And so you have to just sort of maximize your experiences and adventures along the way and see what happens.

[00:03:32] But it's a slower process. So what's the story that's unfolding? At first, it kind of had a self-help angle, which is that as one gets older, you still can find much meaning in life. Not by achieving and success and all that, but by going on quests,

[00:03:51] like finding something impossible to do or seemingly impossible and attempting to do it. So the idea kind of like the quest that the mythical King Arthur had for the Holy Grail. He never actually found the Holy Grail, but he had many adventures along the way.

[00:04:08] And that's what fills the mythology of literature. The King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, it's sort of the epic quest. Odysseus, Ulysses, these are all based on quests where the fact that Ulysses gets home doesn't matter so much

[00:04:24] as the adventures he had along the way. And so I went on this quest, which my listeners know about, but I went on this quest that's taken me on many, many adventures all around the world, which is when I was younger, I was a strong chess master.

[00:04:40] And I wanted to see after a 25-year break where I did nothing relating to chess, I wanted to see if I could be as good as I was when I was younger. And along the way, I've had not only hung out

[00:04:56] with the world chess champion and flown all over the world, but I've had lessons from the world memory champion. I've talked to everybody about how the brain changes as you age and how competition and sports change your ability to be a killer, changes.

[00:05:17] I've explored how young people learn languages because it's connected. And again, I've been all over the world many times and kind of achieved things in chess I never thought I would achieve, but I am not better than I was 25 years ago.

[00:05:34] And I don't know if that's going to change. Well, here's the thing. I feel like I know more, but I don't win more. And I heard that's a common phenomenon. I know a lot more because I've been taking lessons, I've been studying, but I am not winning more.

[00:05:55] I am not a killer. I don't really know why. Do you think that has to do with horsepower going on upstairs when you were young versus now? It's just different? Yeah, it's totally different. The brain is, people say, oh, you could do anything.

[00:06:16] And I've had a lot of good advice where people, well-meaning people would say, you can do it. Don't say you can't do it, which is true. Self-talk has become a big part of this adventure as well. But the reality is the brain changes, the body changes,

[00:06:31] and this is more connected to chess than I would have thought possible. Like you basically have to be an athlete. That's the other thing too, is the world has changed. So people in general have gotten better, and more kids have gotten involved.

[00:06:44] There wasn't really as many kids when I was playing before. The computer has gotten involved. The computer is better than humans now as opposed to when I last played. And that's had an effect on training in the game. And maybe the fact that I have more responsibilities

[00:07:00] has changed, I don't know. But then there's the question, not only can I still achieve this goal, but how does this change the brain? I don't know the answer. And I'm still figuring that out. And you're on, because here's the thing about you, Charlie, that I've always admired.

[00:07:19] You do things, but in what I would call a choose-yourself style, you find your own way to basically recreate industries so they fit you. So like when you wrote one of your books, instead of going to a publisher for an advance, you did a Kickstarter for an advance.

[00:07:37] Maybe you're the first person to do that. And it was genius. You got a bigger advance than you probably would have gotten from Kickstarter than you would have gotten otherwise. And it also is ingenious from a marketing point of view because it shows the market for the book.

[00:07:55] Everybody who donates to the Kickstarter is obviously going to get the book and buy books and recommend the book to others and so on. So you build this, it's a marketing tool as well as a tool to get an advance.

[00:08:07] Yeah. Thank you, James. I appreciate the kind words. And you've done this consistently throughout your whole career. You have a very unusual career. Maybe you describe it. How would you describe what you do? Oh, man. So I would say the simplest way

[00:08:25] that other people describe me is I help authors market their books, but I also help them edit their books, write their books. And I personally identify with, I just like helping authors create amazing books and then figuring out holistically how it fits into their life.

[00:08:47] And so I never wanted necessarily to become an author myself. It was more, it just kind of happened. And I didn't really strongly identify with it because it was such... Unlike you, I felt like I didn't always have the source material or even the need

[00:09:04] to put things into books. And now I'm starting to again, but... But I would question that because, look, I've read probably a thousand books or more for this podcast in the past 10 years. I don't always remember every book I've read,

[00:09:21] but you were on the podcast, I want to say, in 2014 or 2015, for your first book, it wasn't your first book, it was what I thought was your first book, Play. And I still remember that book. Like you were really anxious. You were having the equivalent of panic attacks

[00:09:37] or anxiety attacks. And you developed this philosophy of playing that really changed your life. And you wrote a book about it. And I remember the book and I think about that book a lot because again, related to this current quest, I'm taking very seriously basically a children's game.

[00:09:56] And, you know, Play, when I read your book, I did start playing more. If I had an afternoon free, I would go to an archery range and shoot arrows or I'd go play laser tag. I always tried to think of new ways to play

[00:10:15] after I read your book and it really helped my life. Great. I'm grateful to hear it. And yeah, a friend of mine sent me a video yesterday of a guy named Preston Smiles, I think on Instagram. And he talked about how he made a dedicated practice

[00:10:35] every day 3 p.m. that he would play. And he did it for a full year and said it was the best year he'd ever had relationship-wise, financially, et cetera. He was like everything was firing because what I experienced as well is it trains your body that you're safe

[00:10:52] and in a state of abundance and thriving. Because you can't play if you're worried about your needs and your survival and all this stuff. So I think it's, yeah, I just think it has a similar dynamic to meditation in a way where it's just the act

[00:11:07] of sitting still and breathing that you're just training your body like you're not in fight or flight mode right now. And I think Play accomplishes the same. But both meditation and Play, it's interesting you make the analogy, both meditation and Play are safe ways

[00:11:25] to deal with the traumas of life. So when you play a game, whatever the game is, or a sport, you're experiencing, most games are metaphors for life. There's loss, there's trauma, there's bad decisions, there's good decisions, there's the need to make quick decisions, there's sportsmanship,

[00:11:46] sore losers, good winners, teamwork, camaraderie, learning. So all of these things, and in meditation as well, you have thoughts that are constantly coming up and it's a safe way to kind of recognize those thoughts are not harming you at the moment and you put them aside.

[00:12:06] And it's similar thinking to how one does when winning in a game. And so it's an interesting analogy. But why did Preston Smiles stop playing after that year? I don't think he did. I still think he does. And yeah, it's one of the- And what would he play?

[00:12:25] I think he tried a number of things. He would go skateboarding. There were, I think, I'm promoting his stuff because I loved it. It was, he called it a joy alarm where at 3 p.m. he would just, no matter what state he was in,

[00:12:42] he would enact basically that he was in a purely playful, joyful state to train his body that, hey, I can just choose this emotion at any time. For me, I had to do, I don't know, it was like a month or two of both playing catch

[00:13:01] instead of having coffee meetings, right? And, or like going on walks instead of sitting still and drinking stimulants. And then I was doing Home Run Derby and improv comedy lessons. Oh, that's great. And improv was to me the remembering

[00:13:21] of what it's like to be a kid where if you play with a four-year-old and you hand them something and you're like, here's a gift, or you don't hand them anything, I'm sorry, but you're like, here's a gift, they'll instinctively take it and be like,

[00:13:35] oh, thank you so much. And they'll do something with that invisible object and so improv really pointed out the programs that I was operating with as an adult in my mind of everything's serious, everything is results-oriented, everything is like perfect, right? Like don't share your cracks, your vulnerabilities.

[00:13:59] Like be strong. And improv forced me to let that go and to make mistakes. And the most important thing I felt it taught me was when I made mistakes, it often resulted in a better thing than I could have possibly planned.

[00:14:18] It was like, and it's similar with trauma and looking back on life, right? Is when you look back at these bad things that happened to you, often it led to some superpower or some essential thing later on in your life that actually was helpful in your spiritual refinement

[00:14:36] in some way. At least for me, that's been what it's been. Completely. Like there's no such thing as wisdom without experience. And experience doesn't just mean great experiences or good experiences. It means the full range. Like you have to get screwed over, you got to go broke,

[00:14:55] you have to have anxiety. You have to have periods where you're going, where it's hard to survive. And then I'm not saying failure leads to success because often it doesn't, but the people who survive failure can often have experience to either avoid it again

[00:15:11] or help others avoid it. And that is a benefit. Although the downsides of failure I think are maybe greater, which is that you just feel like shit for a really long time. 100%. If you're not practicing the act of bouncing back or gratitude for the failure or self-care,

[00:15:31] all that stuff, yeah, it can suck. It can take a long time. But you're right, like improv or games or playing is like practice for that. Like improv also is good practice for creativity. I think as we get older, a lot of people just forget

[00:15:45] how to activate that creativity muscle. 100%. And improv shakes you out of that. I was just talking about you the other day, actually, with the idea sex, doing the 10 ideas a day. And I was talking about it in the context of somebody

[00:16:28] you likely know, Jesse Cole, the owner of the Savannah Bananas. I just read about them today. What is up with them? They're awesome, man. I met Jesse years ago and he was one of the founders of Savannah Bananas.

[00:16:44] And I met Jesse years ago when he was just starting to really get momentum with Savannah Bananas as one of the most popular sports teams in the world now. Millions and millions and millions of followers. What is it? I only read about them this morning.

[00:16:59] So it is a baseball team that's rewritten the rules of baseball. And so they have taken all the crappy parts about baseball that make it so boring and tedious and made it into a fans-first experience where everything is about entertaining the fans

[00:17:16] and not sticking to the hard and fast traditional rules of baseball. So there's lots of examples, but some are like their umpires dance. They don't have to pitch all four balls, I think, for a walk to occur. They can just be like, walk. You know?

[00:17:36] And the sport exploded. And the reason I brought you up in the context of that conversation was because he was one of these people that wrote 10 ideas a day. And he made it into a religious practice. And he said, seven to nine out of the 10 ideas

[00:17:55] that I practice, or that I write, that we come up with that we're going to test in games, they fail. But we'll hit that one that will carry over and it'll become this legendary part of the games that everybody talks about.

[00:18:10] And so he's like, we've just been doing iterative processes like that. And so yeah, everything boils down to that idea. And so coming back to improv being, it is the vehicle for creativity because the number of times I've been in meetings where it's like, okay guys, we're collectively

[00:18:30] brainstorming and coming up with ideas. And then somebody will say an idea and another person will be like, that'll never work. It happens constantly and people don't even think about it. But it's like, you're just slamming down on this process when in reality

[00:18:46] the famous improv thing is yes and. No matter what anybody says, you build on it no matter how ridiculous or outrageous it is because that's how creativity happens. Yeah, because think about it. And this goes back to your point about one stage in your book publishing journey.

[00:19:04] What book was it where you did the Kickstarter and you raised $35,000 in lieu of going to a publisher and getting it in advance? It was called Play for a Living. And it was an art book, a coffee table book that I did with 50 artists around the world.

[00:19:21] You know, I don't think I ever got that book. Oh man, I'll have to send you a copy. So probably the first thought is, hmm, I'd like someone to give me a larger than average amount of money for me to do this book.

[00:19:36] And then someone would probably say to you, well, okay, go submit it to 30 publishers and pray that some kid likes it and some marketing department thinks it's worth publishing and some publisher thinks it's worth publishing and some agent negotiates a deal

[00:19:53] and then maybe you get $10,000 advance for it for a coffee table book because not a lot of people buy coffee table books. And you would be like, no. And then people would say, oh, there's no other way to do that though. But if you do yes and, yes,

[00:20:07] and maybe Patreon or Kickstarter is a way to do that. I mean, how else are you going to come up with that idea? Exactly. Yeah. And it was also, I see this in you as well, obviously, with the heroes arc you described.

[00:20:22] But a lot of it is just, what would be an interesting way to do this that would be exciting for me? Like, how can I make this game interesting? And after having done kind of the, you figure out the blueprint for other types of launches for books.

[00:20:39] I had never done that. I just thought it would be exciting and interesting and collaborative. And it felt aligned too with the nature of the book to play. It would feel off. If I was just like telling people, go buy this,

[00:20:53] rather than, hey, let's have this be a collective. And so you've worked with mega, not only if you're in your own books, which I think you downplay your own role as a writer, but you've worked with mega writers like James Clear, Ramit Sethi. Well, I'll pause you there.

[00:21:11] Because James Clear, I will just give a footnote. He would have done amazing if I were alive or dead. He sold 15 million copies of Atomic Habits. He and I are buddies. I did a bowling alley meeting with him where we hung out for a few hours

[00:21:27] and talked about his book. But he knocked that out of the park. It had nothing to do with me. He did. But I give a little nudge of, hey, I may have contributed. And okay, then you mentioned David Goggins, Ramit Sethi, Cody Sanchez.

[00:21:45] Did you work with her on her? And her book's coming out in September. I'm super excited to, I think she's a genius. I'm super excited to read her book and have her on the podcast about it. And then you worked with a bunch of people.

[00:21:57] You worked with Scribe too, right? Yeah, six years at Scribe. But yeah, I've worked with a lot of big names and learned from them. I learned the most from Tim Ferriss when I worked with him for three years. I learned a lot from Seth Godin

[00:22:12] when I first started out. And yeah, Cody and Noah Kagan are the most recent authors that have kind of had a big role in the production. Noah's book is great. Noah's book was fantastic. Million Dollar Weekend, fantastic book. Million Dollar Weekend, Main Street Millionaire with Cody's book.

[00:22:31] It's funny how both books have, does every book have to have million in it now? Maybe, is that your advice? Just have a million dollars in your title. They tested well. Million Dollar Weekend was such a strong concept right out of the gate.

[00:22:45] We tested that on Tim's blog and it's still, I think, in the top five blog posts on that blog, which is thousands of articles. And then Main Street Millionaire for Cody's was one we tested a number of titles, but that was both one of the strongest performing titles

[00:23:04] and most aligned with the message and her brand. And so you use the word test and this is super important. People underestimate this. I'll just describe for Choose Yourself, which is my best selling book by far. We tested the title. I tested the title.

[00:23:24] I remember I didn't like it. My initial title was the Choose Yourself Era because there was a time when now we could choose ourselves. But I didn't like it because I didn't like saying the phrase. It sounded like error instead of era.

[00:23:37] So with Tucker and Max and Ryan Holiday, we came up with a bunch of other titles. Choose Yourself, Choose Yourself Era, Pick Yourself. Ryan had some other title. There was a bunch of other titles. And we bought Facebook ads with $20 budgets

[00:23:56] just to see which end of the Facebook ads you could click, but it would click to nowhere. We just wanted to measure how many people would click and like 80% was Choose Yourself as opposed to the other titles. Love it. That's great. How did you test Cody's title?

[00:24:12] I get kind of intense about this so we can geek out on it together. I use Pickfu.com to run quick tests. How do you spell that? P-I-C-K-F-U dot com. And people will argue that, hey, this isn't a perfect solution, but it's fast and it correlates very strongly

[00:24:41] with methods that you just mentioned, right? Of running Facebook ads, running Google ads to test titles. This gives you very, very efficient, quick results where you can A, B test or test multiple titles. And the way I like to do it is I'll brainstorm first with the author.

[00:24:59] Then we'll brainstorm those options against ChatGPT to see if other variations come up that look promising. And then we'll shortlist them based on some criteria that I developed a little bit and Scribe developed and I'll score them and weight them across categories

[00:25:19] like FOMO, do you get immediate fear of missing out? Just by hearing this title. How compelling is it? How easy is it to say? How fun is it to say? So it's like eight or 10 criteria. And so we score each of them quickly in ChatGPT,

[00:25:36] take the top performers that we like, run them through Pickfu a handful of times with different variations. And then I'll even mock up really rudimentary covers, right? Where it's just the cover, there's no design on the cover, it's just the title.

[00:25:53] And then I'll have people click which one they want. And so having that data I've used to convince traditional publishers, I won't name who it is, but I had to convince their publisher that they botched the title and they were stuck with it.

[00:26:08] And then I just showed them the data and they were like, all right, we have to change this. So yeah, I think titles are arguably the most important marketing decision you can make because if you can't say it out loud with confidence,

[00:26:24] if it sounds foolish to say, to your point, my working title for Play It Away was How I Cured My Anxiety. And that was based off of a blog post that I wrote that went viral and that's why I wrote that book.

[00:26:40] I tested, oh, the material, a lot of people want this. But How I Cured My Anxiety sounds terrible to somebody. Hey, you should read this book. It's called How I Cured My Anxiety. It's almost an insult to the person, right? They feel kind of on the defensive.

[00:26:54] So Play It Away, I think there's probably better variations of this, right? But it performed better than that because of that reason. And you bring up an important point. So a lot of people with anxiety might see a book, How I Cured My Anxiety and say,

[00:27:15] oh, I have to buy that. But the most important ways that books really spread is through word of mouth. So someone says, oh, I've read this amazing book you have to read, How I Cured My Anxiety. But to your point, it's not going to spread that way

[00:27:33] because it's an embarrassing, oh, great, thank you so much, I'm going to read it. Like people don't necessarily want to identify themselves as anxious. I mean, I have no problem with it. You have no problem with it, but a lot of people do.

[00:27:46] So you have to have a book that, oh, you got to read Million Dollar Weekend. That's fun. It's curious. It's kind of a pattern disrupt in that, oh, it's not really a way to make a million dollars from scratch in a weekend, but okay,

[00:27:59] what's his formula here that he's going to get there? And that fear of missing out phrase is interesting. Like I guess with Million Dollar Weekend, if everybody was making a million dollars a week, and I was making a million dollars in a weekend,

[00:28:15] I could see one would have a fear of missing out. Right. Yeah, well, the other ones that it scored against is like, does it have a tight contrast? Does it evoke questions? Does it kind of give you that head tilt, feels novel, right?

[00:28:29] So Million Dollar is one concept, Weekend is another. These do not tend to clash with each other. Yeah, like Four Hour Workweek is like that. Right, which by the way, the Four Hour Workweek in my scoring criteria, I've tested hundreds of titles in it.

[00:28:46] Four Hour Workweek is the strongest title, number one. Wow, wow. And he had a different title initially. Yeah, drug dealing for fun and profit. He had a number of other ideas that didn't test anywhere near as well, but Four Hour Workweek

[00:29:01] was I think at least double the runner up, similar to Choose Yourself. You know what I think was, yeah, what I think was interesting with Choose Yourself was that a lot of people hated the concept because they thought it might be selfish.

[00:29:16] So I think if a title also evokes controversy, then you know, it's like, Naval Ravikant once told me this, that you don't want three star reviews, you want a lot of five star reviews and one star reviews. Yeah. Like you want people to love you and hate you

[00:29:31] and not be mediocre about you. Right, and so that's another part is, can people talk about it whether they want to read it or not? And so with the Four Hour Workweek, it's a perfect example because people have visceral reactions to it

[00:29:45] where they're either super excited or they're actively angry. Like that's impossible. This guy's a scam artist, et cetera. Like they are already emotionally worked up. So does it evoke an emotional response is a really good indicator of a good title. What about like Malcolm Gladwell books,

[00:30:03] like Outliers for instance, or The Tipping Point? Well, I guess all of those are like, or Blink, you know, all of those are aspirational too. Like can I be an outlier? Or can I judge someone just in a blink of an eye?

[00:30:19] Or is my company or is my life hitting a tipping point? So there's some aspirational quality to Malcolm Gladwell's books as well. What about Freakonomics? Freakonomics is fun to say. It's a fun concept. Right. And for something that's so boring, it's like those two, Freaks and Economics,

[00:30:40] they do not come together often. Right? So I would say that's super strong on that front. And what other book titles do you like? Oh man. Atomic Habits feels like a boring book title though. I don't know. It's solid. It's not amazing, but it's strong. Right.

[00:31:04] In the Habits area, maybe I like Charles Stuhig's title, The Power of Habit, better. Yeah, that actually performed better. And both of those books, by the way, have sold almost, in the grand scheme of things, it's not that significant of a difference in how many copies they've sold.

[00:31:22] They both sold incredibly well. And so you brought up Malcolm Gladwell's titles. Those are real punchy titles that they almost contain the story. They almost beg the story from the title. Right? It's funny you say that. So Nassim Taleb, I love his titles.

[00:31:40] And in my last book, I even have a chapter, basically you don't have to read Nassim Taleb's books, you just have to read the title. Because he does the same thing. Like Anti-Fragile, you could understand the concept of the whole book, which is a very creative book.

[00:31:57] You could understand the whole concept and even enact it in your life just by really thinking about the title or The Black Swan or Fold by Randomness. These are all, the story is contained, the concept is contained completely in the title. Yeah.

[00:32:12] It's almost like a good title practically gives away precisely the transformation that you're going for or the understanding that you're trying to harness into your life. So I'm trying to think of books I've written that didn't do as well as I expected. Skip the Line, my last book.

[00:32:47] It did well, but not as well as I expected. And the title maybe is a little boring. It's a little too easy somehow. It doesn't really challenge you. Yeah. So give me a second. I'm going to actually look up all the criteria

[00:33:01] so we have it and I'll try and run it through my books ratings system while we're... So Skip the Line was one. And then Choose Yourself and then you had Reinvent Yourself. You've had a ton of books, but I'm just curious what it'll rank these.

[00:33:15] The Power of No did well. Yeah, that's a good title. The Power Of often is very good. And so in similar... That goes to the contrast, right? It's the power of something very simple that doesn't seem powerful. Same with The War of Art. Right? I was thinking about...

[00:33:38] I was talking to my wife yesterday and saying I think a good title for a book would be The War of Joy, where you always are trying to get yourself into that state and stay in that state. And it is a choice oftentimes, right?

[00:33:51] But you are at war still, especially when you have kids who are throwing you into an array of chaos and their stressful moments, all this stuff. So Skip the Line had a decent score. And so why do you think that book didn't perform very well?

[00:34:09] Or as well as your others, I should say. Yeah. It was the first book I had done in a while with a traditional publisher. And so I wasn't able to do my normal marketing things as easily. But I don't really know...

[00:34:25] I think actually it was my best written book. So I don't really know, to be honest, why it didn't do as well, except I just didn't do as much marketing for it as I normally would. It came out in 2021, so there's a COVID thing.

[00:34:37] But I didn't even call up people and say, hey, can I come on your podcast? I just didn't do my usual stuff. And I don't know why it wasn't a huge bestseller. I felt it should have been, but it wasn't. Do you think it's just simply reflective

[00:34:54] of at that period of time, you didn't really feel like going into doing all this stuff? And so usually you're the one who can... I always think of a launch as like, you're just lighting as many sparklers as you can and hoping it catches fire,

[00:35:09] but you don't know if it will or not. Yeah, so to be honest, this was like in the aftermath of that New York City is dead article. And I let the reaction to that affect me more than I should have.

[00:35:23] And I was a bit, let's even say depressed. And I just wasn't doing anything. I didn't leave the house. Yeah, should have is a strong word. I think any normal human being would... The fact that you were able to get through it is great because to go through

[00:35:40] what you went through is really hard. And I think people don't realize how difficult that level of criticism is, unless you've had already thousands of arrows in your back from little comments on YouTube, little comments in the blog. It's like those all kind of...

[00:35:56] You don't know how like the blood draining from your face down to your feet feeling is until you've experienced something like that. So my hat is off to you. I don't think you should have been able to get through that any faster than you did.

[00:36:15] So that wouldn't beat yourself up. It's unfortunate. I had two books come out during that time when I was basically depressed from this and neither did that well. I did like zero marketing for all of it. And I did zero business stuff. Other than the podcast, I basically...

[00:36:34] Other than the podcast and starting to play chess again, I basically did nothing. Yeah. It was a draining time. I don't honestly blame you for that. That's tough. And yeah, book launches are a lot on their own, much less or much more so after a global pandemic

[00:36:55] and an icon basically attacking you in a public forum. Yeah, it was weird because most people I would say, and my listeners have heard this, but most people I would say loved the article except for all the people I knew and was close to.

[00:37:14] Oh yeah, everyone in New York, right? Yeah, and my family and Seinfeld. I lost a lot of friends and family. Do you think it's because they identified with it? Do you think it's because they identified so strongly with New York that it felt like just a personal attack?

[00:37:38] Maybe. And then what happened is that... But then it tied into all sorts of other things. So when Joe Rogan mentions it or Rush Limbaugh read it word for word on his show, I didn't know Rush Limbaugh. I didn't ask him to do that.

[00:37:56] But then people in New York obviously thought, this is some alt-right wing opinion about New York. It must be, you are the company you keep. So that would create another wave of attacks. I owned a comedy club that was vandalized. Jay, the producer on this podcast right now

[00:38:13] was harassed physically. Just lots of things happened. Family members would write articles against me. It was just a weird thing. So I really kind of... And I had been attacked before. I've had controversial articles before, but this one somehow everybody knew how to press the right buttons.

[00:38:33] And I fell apart for a little bit. I get it, man. I've had heroes of mine dissect my stuff as well and poke flaws in it and question me or my character, which is hurtful because you try and do things with an intention behind them of balancing,

[00:38:57] hey, I'm trying to be helpful or to state my truth. And at the same time, balancing what you know about will this get any attention whatsoever or will it just be completely lost? And so I remember the feeling of terror I had

[00:39:16] after the Vegas shooting where I wrote an article about why men keep doing this, basically. It was something to that effect. And that article went viral very quickly. And I was terrified of the reaction to it, which was by and large positive, but the negative ones were frightening.

[00:39:41] You only really hear the most from the negative ones because everyone else is a normal human being and goes on with their lives. Whereas the negative ones, they sort of get attention from how negative they are. Right. And that's how our brains are hardwired too,

[00:39:57] is to look for the threat and to look for the attack. And so that's why everybody only remembers their one-star ratings and not their 105-star ratings. It's like, ugh, you only remember the attack. So I don't know. I've gained an appreciation for not coming down on people

[00:40:19] and trying to offer some level of constructive criticism because it takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there like that and make a bold statement that you know is a potentially painful truth. And I think probably if you'd said that at any other point,

[00:40:37] that people weren't hypersensitive to the realities of the global pandemic, it was a timing thing. It was a zeitgeist. Yeah, which is why I wrote it, really. There were issues in a time of global emergency. There were issues that New York wasn't tending to.

[00:40:56] But anyway, I don't want to... Sure. I've talked about this article a lot, but I do think that's why those books... I just didn't put any love and attention. I had already written them, but then they had to come out.

[00:41:11] It takes a year for books to come out. And that's the benefit of self-publishing, really, too. You have an idea you're excited about. You write the book in a state of excitement. And you literally can publish the book still in a state of excitement

[00:41:25] as opposed to waiting for a year and then other things are going on in your life. And oh, this book, I wrote this a year ago. I'm not that interested anymore in marketing it. That's so true. That is so true. That's a huge benefit of self-publishing.

[00:41:39] I don't really know what the benefit is anymore of traditional publishing, other than that feeling that, oh, they like me. Yeah. I talked with Nat Eliason recently. Oh, he's coming on the podcast in the Crypto book. Yeah, he'll be a great guest for you.

[00:41:58] You guys will have a lot to talk about. But he had a nice filter for it, which is if you can't get at least $100,000 from a publisher, just self-publish. That's absolutely right, because then the publisher is not committed either to marketing the book. Exactly.

[00:42:17] And it's also not going to make that much of a dent in your life. The costs of self-publishing professionally used to be exorbitant. I believe they've fallen considerably if you know what you're doing. But that's the challenge. Or that's a challenge.

[00:42:35] And that's another challenge in and of itself. But yeah, I largely agree with you about publishers. I like them. I like the people. But I have just seen over and over that there's just not that significant of a value exchange.

[00:42:53] And I know that folks like some of the authors we've mentioned, right? Ryan Holiday, James Clear, Tim Ferriss, they would probably argue there's lots of benefits. Potentially, they're a legal team defending you. But I don't know. I'm largely on your side. I think most people should self-publish

[00:43:12] and just do it as well as they can. Well, and it's interesting because you see, there was one phenomenon that I think still occurs. Let's say after James Clear wrote Atomic Habits and Charles Duhigg wrote The Power of Habit,

[00:43:24] I think they were within a year or two of each other. Suddenly everyone realized, oh, people are more interested in habits than we thought. So there became a little cottage industry of people self-publishing 60, 70-page books about habits. And there was hundreds of them.

[00:43:43] And they would all do pretty well, actually. Oh, really? Yeah, there's a bunch of writers out there. They publish a book a month on whatever they think is the hot trend. Maybe now having the word millionaire in a book or million is going to be a trend.

[00:43:59] And so I've noticed that happens occasionally. There would be people who write books like The 60-Second Habit or Nuclear Atomic Habits or whatever. So there's also this industry of self-publishing really fast. You don't even have to care about the book.

[00:44:19] You just publish 100 books and some of them will do well and you make a living. Yeah, it is a strategy. And I know that that's a way that a lot of fiction authors have done it, where they look at, all right, what are the leaders in the categories?

[00:44:33] What are the overall trends? Can I create a book with a cover that screams, hey, we're one of you? And it's a very similar style. I haven't looked into that much from the non-fiction category because the volume seems like it's significantly lower.

[00:44:52] So I feel like there's less of a need for that upside to doing it. But even more so, I don't know, I'm more fixated on can we offer something unique to this author that we're doing with this topic rather than just kind of a distillation and rehash?

[00:45:09] Have any of those books been noteworthy to you? No, zero. Zero noteworthy. It's what you're saying is you have to be an expert in the space, spend years, and not necessarily a credentialed expert, but an expert, like someone who has life experience that makes you an expert.

[00:45:31] Like Rameet Sethi, I Will Teach You to Be Rich. From his college days, he was giving people personal finance advice. That's just what he did. And then he had a successful newsletter doing it. So he had a lot of experience knowing what issues were important to people

[00:45:45] and knowing what advice worked. And he wrote a great book. And you have to have that kind of life dedication to learn how to do that. You have to have that life dedication to learn how to do that. And you have to have that life dedication

[00:46:00] to learn how to do that. So you're right. What you offer an author is that extra step of how do they turn it into something that people will read? Because there's a lot of nuance to writing a good book, but then there's nuance to getting people

[00:46:17] to read your book. And they're a different set of nuances. Like Tim said, before you write a book, you have to become the book. And I think if you look at what Tim Ferriss did with the four-hour work week, he didn't claim necessarily to be the utmost expert

[00:46:33] in startups and entrepreneurship. He just came from a place of like, I had all these problems, and this is how I fixed them. These were my recipes in how I did it. And so he could speak from such a place of authority.

[00:46:47] Tim's a genius, but he could speak from that strong place of authority. He didn't have to be brilliant. As long as you come from a place of like, I went through this, it was really hard for me, this is what helped me, that makes a great book.

[00:47:01] And that was what I did with Play It Away. I said up front, I'm not a healthcare practitioner. I'm not a doctor. I'm not an expert on this topic. All I know is what I got, what caused me to get here, and what helped me get out.

[00:47:17] So when does someone, let's say someone wants to write a book. How do they start thinking about what topic can they be the Tim Ferriss of, the Charlie Hohn of? I think that's the place to start is, can you write a book for your former self?

[00:47:37] I think it's the easiest kind of thing you can say is, could I be a hero to my previous self if I'd written this book? And that's why I actually wrote Play It Away and Recession Proof Graduate in 2008. I was desperately looking for advice that worked,

[00:47:54] and nothing worked. And none of it was in the category that I wanted it in. That is such a great way to think about it. That's kind of like how I did Choose Yourself. I wish I had read that before I spent 15 years begging people to choose me

[00:48:09] instead of me choosing myself. Yes. So what book can you write your former self where the former self could become basically the hero if they follow the advice of your current self's book? Exactly, yeah. It's kind of the paradox of these books that sell millions of copies

[00:48:31] is they're actually written for one person or two people maybe. So The Four Hour Workweek was written for two people. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell was written to impress four friends on an email thread. Harry Potter was written to entertain J.K. Rowling exclusively.

[00:48:48] She wrote those to entertain herself. And obviously, the market comes in and affects things. But I think that's the strongest way to write a book. And the death of a great book is the person thinking during the production process, I'm going to change the world.

[00:49:07] This is a book for everybody. There is no such thing as a book for everybody. Right, and I think another... There are a lot of things that can kill ideas. But let's say someone says, oh, everybody already knows this. It's useless for me to write a book.

[00:49:22] And so let's say everybody has unique experience. So let's say someone, and I'm just going to take a topic I've seen a lot of people talk about. Motherhood is difficult, right? So being a mother is a hard thing. And everyone complains about their mothers anyway.

[00:49:36] So you know motherhood is a hard thing. So if someone loves being a mother, I can easily see them saying, I should write a book about being a mother. But oh no, no one's going to want to read this. Everybody's already written that or said something

[00:49:50] or I'm no expert. So there's a lot of ways to talk yourself out of it. But if you write your experience, it's going to be a great book. 100%. Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, if you're worried about other people's experiences, if other people have already written this book,

[00:50:09] I mean, why do we listen to the national anthem? It's for many reasons really. But it boils down to we want to hear a new voice and we want to reinforce what we want to believe or what we need to hear, right?

[00:50:22] And so we want to be unified together. And so it's similar with books where it's like, I told somebody recently, they were like, I don't know. There's been a bunch of books written on this topic. Like, what else?

[00:50:35] What unique angle do I have to add to this topic? And I was like, I've literally read at least 25 books on your topic and not like an exaggeration because it's so interesting to me and I want to be the best at it.

[00:50:48] And so if your book comes out, I promise you I will read it. It's not going to sell 100 million copies, but it will sell a lot to the people who care about that topic and it will change them and make them want to work with you.

[00:51:03] And that's, there's a couple of interesting things to unpack there too. And it's like what you said about the national anthem. Why do we all listen to it again and again? You're right. We want to hear a new voice and hear it in a beautiful way that's unique.

[00:51:18] But also we want to reinforce beliefs that we all have, not just on ourselves. We have these beliefs together. We want to, we all, let's say you go to a baseball game. You see everybody, 40,000 people in the stands sing it together.

[00:51:31] People want to be part of a tribe. And I think the goal of a good book too is to build a tribe around your ideas. So the four-hour work week built literally a very strong tribe around the idea that, hey, there are better ways to work

[00:51:45] than the 40-hour grind that we've scheduled our lives around. Or for economics, hey, here's a really cool way that we can all look at economics together and you could take into new situations and impress your friends looking at economics this way. Or, you know, what's,

[00:52:07] oh, the million-dollar weekend. Yeah, we're going to, Noah gives all these kind of challenges in the book. And hey, I'm the type of person who reads the million-dollar weekend and does these cool, quirky challenges like Noah Kagan does. And you build a tribe around your book. Yeah.

[00:52:25] And I think a slight step back is that it makes people feel like they're not alone. You know, it's like you don't have to necessarily go in with the intent of, I'm going to build a tribe around this book, but more so this book is going to find

[00:52:40] the tribe that is fractured out there and feeling alone. And this will be this unifying force of there are people like you with this problem who are trying to figure it out and this is a community of people who are trying to figure out

[00:52:57] how to solve this problem. And I think that is a calming solution right now, right? So I think of like the subtle art of not giving an F, I thought was perfect timing with the cultural zeitgeist of millennials feeling like the media did not match, traditional legacy media

[00:53:22] was that people were dealing with the struggle of social media and the weird social dynamics that it created. And so the subtle art of not giving an F was just like Buddhism with a modern millennial spin. And it found and struck a chord

[00:53:40] with all these people who are like, I'm not necessarily looking for God as the answer, quitting as the answer. But I want to have an identity of a person who doesn't really care so much what other people think. And yeah, it was brilliantly timed

[00:53:57] with a title just as strong as the four-hour work week. And by the way then, suddenly there was a whole bunch of books with the F word in the title. Yes, that was the other thing. It created a category. And so to that not matching social media,

[00:54:14] legacy media, like books were kind of stiff and you knew what you were getting and it was all kind of whatever. To my knowledge, it was the first book that did that. Can you think of a book that did that before it? I could think of one novel

[00:54:33] with the F word in it, but it wasn't like the book. And I'm trying to think if I could think of anything else. I can't really think of anything. Yeah, so I felt like it was a category leader in that regard and was automatically remarkable

[00:54:47] in a way that hadn't been seen. Yeah. Okay, so let's say, but let's take it one step further. Let's say you really have a hard time. You want to write a book, but you have a hard time thinking what to write about.

[00:55:00] Is there any way to explore topics and see which one resonates with you? Yeah. I like to think of what have you helped at least three people with or transform into? What is a problem that people consistently come to you

[00:55:20] asking for help with and paying you money to solve? Those can be great, right? Because it can add fuel to the fire that you already have. And you already have irrefutable proof that this is valued among other people, that it's not just you.

[00:55:37] And I think the common mistake I have made and a lot of other people make too is I'm just really interested in this notion right now and I'm interested in a bunch of things and I've done a bunch of different experiences.

[00:55:53] Maybe I should just pile everything into one book rather than, what if you just had like one problem or one person that you were trying to help with one problem get to that outcome and you have one solid idea that gets them there?

[00:56:12] You can have multiple steps in the process but there's one core idea for this one person in this problem. That's kind of how I think of it. Yeah, that's very good advice. So okay, then what's the next step? You have to, you could write down your stories,

[00:56:30] you could write, the next step always for me is just making a list of topics that fit under this broader topic and stories and experiences that I've had, not necessarily in chronological order and stories that I've read about other people that kind of exemplify the topic as well.

[00:56:48] Again, not in any kind of order because I actually appreciate sometimes things that are out of order and then you sort of weave them together in an unusual way. Yeah, yeah. I do a few different things. So one thing that I do think is useful

[00:57:04] from the traditional publishing process is the book proposal where they make you look at comparative titles. I do think it's actually useful to put in Canva, okay, if this was on a shelf, what would the books around it be? So I've done that for TEDx Talks too,

[00:57:21] is like, what are the other TEDx videos that this would be suggested with, kind of thinking around that. And so that's one. And then I agree with you 100% where it's stories. What are all the stories? Can I get like 25 to 50 stories on a piece of paper

[00:57:40] that are related to this topic? And then I just like drawing a line of from here's where the reader is starting over here to this is the reader completely transformed. What are the most efficient steps to get them there? Usually between six to 12

[00:58:01] because those are kind of conventional book lengths and they're things that we expect. Sometimes I'll preface and proceed that with, let's talk about your book business idea, right? Like your book business plan, so to speak, where how does this fit?

[00:58:18] Are you trying to make money with this thing or not? And a lot of people are. If they're not, if they don't care, they just want to get the idea out, sweet, skip that step and go into the next one. But I think looking at positioning is useful.

[00:58:30] And then I completely agree with you that the stories and then the steps. Well, this is an interesting thing. The book business plan. Why should people write a book? And now let's compare now to like 40 years ago or 50 years ago where there was no social media.

[00:58:48] TV outlets were hard to come by. Like you couldn't just get yourself a TV show or a radio show. And then there was sort of a reason to write a book. That was like a path to fame and a career and credibility and so on.

[00:59:04] What are the reasons to write a book now as opposed to a LinkedIn article or a viral TikTok video or whatever? That can still happen, by the way, that they can break through. So books are magic, right? They're a product and they command your attention and respect

[00:59:23] and they still have that authority to them, especially if they're done well. People immediately have an air of respect and honor for a good book. And people at this point are very much conditioned, I feel, to seek a book for important problems

[00:59:46] that can't be resolved through like a YouTube tutorial. So the reasons I see that work really well for authors to write a book is, do you want to raise your authority within your particular niche topic and your credibility? Do you want to have people automatically take you seriously?

[01:00:07] Just like a subtle thing that has made a huge difference in my life is it's kind of like, would you rather be at a networking event trying to introduce yourself cold or would you rather come offstage after an hour keynote and everybody in there

[01:00:23] kind of knows what you do and they're interested? One, you're rolling a ball uphill each time. The other one, it's like, piece of cake, everybody's coming to you. There's that dynamic with books where if somebody has seen your book and read it especially,

[01:00:40] they come to you at a level of not just excitement to work with you but readiness. It's almost like if you have some type of business where it would be helpful for them to know your process, what it's like to work with you,

[01:00:55] what your values and beliefs are, it can make some of your best clients. I think one of the biggest misconceptions that people fall into is they're like, I'm going to make my money through selling books and I think it's the worst way to make money usually.

[01:01:16] It is a way. It's a way, but I don't think anybody should really write a book for the money even when you get a big advance. Let's just hypothetically say, I'm going to make up a number, you get a half a million dollar advance.

[01:01:32] The advance is usually broken into four parts. You get $125,000 upfront, you get $125,000 when you deliver the book, you get $125,000 when you publish the book, and then maybe you get $125,000 a year after that. I don't know. But it's scheduled out. An agent takes 20%, so now you're getting,

[01:01:53] I don't know, $97,000, something like that. Then taxes take half. Basically, every couple of years, you're getting $50,000, which is great, but it's not like a light, even a half a million dollar advance, which seems huge, is not a life-changing experience. Yep, I agree. What I tell authors is,

[01:02:17] if you can't give away your book for free and hate your financial goals, if you're using a book to actually grow your business, then you have the wrong business model or your offer isn't priced high enough or whatever. It was one of the benefits of working at Scribe

[01:02:35] was I got to see the authors that really did well financially and how with their book. What was fascinating to see was there were many authors who made millions of dollars just giving their book away for free. I'm not even talking about the free plus shipping

[01:02:53] and handle Facebook ad funnels. I'm talking about literally didn't list it on Amazon, printed off 1,000 copies and then went to law firms that catered to wealthy clients and just dropped their books off and asked them to hand them off. It's similar if like... You know that scene?

[01:03:13] It's a show on Apple TV. Do you remember that show? No, I haven't. I remember it, but is it worth seeing? Yes, 100%. It's a great show. There's a scene where the founder of WeWork, he figures out where the main investor of WeWork,

[01:03:30] the big one, I forget his name, but he goes to where he knows he's in the audience. He figures out how to get a speaking slot on there and then delivers a speech that is solely intended for that person to raise money.

[01:03:45] And he ends up making a ton of money from giving that speech. It's similar to a book where I'm like, look, if you only had three copies of this in print, they never went on Amazon, but if you put it into the hands of the right people,

[01:04:00] and you care about growing your business by this much? Assume one or two of those people convert and they become your clients. Does that hit your financial goals? For a lot of authors, if they break it down, and consultants in particular, they do these big offers

[01:04:21] that are six figures. Yeah, it can be really profitable just to mail your book out with a letter. I think it's true. And you don't get, for whatever reason, there is a certain cultural significance to writing a book. It's a stake in the ground.

[01:04:39] It's an event that says, I'm going to be in this area. A LinkedIn article won't do it. A YouTube video will not do it. No matter how great the YouTube video is, it just won't do it. A book though, like a friend of mine is upset

[01:04:55] he sold only a couple thousand copies of his book, but he was also just asked. Yeah, by the way, that's solid, but he's a little upset. But he also was just asked to give workshops in all these countries and he was asked to give a worldwide tour

[01:05:13] happening where he is the expert. He never would have gotten that without the book. Absolutely. Yeah, YouTube I think is the closest thing I've seen online to having the staying power of a book, but nothing compares to if you want to have the respect

[01:05:32] of the types of people that you really want to collaborate with, work with, connect with. I've had a lot of friends through, he read Play It Away, then he reached out to me. He's like, I've been a professional speaker. If you ever want advice, consider it repaid

[01:05:51] because you helped me a lot with this book. Yeah, I've had a lot of that as well. Yeah, the writing of Choose Yourself, other than the book and any experience related to the book, just the friends I've made, actually the wife I made, she read Choose Yourself

[01:06:11] and then sought me out when she saw that I was speaking. She didn't know I was in New York City. There was an event I was speaking at and she went and that's how I met her. That's amazing. I will double down on that

[01:06:25] and say the same thing with me. I'm married and our third kid's on the way in like two weeks and I don't know if we would have gotten married had I not gone through that journey first of all, right? My dad, my father-in-law

[01:06:41] read the book while we were dating and he was always kind of prickly to everybody else but he read that and he was like, Charlie's not bad. Yeah, see? There's a level of trust, especially if you do it in a sincere way where you're only trying

[01:06:59] to help the reader and you're not trying to take. I think a lot of books try and take and try and exploit but the irony of that, you can't get everything that you wanted if you just focus on helping, helping, helping. Now what if the writer

[01:07:34] is not a writer? So a writer means you write a book or write a story but also there's the other kind of writer which is someone who develops the skills of writing. Everybody now thinks because they can publish every day something on a blog or whatever,

[01:07:55] you have to work 8 hours and the time, you have to read a lot of books, you have to really study writing to be a good writer. Can you write a book without being a good writer? You know the answer to this question but yes, you absolutely can

[01:08:13] and some of the greatest books of all time have been spoken and so we all have technology now that allows us to speak and have it instantly transcribed for cheap or free and speak their first draft because so many great writers will say,

[01:08:31] yeah you have to get that C plus first draft out, the first draft is shit. Hemingway said it, Jordan Peterson said it, they all say it but what I really admired was learning how Brene Brown did it which she would rent an Airbnb,

[01:08:49] invite a bunch of her girlfriends to come drink wine and listen to her speak her book, and then build a structure like nail the table of contents, that's the foundation, don't screw that up, that's an important part but then give yourself chapter talking points

[01:09:07] and as long as it meets kind of the general structure of chapters which is you have a hook, you have a thesis, you have a body which contains your stories and supporting content and then you have the takeaways of speaking, right? I like to say speak it

[01:09:29] to your target reader if you can too because then it's like a comedian being on stage rather than practicing in their apartment. It makes it more real, it opens up the dialogue at the end to hey that was really interesting, that was boring, I was confused

[01:09:45] and so you're kind of testing the material as you're making it but the beauty of that is you can very likely speak 3,000 words an hour or 30 to 40,000 words and you just do the math and so the result of that is it's eight times faster than typing

[01:10:05] and I had to show an author recently because he went from I have an idea for a book to finished first draft in 39 days and I had to be like, he was like this is awesome, let's keep going, I was like hold on,

[01:10:22] you just ran a one minute mile. So I had to do the math for three years which took place over 39 days versus the quality of a best selling author's first draft which took them years and I think that's one of the biggest myths in writing books is

[01:10:39] that you have to do it in the way that we all have romanticized of sitting in front of a typewriter for months and grinding it out and hammering and hammering and being a torture genius alone. I think it's totally wrong, but I think it's romanticized

[01:10:55] so that it's a more rewarding and efficient process specifically for creating and writing the first draft and then from there if you're in editing mode it gets fun, you can take your time and that can be a longer process where you make it great

[01:11:14] but you need clay on the table before you start shaping it. Yeah, and you're right, so the key is so many authors do that and it's why it takes so long because you're editing while you are typing which is taking a road trip with the emergency brake on

[01:11:33] the whole time. It's super inefficient and it doesn't guarantee a better outcome. I've seen it over and over. And also, you know, you've obviously worked with the scribe method and you've worked with many authors. There's no shame in using a writer to help you write your book.

[01:11:53] 100%. Yeah, I think what I recommend is I kind of teach here's how to self-edit and you should do at least two to three passes of your book kind of following these structures like read it aloud. You can use Speechify to turn it into an audio book

[01:12:12] that you can listen to if you want but go through the act of self-editing and then yeah, there's literally no shame in doing that either because books are team sports. Look in the acknowledgement section of any book. There's tons of people required to make it.

[01:12:27] And then I think, have you heard of helpthisbook.com? No. So it's a great site where you can use it to work with beta readers. So in the past you had to use Google Docs and have everybody commenting on a Google Doc and it was kind of sloppy.

[01:12:46] Or this was confusing or love this or bored or whatever. And then you can see it as data of okay, these chapters are weak. This chapter is particularly strong and you can dive in right into those sections. And so it's like 30 bucks and it's a really useful tool

[01:13:04] to be able to see where your book is weak. And who are the beta readers? So this is an ad now to helpthisbook.com. I have no affiliation with this book. But you should have an upsell that pairs you with beta readers. Right now it is your responsibility

[01:13:22] as the author to go find beta readers, which is generally speaking it's a pool of people made up of topic experts all the way to complete novices who are just like either fans of yours or just wanting to learn about it. And so the benefit

[01:13:41] of doing this is, and I never recommend beta reading, not only will it make your book a lot better and prevent one-star reviews or I guess two-star reviews, it will actually make these people feel like co-creators, which is a really important psychological shift that you need to have.

[01:14:03] Like James, how many emails per month do you think you get being like, hey, James, I know we haven't spoken in 10 years but I just wrote a book. What I'd love for you to do is buy a copy, leave a review and share this on social media today.

[01:14:16] Do you get those emails? I get them a lot. Yeah, right. And they don't work and it's also like guilt-inducing all of a sudden. It's like where is this even coming from? It's almost a guarantee that I'm never going to talk to that person again.

[01:14:31] Because then I have to explain why I didn't read the book and spend the time writing a review. But I get why they do it and why it's so common because people suck at marketing and they're so isolated during the creation process when in reality

[01:14:46] you have to be inviting co-creators in because they're like exponentially more likely to do the things you want them to do when your book comes out if they feel like they had a hand in how good this book is. You know, another way, it reminds me of the

[01:15:04] technique I would often use like I use this for Choose Yourself is basically I wrote articles on almost every topic and related to the concept of choosing yourself and the way I beta tested each chapter was was that article successful and then I'd rewrite that article

[01:15:24] into a chapter in the book. Exactly. Because the thing is you can say, oh, well that's not fair it's just a collection of articles. No, it wasn't because I did rewrite everything to kind of fit into a book format but also so what? Right. Not everybody who's

[01:15:41] read those articles is going to read the book and vice versa and maybe somebody who read one article didn't read the rest and there's different audiences for different things like it doesn't matter if you plagiarize yourself like just very few people are going to even

[01:15:58] they might not even remember oh, I read this in some kind of in a different format before but then okay now there's the rest of the book so they didn't really read it so I found that was a good way like ultimately you can beta test

[01:16:11] and get feedback per chapter by writing it into an article first and then just take the rewrite what you want take the best chapters the most popular articles and make a book out of it. 100% and I would say it's negligent to not do that because going back

[01:16:28] to stand-up comedians literally all of them do this process and if you see them twice in six months they will tell you the same jokes usually but there's variations there's different beats they've placed them at different parts of the set et cetera and that's the only way

[01:16:46] they can make a good set a good hour and it's the same with books if you aren't testing this stuff you're setting yourself up to have zero clue what the market is going to do when it's in their hands. Like often I would start off

[01:17:01] I would go on Quora and I would answer a question like oh what are the five best life hacks I can learn in 30 seconds or something like that so I'd answer a question and then if it got if it got a lot of upvotes meaning I helped people

[01:17:15] as per your earlier point like can you have you helped people so I would see which things got the most upvotes of my answers I would write on Quora every single day and then I would turn it into let's say an article and publish it in either

[01:17:30] of a number of different places that I could publish and then if it got what's popular there I'd rewrite and that would be kind of my process to getting a chapter into a book. It's brilliant. Yeah. And so like that's perfect and another similar thing

[01:17:49] is YouTube retention graphs right? You're trying to create a book retention rate that's high that doesn't have a steep drop off after the first page or the first chapter you're trying to sustain them right? And so like if you don't test this stuff on individual slivers of ideas

[01:18:12] then the chapters and then the book itself you have no idea where that retention graph is going to be and very likely because a lot of authors just assume I gotta spend the first part giving them kind of the history of this topic or like catching them up

[01:18:29] on the theory behind it it's like that's the most boring stuff and people are going to drop off immediately. You have to treat it like they're going to give up at any time. Neil Strauss talks about this of like any sentence they could drop off. And I think

[01:18:47] part of this if you develop the skills of a writer part of this helps part of that helps you avoid some of these issues like if you have a skill of teaching how to keep readers going and it's a skill you developed over tens of thousands of pages

[01:19:02] of writing or whatever then that's fine. But again most people don't have that skill so these are excellent techniques to kind of skip having that skill. And so once you write the book and let's say you self-publish by the way people don't realize still that self-publishing doesn't mean

[01:19:22] you print up a bunch of your books and you have them sitting in a warehouse and you send a document to Amazon and they print on demand for paperback books and so on. I will recommend you do Kindle, paperback and at least audiobook because those are the ways

[01:19:39] those are the three different ways people audiobooks are more popular than paperbacks now so you have to make an audiobook you cannot skip that part of the process. But how do you now market the book? How do you suggest starting to market? Yes so

[01:19:54] I'll add one more thing I think people get done with the book and they've spent some money and they're afraid to invest in the most important part of the book which is the design the cover. Yes that's a good point. I see it a lot where it's like

[01:20:12] you wrote a good book but you paid the internal designer at your company who specializes in something completely unrelated to book covers to design your cover on the cheap bad move. You should Also Amazon provides these templates but I'm sure you could tell just by looking

[01:20:33] at a book if it comes from an Amazon template you can always tell a book that's not what I call professionally self-published Yes and professionally self-published means you have to hire not just a designer but a book designer. Yes and so the best place

[01:20:48] to look by the way is ineedabookcover.com it was made by Oh my God a traditional book cover designer named Zoe Norvell. It's a brilliant service. She just consolidated and made a directory of the best book cover designers in the world. So you can connect with

[01:21:03] Pete Garceau on there who did Adam Grant's covers, James Clear's covers and he'll charge you several thousand dollars but it'll be 100% worth the investment and it'll be a great service. So I think you should look at Amazon and Amazon and Amazon and Amazon and Amazon and Amazon

[01:21:21] and it's 100% worth the investment especially if you have people who are really high-end clients. You do not want a bad cover. Oh my God I'm actually looking at this site right now. This is, I am definitely gonna use designers from this site. It's got my struggle on there,

[01:21:44] it's got some of my favorite novels on here actually. Oh yeah and the brilliant thing is people with good ideas fail to communicate them to creatives because there's such an information gap between what you think is good and what they think is good,

[01:22:05] what you think is right, what they think is right, what you think is wrong, and what they think is wrong. And if you can't clearly articulate these things visually, you are... I heard the CEO of a major publishing house say, I need 20 rounds to get the cover right.

[01:22:21] And I'm like, that's a broken process, man. It's a lack of a creative brief that's adequate for a professional designer. Yeah, and I find a lot of the covers made by publishers to be not that good. Right. And I do think it's because of this.

[01:22:40] They have the resources, they do invest. And just to give you an idea of what it typically costs, to get a really excellent cover, I think you want to spend $2,000 to $3,000. If you want epic, you can spend up to $5,000. And the bare, bare minimum I would spend is $1,000.

[01:23:00] And so in the grand scheme of things, it's not much, but it's literally the YouTube thumbnail for your book. People who make these great videos and then they'll make the thumbnail in Canva last minute as an afterthought wonder why it only gets 100 views. It's like the packaging, man.

[01:23:18] It's the packaging. You should have invested in an amazing thumbnail and you'd have way more views. Same with book covers. So anyway, that's kind of a rant, but I think self-published authors in particular neglect it to their detriment all the time. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

[01:23:36] So, okay, but now marketing. Marketing, yeah. So again, I would be leaning into a kind of can you get these people kind of involved, your following, so to speak. Are you having them vote on titles, covers, participating in surveys of problems?

[01:23:56] And so once you're past all that, I think the next step is to think in terms of what are the proper incentives that will get people to buy this book in numerous copies, in numerous copies that make sense.

[01:24:10] And so don't just arbitrarily try to sell a thousand copies. No one, generally speaking, wants a thousand copies of your book. But you might speak to organizations that want 100 copies of your book at their next speaking event to give away for free.

[01:24:26] And so my colleague Rory Vaden, who's brilliant at bulk sales, calls them BILFs, which is Books In Lieu Of Fee. And so it's like, Tucker used to say this all the time at Scribe. He said, no one wants to buy your book.

[01:24:42] They want to buy what your book gets them. And so people are already paying you money for the thing that your book promises to get them, most likely. So if you can tie these bulk sales into what people are already wanting to pay you money for,

[01:24:57] it makes it a lot easier. Is that clear? Does that make sense? No. So what's an example? An example would be you're a professional speaker. You get paid $15,000 to speak and you say, hey, I'm running a promotion right now where you can book me for a full keynote.

[01:25:19] And as a bonus, you get to have 50 books or 100 books to give to all the people in your audience. Because you're self-published, it is cheap for you to buy those books at a couple bucks a copy on KDP.

[01:25:33] And so you just use the profits, part of the profits to distribute and send out those books to them and give them as a gift. And so you're doing it as a self-published author that way because traditional published authors

[01:25:52] have to worry about bestseller lists and all that stuff. And it's a miserable game that I really hate to play. But as a self-published author, you can think of your book as a seed where you're just trying to get it into people's hands.

[01:26:06] And so if you can just couple that with the purchases that are already taking place, you're in a good spot. So Ryan Holiday, he recently did this for his upcoming book. I think he did packages of buy one book, buy five books, or buy 125 books.

[01:26:25] And they're good packages because they make sense to his spectrum of readership. So one book might be, you get a video message from Ryan and an early instant download. You'd have to look it up, but I'm just guessing here.

[01:26:43] If you buy 125 books, you get access to a live in-person dinner with him and a small group of people. And so if you're running a company that you have 150 people there and you can give away those copies of the book, it's great.

[01:27:04] The reason you're doing this is because it's very difficult to sell 10,000 copies of a book to 10,000 individuals, or one copy to 10,000 individuals. It's a lot easier to give them the option to buy multiple copies of your book that they can then distribute and give away on your behalf.

[01:27:23] And you can end up selling more copies. But if you're a first-time author, and you might not necessarily have that fan base yet, how do you get the word out even that you have these packages available? Or how do you get people interested in those packages?

[01:27:37] I would challenge you on that. If you're a professional, if you're an expert who's getting paid to do something that you've written your book on, you have connections on LinkedIn, Facebook, family, friends, etc. And then it's a matter of just making them available

[01:27:55] and telling those people about them. It's kind of like your Kickstarter campaign built that audience for you. Exactly. It was one of the big things I learned from that. And I'd seen it with The 4-Hour Body too when we marketed that. We did all these different packages.

[01:28:14] I saw we'd made this really outrageous, compelling package if you bought 30 books. And then another really good one if you bought three. And then all of a sudden those two packages were like, whoa, those are moving a lot of copies.

[01:28:29] We got to double down and just promote these too. And so I think it's an easy way to move a lot of books and have people distribute on your behalf. But to your point, if you don't have a big following or an audience,

[01:28:41] I don't think it really matters. If you have people in your network that know, like, and trust you, you likely have a lot more than you think. If you go through your contacts on email and social and your phone,

[01:28:53] you have more people who want to support you than you think. That's definitely true. Now that I think about it, at every point in my life where I was writing books, I never really suffered for that first initial group of people who really wanted to read my writing.

[01:29:11] So if you use that to sell more copies, that's doable. Yeah. I think that's the easiest way and it gets your investment in the book back usually if you're offering higher-tier things. And so often people are surprised. It's just a matter of sending those emails.

[01:29:29] If I told you, you can get all your money back and more before you've ever promoted or, I'm sorry, launched the book officially on a publication date, you can get an ROI and be like, great. Okay, that's going to require more than a dozen emails. Maybe two dozen.

[01:29:47] Are you comfortable with that? Oh boy, I don't know. It does require some element of work and communication, but it's worth it. People want to support you. Do you recommend any kind of advertising? Oh man, it totally depends, I think, on your overall goals and your budget.

[01:30:11] With traditionally published authors, it makes sense to play the horrible game of climbing Mount Everest and trying to hit the New York Times bestseller list where you have to sell 15,000 to 20,000 copies depending on the time of year. But if you're self-published, what do you do next?

[01:30:30] What do you do next? I think it goes back again to what do you want the experience to be. Generally speaking, a template that I've seen that works for authors pretty consistently is deciding on what is going to be a compelling, fun thing I can do

[01:30:53] on my launch date that I could share as an experience with my audience for an hour. I've seen this at the very, very high level. Alex Hormozy doing his hour-long, I don't know if you saw, for $100 million leads, he did this world-class presentation.

[01:31:16] I don't know how many people they had sign up, but he's a self-published author and I'm pretty confident they sold over 100,000 copies. They sold over 100,000 copies of that book just from that launch day alone. They offered one book, three books, 10 books. They did a world-class presentation.

[01:31:40] I've seen authors do all-day long events where they're having people on as guests and they're streaming it and whatever. But I think it can be as simple as you do a Zoom meeting that you're genuinely excited about.

[01:31:55] Buying a book is just the ticket to go to this event. If you can give a great presentation on your topic that can really help people who are interested and care about it, and then at the end you make the offer to, hey, if you buy the book

[01:32:11] you can do these things, I'm only doing it for this week, thank you so much, and then follow it up with a series of emails, generally speaking you'll do pretty well. They've sold over 100,000 copies over the entire life cycle of their book.

[01:32:29] 20 years goes by and they've only sold 700 copies. But they don't really do things to give it a chance at the beginning. They don't really take a stand and be like, it's my moral obligation to sell this to people

[01:32:44] because I believed in it so much that I worked on it for a full year, giving it my all. And the fact that people just discover this thing and believe in the message as much as you, it's literally such a huge barrier to that.

[01:32:59] Hal Elrod is a great example of an author who beat the drum of his own message for years and ended up selling, he's sold over 3 million copies now. But that first year he did it full-time, 200 plus podcasts and sold 13,000 copies I think,

[01:33:14] which is incredible for a self-published author, but also a far cry from a million. It is a matter of how much do you really believe in this? If this actually saved your life and improved it so drastically and you know it works with others,

[01:33:29] why wouldn't you be your biggest fan? Yeah, and Hal's a great example where he really worked hard building a whole community around his book and around everybody who reads the book, helping other people also who have a similar experience and helping other people also who read the book.

[01:33:47] Yeah, and you're going to love this if you didn't know it already. This is my favorite example of a self-published author doing something really smart. Hal continued the process of improving the book after it was published. And so every three, two, and one-star review,

[01:34:05] he would take it in, go back to the manuscript, and fix that. And that is genius. And you can't do that with traditionally published. It's set in stone, you're done. You might get a chance on your 10-year anniversary to update it, but good luck, buddy.

[01:34:26] Self-published, you can do that. What I love about that is he treated it basically like software. Let's get in, fix the bugs, and then release a new update. I didn't know he did that. That's a great idea. I like how he almost franchised the book.

[01:34:41] He would then get other authors who were experts in their field, oh, the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneur. I even wrote a foreword for the Miracle Morning for Writers. He kept on going with franchising the book. It was just really genius. Yeah, I love that.

[01:34:59] Once you get to a certain level where you can figure out other means of distribution and scaling it up, that's great. What's your next book? My next book is very likely going to be something to the effect of the million copies method,

[01:35:16] or something along the lines of all the hidden DNA I learned from seeing authors who've sold millions of books. I gave a two-minute talk on this at a conference just to test the idea of how to do that. It went really well.

[01:35:37] The talk was effectively, I held up two books. I said, these two books are on the exact same topic, written by credible experts with big online followings who hit the New York Times bestseller list when they came out. They promoted it on podcasts and traditional media.

[01:35:55] This one sold 200,000 copies, which is amazing. And this one sold 15 million copies. It was Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg and Atomic Habits by James Clear. I just talked about, and I have respect for both of those guys. I'm not trying to rain on BJ. Both great books.

[01:36:18] Yeah, they're both great books, but when you actually sit down and lay out, there really is a hidden DNA to these books that you don't notice until you study them. A lot of the bestselling authors that I've worked with have a very clear structure of books,

[01:36:33] and they study the user experience of books. If you're not deeply familiar with those, yes, it can be hard to write a book that reaches a lot of people. Also, I looked at authors who've sold 100 million copies of their books. The average number, what do you think,

[01:36:55] of number of books they publish Someone who sold 100 million copies of their books? I would say the average and the medium are kind of similar, but since you're asking it that way, it's probably different. I would say on average they've sold about 50 books. 56.

[01:37:17] And the median, I think, was 165. That's interesting. When I learned that, it also gave me a perspective of similar, I think you probably had when you were writing a book a year, is if I really want to make an impact,

[01:37:32] I can't just count on this being a hyper-hyper quality. Books like Mark Manson's and James Clear's are uber outliers. And James, you could argue, both of them took the same path of writing, writing, writing, writing online, testing, figuring stuff out,

[01:37:52] and then finally coming out with a golden book and Ryan Holiday did the same thing. His books, sales numbers dropped the first three books and then he hit on stoicism and sales went through the roof. And so I think it is overall a numbers game

[01:38:07] and can you just keep the wheel going and not count on this is my only shot at this game, but can you do it multiple times? Yeah, that's critical. I mean, this happens most with fiction that you'll have like three, four, five, ten

[01:38:28] worst selling books before you have your first best selling book and then it changes your life. Mario Puzo had two books that failed before The Godfather and a ton of stories like that. I like this idea though. The million copies method, I like that. Thank you.

[01:38:52] So you'll definitely have to come on the podcast when that book comes out. And Charlie, such valuable information and I'd also love to hear all your stories about the different writers you've worked with and your experiences with them like David Goggins and all that crew.

[01:39:07] So definitely come on again to talk about this and I think this is such an important concept. It really still is equally important as important as it ever was to write that book and get that stake in the ground

[01:39:22] that here's who I am today, this is the book about it and make it as good as possible. So this is really valuable. Thank you, James. And I'm looking forward to when your book comes out as well. Me too.

[01:39:40] I'm looking forward to figuring out how to finish it. I love the Fire Act, which I always admire. Any creative act is a vulnerable one, but you're doing something new and so I'm fascinated to hear how.

[01:39:55] Have you decided on the finale, the ending, or is it still in the works? No, I haven't at all and that's unusual for me. So this is a very new type of book for me. After writing 24 books, this is like a new experience. Awesome.

[01:40:10] I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited for you, man. Thanks so much for having me, James. It's always a pleasure. Thank you, Charlie.