The Ultimate Guide to Self-Publishing Your Bestseller Book

Copyright © James Altucher

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ISBN-13:978-1501009945 | ISBN-10:150100994X

CONTENTS

Introduction: By Claudia Azula Altucher ...... 7

Why You Should Self Publish ...... 14

What Is Your Goal With The Book? ...... 17 Reason 1: Spreading The Message ...... 17 Reason 2: You Want A Best Seller ...... 20 Reason 3: You Want To Make A Lot Of Money ...... 24

How to Create a Professionally Looking Book ...... 29

Editing ...... 37

Design ...... 38

Title ...... 39

Audio Book ...... 40

Foreword/Introduction ...... 42

Blurbs ...... 43

Testimonials ...... 44

Professional Bio ...... 46

Professional Photo ...... 48

The Ultimate Check-List Before Self-Publishing ...... 49

Create Space ...... 51

Kindle ...... 52 Book Proof ...... 52 Hit Publish Only After: ...... 52 Build Your Platform ...... 54

Ultimate Guide To Building Your Platform ...... 55

Other Merchandise ...... 57

Foreign Rights ...... 58

Frequently Asked Questions ...... 59 Do I need to worry about an ISBN? ...... 59 How do I design that page with all the rights and the legal terms? ...... 59 Do I need to have a professional do the recording of my audio book? ...... 59 Is it hard to upload the audio files I get from the recording studio? ...... 59 Do I really need all three formats? As in Kindle, paper back and audio? ...... 59 Do I need to write every day? ...... 59 Do I need to worry about what the reviews say? ...... 60 Do I need to worry about copycats in Amazon? ...... 60 Do I need to worry about Barnes and Nobles and Independent stores? ...... 60 What should I price my book? ...... 60 Should I Enroll in the Lending Library? ...... 60 Should I distribute onto all countries? ...... 60 Should I line up people to review my book on the first day? ...... 60 Should I try to book myself on TV? ...... 61 Should I go on Podcasts? ...... 61 Should I start my own podcast? ...... 61 What if I get bad reviews? ...... 61 Should I do a video to promote my book? ...... 61 How long should my book be? ...... 62

Interview with Hugh Howe ...... 63

Interview with Steve Scott ...... 98

Interview with Michael Drew ...... 131

Interview With Tucker Max ...... 146 Resources ...... 177

Other Books by James Altucher ...... 178

About The Author ...... 179

INTRODUCTION:

BY CLAUDIA AZULA ALTUCHER

he traditional publishing industry is almost completely dead and they don’t know it. Or if they do they deny it. I don’t blame them because change can be hard. TSince the year 2010 I, personally (and as a completely nobody) have worn the hats of publisher, editor, interior layout designer, cover designer, audiobook producer, writer, talent, author, co-author and ghostwriter. And that is among a myriad of other “professions” I now perform including video producer, sound editor, yoga talent, post- producer and on and on and on.

Some of those jobs I did terribly, some I am getting better at. But no matter what, with every step I’ve learned that the need for a traditional publisher, or any other gatekeeper is obsolete. As I see it now, I am a full publishing house in one person and there is nothing stopping you from doing the exact same thing. It’s not that hard. It just takes dedication and a lot of attention to detail. Anyone can hit publish, but doing it professionally is a different story. That is, mind you, the story of this book.

Throughout my brand new street education on self-publishing I got to talk to people who are a lot smarter than me, like Tucker Max, Ryan Holiday, Stephen Dubner, Cheryl Richardson. All people who have been best sellers, been on Oprah, done it all.

My eyes opened up when I saw that publishing a book, if you want to do it right, is a big deal. How much you invest in it matters. The numbers matter, what you title it matters, what you want the book to do, for example: do you want to sale lots of copies? Get credibility? Spread a message? Whatever you answer to this is matters because it will permeate the flavor of how you promote, price, and speak about your message. On the other hand, the question: ‘who is your publisher?’ is the most irrelevant of them all. NOBODY ever asked me that. I’ve never seen anyone ask James that. Nobody cares. It’s a whole different world out there.

The last book James and I wrote together through a traditional publishing house, The Power of No, sent us a statement of “debt” after six months of being on bookstores all over the country. Not only did we not make any money, we actually owe them something. This is of course, after we did everything for the book. And by everything I mean: the marketing, three special recordings for bonus materials, a video, all the writing, all the mailing to our own lists, all the promotions, all the copy-writing, all the speaking, all the going on TV (we booked our own TV). And still… we owed money.

The book made it to the prestigious Wall Street Journal list of bestsellers, something I am grateful for, as anyone would, and in all fairness the numbers on that statement of debt reflected only sales for one month, the month of the release.

I am sure next month (six months later) we may probably break even. And I say that with a hint of hope, in reality I don’t know. Whatever amount of copies we sold in that first month (which we do not know because we don’t have the data) did not cover the advance.

That is the first issue I have with the publishing industry and why I prefer to self-publish. I like to have control over my product, my costs, weather I can promote it to different audiences and what I do with it in general.

Guess how much was the advance for The Power of No? It was $15,000. I kid you not. And this was right after the huge success of “Choose Yourself” which sold over 200,000 copies and has since grossed over $600,000+.

Please note that I am a fan of the publishing house we went through. Hay House treated us very well, they are a small shop and everyone knows all other members of the staff. It is not the people, but the industry that is in trouble.

If anything I am extremely grateful because I find that ultimately there is a little side of me that still clings to the idea of being “chosen”. Even though I was not. They chose James and I rode along because he chose me. I did my finest writing but I free-rode on his invitation to write with him for them. People now care more about how the book looks and about the value it delivers than who was the publisher. If a book has a good message and it looks good you are in, regardless of what logo lies on the back, sucking the life out of your work.

But let’s get back to money. There is no money in publishing through traditional means anymore. James was among the lucky ones to get those $15,000. Most get nothing.

Now, of course if you are Tony Robbins you get 3 million in advance, but are you? I’m not. So, if you are anything like me, you get between nothing and a maximum of fifteen thousand dollars, and you don’t get to set the price at which you sell (which is key as you will soon find out) and you don’t get any more than 15% on the royalties, after several statements of debt.

It’s kind of sad.

There is however a lot of money possibilities for those who self-publish with the right tools, and you are reading the right book for that.

If you cannot control the pricing of your book you are subject to the traditional ways of selling. And books are not selling traditionally anymore, that word died a long time ago.

For example, James is about to release a book called “The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth” through his own newsletter and by invitation only. Anyone on his list, who signed up on his website (it’s easy to do), will get one. My own latest book “Become An Idea Machine” will be a premium on that ‘invitation only list’. This may sound very exclusive but it is not, it is natural selection, it is the way we transform and grown when we are passionate about writing and need to feed families. When we get real, we realize it is important to have control over how we distribute, sell, price and market our books. Power lies with the author. I love it.

I hate to see bookstores vanishing as much as the next person, but the reality is they are, and the few last ones standing can carry only so many books, so they will tend to load up on copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, meaning whatever sales, what brings in money, of course.

Also, there are now websites like BuckBooks.net where you strike a deal in which you pay an entry fee and for one day they will promote your book to their enormous mailing list. In July of 2014 I saw one of their promoted books. It had been written in the 80’s, and it hit the New York Times list. How did it do that? It did that because the whole terrain is shifting under our legs. Note that the New York Times is not easy to hit. We had a whole Ask Altucher episode with a man who can put books on the list and he told us his very elaborate system to make that happen. Listen to episode 105 of the Ask Altucher show or read the transcript at the end of this book.

But in order to have your book accepted on this website, which is not the only one, you need to have your book be expensive and suddenly lower the price, so it is a “bargain” and they can offer it as such to their readers.

A publisher will never lower the price because you want to. They are likely to do nothing ever because you want to. As a matter of fact they just fought Amazon so that they could charge whatever they want for kindle books, which I think is fair, and better for us self- publishers.

I am happy that publishing houses want to charge a lot of money for Kindle books. Because it means more people will buy mine. And yours. Because we control the pricing.

If you self publish, as soon as you recover from the panic it can instill on some, you will be able to manipulate the price and do deals with not just a discount websites but also with other mailing lists, and at any time.

This book is about re-gaining control. Gone are the days in which you have to wait six months to maybe see a 10% return on a book after a skim advance is covered. Now you can start collecting your own royalties right away, the day you publish. There is no more need for intermediaries.

When I heard Amazon would give me 70% of the price if I went above a minimum price I didn’t need to hear anything else. Do you?

Think about it, in the old fashioned way you need to have an agent who will take a cut on an already skim advance, and then pay taxes. In Amazon you determine your pricing and then you get the most of the money. But I will tell you an even better secret. Audible, which is also Amazon and who will sell the voice- recording of your book, will give you the most value for your money.

I had to convince James to do Choose Yourself in audio. He did not want to because it takes a long time and a lot of effort to record a book, it is hours and hours of talking, and it is exhausting. But it pays. Nicely.

Publishers will tell you they will help you market your book. This is not true. I’ve seen the process of James going through five major publishers and in no case did they ever do any marketing at all, or the little they did was completely ineffective.

In this time and age the marketing is on you and me. We need to market our work, and there is a section in the book dedicated to how to do that. We need to build the platform, the audience, and give give give and give some more.

Here is James talking about the joke promise that the publishers once made to him (in his words):

When I published with Penguin, they then met with a friend of mine whose book they wanted to publish. They didn’t know she was my friend. She asked them, “What marketing did you do for James Altucher’s book?” They said, “Well, we got him a review in The Financial Times, a segment about his book on CNBC, and an excerpt in thestreet.com”

Here’s what’s so funny. I had a weekly column in The Financial Times. I WROTE my own review. As a joke. For CNBC, I had a weekly segment on CNBC. So naturally I spoke about my book during my regular segment. And for thestreet.com excerpt, I had just sold my last company to thestreet.com. So instead of doing my usual article for them, I did an excerpt. In other words, the publisher did NOTHING, but took credit for EVERYTHING.

Ultimately, authors (unless you are Stephen King, etc) have to do their own marketing for books. The first question publishers ask, even, before they look at your proposal is, “How big is your platform?” They want to know how you can market the book and if they can make money on just your own marketing efforts. A traditional publisher is not even going to look at you unless you have your own platform, which means a Twitter following, Facebook following and/or a significant blog following. But if you already can hand-deliver the customers, what do you need the traditional publisher for?

Wasn’t that supposed to be what the publishers would get for you? Don’t they get you in bookstores? The answer is “no.”

Bookstores take very few of the books published by publishers. And whenever you see a book facing forward, or on the front table, or a “staff pick” that means the publisher usually paid to have that special placement. Most books don’t get this. And if you don’t get that, chances are your books won’t sell.

Claudia speaking: how’d you like that story? Which reminds me, stories are great whenever they are told at the right time. Otherwise, what’s the point, right?

James’ book “The Forever Portfolio” was an optimistic book. I did a study of it and found out that the majority of the stocks he listed (one of them was Disney) are up about 1000 percent combined. But the book was set to launch on December of 2008, at the worst economic moment of our generation.

The publisher could NOT move the release date because they have whole corporations to report to and deadlines and journals and publications and catalogues. They are huge Trojan horses, once in, they deploy, and they are deadly. James’ book sold nothing. But it did make for a very cute story. He autographed a copy at a random signing on a Borders on 34th street, which is no longer there, on one of the copies he wrote: I love you. He did that while looking at his then 7-year-old daughter and as a joke. But the book stayed in the bookstore. And guess who picked it up? Yes, me… I love that story. It was our fourth date. I was floating. What are the odds of that?

I’ll tell you, the odds of THAT are greater than that you will make any money if you publish through the traditional route.

If you self-publish you control when the book goes out. And if there is a disaster you can hold on, take a book out, re-publish later, update without much fuzz. You own it. And you can move, fast, because you are no corporation. Self Publishing Professionally is The New Black

he problem with the major publishing houses is that their staff has been cut so thin they are struggling to just keep up, and in so doing they mistake the trees for Tthe forest. They try hard but they are too busy in an industry that is drowning and water keeps on coming through more and more holes.

In being so hard at work they have no time to stop for a minute and connect with real writers who are doing things differently. Even the ones who do, cannot really go against the grain because big changes in a corporate (publishing) setting is very hard, it requires meetings, discussions, project management, charts, focus groups, or whatever they call them, and lots of layers of management to make decisions. I feel that industry is busy just surviving, but fighting the wrong battles, i.e.: fighting to charge more for e-books in Amazon (a fair fight as I don’t think anyone should ever control prices) but again, it’s missing the point.

It is not about pricing anymore but rather about elasticity, about how flexible you can be depending on what change is coming your way. It is about working with an author and helping her or him through all the decisions that need to be made.

In reading this you have the whole world open to you, and it has rolled the red carpet. As you read you will notice the wealth of opportunities to write well, have a nice design, and propagate your book in a way that reaches the reader, which is what this is all about.

The interviews at the end of the book are worth more than the book will ever sell for. You have authors that are making a living from writing and they tell you how they do it.

There really isn’t an excuse any longer to not have a book out.

Here is wishing you success with your own, professionally self-published work.

WHY YOU SHOULD

SELF PUBLISH

believe everyone reading this has the content inside of them to write a book. If you want to stand out in a world of content, you need to underline your expertise. I Publishing a book is not just putting your thoughts on a blog post. It’s an event. It shows your best-curated thoughts and it shows customers, clients, investors, friends and lovers what the most important things on your mind are right now.

Unfortunately, most people suck at it. I’ve largely sucked at it. I’ve published 11 books — five with traditional publishers and six that are self-published.

The distinction now is no longer between “traditional publishing” versus “self-publishing.” The distinction now is between professional versus unprofessional publishing. The problem is, even the traditional publishers will unprofessionally publish your book. My first 10 books were done unprofessionally. Especially the ones with the big publishing houses.

Claudia talked about money in the introduction but there is more to professionally self- publishing a book than a dollar sign. For example:

I really hope that everyone self-publishes. The benefits are enormous because of some simple points, like:

A. Control over design. Traditional publishers usually keep that control and they do a decent job, however, now for less than 300 dollars you can hire thirty designers to compete for your business at 99designs.com. And the covers are good. We just had a competition for the cover of this book, what do you think? Bet you can’t tell that is self- published. And I got my pick of over 60 covers.

B. Content control. My bet is close to 100 percent of the people reading this have quality content in them that is strong enough for a book. But, 22-year-old interns at publishing companies won’t recognize that content. Even the editors, the publishers, the marketing guys — most of them — will not recognize the message you have to offer.

To give you an example, I am now getting help from an editor from one of the big publishing houses for another book project and even though I said I only wanted line by line editing, this editor started making structural changes.

Thing is, you are the one that is familiar with your content and only you can make magic with it. Suggestions are always good but when a publishing house is behind an editor, disasters can happen. If you don’t believe me you can check a book I wrote with a ghost editor a few years ago which I wish would vanish into the archives of hell, it is called The Wall Street Guide To Guide To Investing in The Apocalypse. Don’t read it, I will tell you, it is not my book. What that book says is mostly not what I wanted to have in it.

Which leads me to…

C. Avoiding bad things in life. I hate getting that feeling of, “I hope he or she chooses me for X.” Where “X” could be love, or an investment, an acquisition, publishing a book, buying my product, whatever. I try to limit this feeling in my life whenever possible. I HATE when I have to depend on other people choosing me.

When you have to deal with more and more layers of people who have to choose you, you don’t get the opportunity to choose yourself (!), which is infinitely more valuable. WHAT IS YOUR GOAL

WITH THE BOOK?

ou may think this is not important, but it is. Matter of fact, it is the first step, and you should have a notebook or a waiter’s pad nearby because ideas will start to Yspark and you better keep them somewhere. If you don’t get clear on what the objective is you are much more likely to make mistakes along the way.

Reason 1: Spreading The Message

If you’ve just given someone your business card then you failed. If you have a business card you might be about to fail. Nobody cares what’s on it. I throw out all business cards. You need to self-publish if you are in business, a blogger, a writer, or in any profession (essentially all professions) where you want to stand out versus the competition. There is one window, right now, where you have the right combination of “easy to do”, “cheap”, and “nobody is doing it”. The key is the Era of Validation is over. Nobody needs to pick you. You choose yourself.

If you, the entrepreneur, artist, consultant, yoga teacher, traveller, inventor, chemist, retiree with nothing to do who found out a way to make money on the side, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties. I know this because I am seldom cool but at cocktail parties, with my very own comic book, I can basically have sex with anyone in the room. But don’t believe me- it costs you nothing and almost no time to try it yourself.

Not only that but determining that your book will be your opening line, your hello, or your business card, means that you know how to market it.

If you want a book to have you be known then pricing is not the priority, what you want is high distribution, so you will want it in all the selling stores like Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and Indigo, but you will also want it in PDF and make deals with others who have audiences to give it away for free.

You also know you want people to actually read the book. Take for example Choose Yourself. When I finally became clear that I wanted Choose Yourself to be widely read (rather than a best seller or a credential) the way to market it became very clear, I knew what to do.

Claudia didn’t agree. This is comes from an email she sent to her newsletter about, she titled it:

I Begged Him Not To Do This

James said: "I don't care if I make money on this book or even lose money on it. I want people to get the message. I want to pay people back who buy my book and can prove to me they read it."

I said, "Are you crazy? Why did you even think of this."

He said, "Well, to be honest, Tucker Max was the first one to suggest it."

I said, "You mean the guy who wrote, 'Assholes Finish First'."

Although I've since met Tucker. He's a great person and incredibly intelligent.

"But listen," James said, "We know that if people get something for free they won't value it. And we also know that if someone buys a book, chances are they won't read it."

"Ok..?" I said.

"So I know the ideas in this book helped me. Saved me. Even freed me from the chains. I tell my story. I tell other stories. I give the methods. I WANT people to read this. I don't care if I make money on it."

"It's too gimmicky," I said. "It feels desperate."

"I'm not paying people to buy the book," he said, "I just want people to prove to me they got the message from the book. Then I'm happy. Then I will pay them back because that is more important to me than the money. And if they don't want the money, we can send it to our usual charity."

The article went out in spite of her fears, but you get the point, she was terrified that everyone would ask for their money back and we would have to mail hundreds of thousands of checks and it would be an accounting nightmare. And maybe you feel that it could be gimmicky, but it was not.

How do I know? Because of the numbers. Guess how many people asked for their money back? One half of one percent. And the book went on to sell over 200,000 copies because people read it, and they bought it for their friends.

Here Is What That First Page Said

I don't need to make a dime off of this book. The ideas in the book have already made me wealthy in many ways. What I really care about is that as many people as possible read this book and understand this message, even if it puts my own personal investment at risk.

Here's how I'm going to try and create a situation where as many people as possible get this message:

I know nobody values books—or anything—that are given away for free. So, I’m not going to do that. This isn't one of those ineffectual self-help books designed to look good on your shelf. You either read the book and use these ideas, or you shouldn't bother. That’s why you have to front the purchase price. But, if you can prove to me that you have actually read the book, I will give you your money back. It's an investment that's all upside on your part.

How do you prove to me you've read the book? Do the following:

Within the first three months of the official publication date, do these two things:

1) Send me a copy of the receipt to [email protected]. There is a kindle version, a paperback, and an audio version and they all cost different amounts. I need to know what you paid. 2) Then chose one of the following to send together with the receipt:

- You can write an honest review anywhere you want.

- You can take a photograph of yourself reading the book.

- You can write me a testimonial or an email asking me questions that show you've read the book.

If you can think of other ways, that's fine too. The point is: prove to me you read the book, and get your money back. Or, you can tell me to give it to a charity. This is the charity I will give it to: WomenForWomen International

I'm a man of my word. If every single person who buys the book takes advantage of this opportunity, then I will lose money on it (since Amazon takes their cut). But I'll be just as happy because it means the message will spread and you, the people who read the book, will be helped.

I know I was helped. This book has worked for me.

I chose myself.

Knowing that your book is for wide readership gives you more choices. You can give extra chapters as exclusives (with your best material) and then offer the book for free and have the audience tell you something, or give you something for a reward (money back or something else)

You can just have the book offered to anyone who signs up for your newsletter

You can use this as an opportunity to exercise your idea muscle and come up with ten ideas to have people actually read your book.

Reason 2: You Want A Best Seller

If you already have a readership, you may want to get extra recognition. Then any of the lists, like the “NY Times” or the Wall Street Journal or USA Today can help you, because once you hit one of those lists then you can attach the title of “bestseller” to your name wherever you go. There is a hierarchy that gives meaning to the ‘best-seller’ list effect, but like all hierarchies, it’s going away. Vanishing. Fast. Nevertheless, for now, there are 3 lists you can hit are these:

List #1: THE NY TIMES BEST SELLER LIST

You only need to sell about 2500 copies of your book in any given week to hit this list. BUT it has to be spread over certain bookstores around the country and nobody ever knows what those bookstores are (think secret sauce). Also, they DO NOT count e-books.

Also, their way of calculating what makes a best-seller changes all the time. Listen to Episode 105 of Ask Altucher or read the transcript here as Michael explains how he has managed to, for a fee, put every one of the books he worked on within the list.

So, yes, you can BUY YOUR WAY into the NY Times Best Seller List but it is not cheap (north of 40,000 dollars plus buying the books in bulk), and it definitely will not work if you don’t already have an audience that will pre-order books.

By the way, there is nothing wrong with buying your way into a prestigious list, by all means, go ahead and choose yourself to do whatever it is you want to do.

Having a NY Times Best Seller hit does still (my guess is not for much longer) get you credibility, speaking gigs, and maybe advances for future books from major publishing houses, although those advances are going down really fast. Here are my advances on my first mainstream-published five books in order: $5,000, $7500, $30,000, $100,000, and $30,000. Advances are coming down quickly, since as you read in the intro, the advance for Power of No was $15,000 for two authors. Whichever way you look at it the trend is down.

Publishing Houses also take advantage of the “paying to hit the NY Times list” in a different way, i.e.: they can pay to get a book on that first table you see on those still standing bookstores. It is never a coincidence that they are there, that is why we are all more likely to buy them. Someone paid good money for you to see this book right away.

Good luck getting a publisher to do that for you if you are not Stephen King or your book is not called Lean In, or This Town. With Power of No we got to be on a table close to the front at the Barnes and Nobles on Union Square in NYC for about a week. Then the book moved to the self-help section with only the spine showing (rather than the cover). Claudia asked people to take pictures of the book and around the country. We got photos from California, Florida and even some bookstores in Canada, but it was not long until the book was not face forward anymore. The reason why is because it costs publishers too much money.

List #2: THE WSJ AND USA TODAY LIST

If you get into any of these two lists you become what is known in the industry as a “NATIONAL BEST-SELLER”. That is what Choose Yourself is because it hit the WSJ best- seller list (on top of being a #1 in Amazon see next point).

I find the WSJ and USA Today lists to be a bit closer to reality at least when it comes to e- books. They are less curated and they just go by the raw data. They are also not afraid to count Amazon books sales as they are, without inserting some formula. That is why any book that is promoted through a major email list at a discount ($0.99 cents) can get into the WSJ list by selling, say, 3000 copies in a week.

List #3: AMAZON BEST-SELLER

This is by far my favorite list and I have a feeling it will be the favorite of everyone pretty soon. Why? Because it’s real.

Yes I know, Barnes and Nobles does count too, but really, let’s be honest, Amazon is where things are happening. If you are in the top 100 most sold books on Amazon you are a best seller, you are making money and 10 to 15 countries are ringing your foreign rights agent phone off the hook (see foreign rights later).

Thing with Amazon is… you need to clarify what type of best seller you are.

Are you in the top 100 best sellers for the whole world? (Meaning top 100 of ALL books?) If you are congratulations! It means they will rank you as an author too. It is fascinating. It is also VERY HARD. At its peak James’ book hit #13, that is in the whole world! Which, for a NON-Fiction book, is almost impossible. The top best sellers are usually in the categories of paranormal or romance novels. Non-fiction is a hard sell!

When Choose Yourself was #13 in the world, it was also #1 for Non-Fiction books. BUT that is a sub-category. Within non-fiction it was king, followed by the likes of the then recently released Lean In.

So the thing to know about Amazon is that being #1 in your category is great, but not exactly a total best seller.

When Claudia’s self-published book was first in Amazon in May of 2011, it hit #1 but for the category of YOGA. Nevertheless it was a best seller among people reading yoga books, and that is not a bad thing.

So whenever someone says they have a #1 best seller in Amazon, it begs the question: was it in a ‘category’ or was it ‘for all books’? If you do ask that question do it nicely. Authors are very sensitive people.

Once a Best-Seller…

Claudia was asked to give a talk about self-publishing because she knows a lot about the industry by now. She is the editor in chief and head producer for all of my books.

The woman who was facilitating the talk called it: “Get a behind-the-scenes process of how James & Claudia self-published his #1 NYT Best Seller book Choose Yourself”

Did you see what just happened there?

The book is a WSJ and an Amazon bestseller, it is not a #1 NY Times Best Seller, but IT DOES NOT MATTER.

If you hit a list, ANY list, it will be good for the book. Not everyone knows what the differences are. Now you do.

What I Wanted For Choose Yourself For Choose Yourself I wanted to spread the message (business card) and to have the largest amount of people actually read the book, and then, as a number two priority I wanted to hit a Best-seller list.

You also need to become very clear on what your order of priorities is, else every step of the way you will not have a clear guiding point of reference.

Reason 3: You Want To Make A Lot Of Money

I asked Joe Ragan if he gets jealous. His wife, Theresa, writes romance novels. She also writes thrillers under the name, TR Ragan. She’s sold 300,000 copies of her books as of 2012. She is entirely self-published through Amazon/Createspace.

“Why would I get jealous?” he said and he was smiling so I knew he was up for the question.

“Let’s say Theresa writes about a love interest in one of her books. Let’s say her main character is clearly based on her but the love interest is not like you in any way. Do you get jealous of the love interest in her book?” I was asking because I knew if Claudia was a romance novelist and wrote about a love interest that was nothing like me I would certainly get jealous. No matter how much self-work I did I would get jealous. I hate having that mental illness.

Joe laughed. We were at a dinner that Amazon organized for a few authors who had used Createspace for self-publishing, my latest self-published book at the time was “I Was Bling But Now I See”.

Theresa had burst out a quick seven novels on that platform. Two thrillers and five romance novels. Whitney, from Amazon, laughed and said, “That’s a good question.” She wanted to know also.

“I never get jealous,” Joe said. And then I was jealous of him. I’m stuck in my brain when it comes to issues like this. Thank god Claudia is not a romance novelist. But then Theresa piped in, “I always make sure the love interest has some aspects that are like Joe. Maybe a food he likes to eat, or clothing he likes to wear. Something.”

See. A good romance novelist knows how to keep her man happy. I spoke more with Theresa the next time we met, at the Amazon booth at the book expo where we were both signing books. Now I had an opportunity to be jealous of her. Since she started self-publishing in March, 2011 she has sold 300,000 books. 300,000! And now she had just signed a deal with Thomas & Mercer, which is Amazon’s publishing company that competes with the more traditional publishers. “But I’m still going to be using Createspace and Kindle Direct for self-publishing,” she said.

She told me she had been writing and trying to get published for 19 years. She had been rejected by every publisher. She had had two agents but they hadn’t helped her. She wrote every day (“1000 to 3000 words every day. If I get 1000 words done in the morning I can feel happy for the rest of the day knowing I did it”) she had been in writing groups, she had tried everything to get published. I asked her if she outlined everything before she wrote. “No,” she said, “I just make sure I do those 1000-3000 words a day.”

“Over the course of those 19 years I’ve received over 100 rejections,” she said.

This is why I don’t like traditional publishers. Think about it. Some 22 year old, fresh out of college editorial associate rejected her books. Now, in just the past year, she has sold 300,000 copies. That would put her on any bestseller list in the world. Clearly the readers have spoken! She’s a success! For 19 years the traditional publishers were wrong.

Her first book came out in March, 2011. Her second in April, 2011. With self-publishing you have to be prolific. But with 3000 words a day that’s possible. She told me, “At first I was selling hundreds of copies, then thousands, then one site, “A Pixel of Ink” mentioned my book and things really took off.”

So after 19 years of being rejected by traditional publishers, she CHOSE HERSELF and is now making a great living.

Because of technology, and the total breaking down of societal, financial, and psychological barriers brought on by the financial catastrophe, its become more acceptable, even welcome, to choose yourself. You no longer have to wait for the big media companies to call you. You no longer have to wait for the big companies to reach down from the sky and offer you a job. You no longer have to wait for some website to link to you so you can get thousands of followers. You can work hard, be persistent, and eat what you kill. You can choose yourself to be the dream you always wanted to be. You build your platform and then select yourself to be the star of it.

Theresa wanted to be a writer. She worked 19 years for it. Nobody would choose her. So she uploaded one book, then two, then a thriller, then four more books. Now she is sought after. But it’s too late for anyone to get her before she becomes a success. She already IS a success because she chose herself to become one.

She had mentioned something about emailing reviewers reviews of her book and I wasn’t sure if I had heard right so I wrote her and asked her to clarify. She wrote back and we continued our conversation through emails.

Theresa: “When I “emailed a reviewer every day asking for reviews” this is what I meant: I sent an email to actual book reviewers…mostly romance reviewers and I asked them if they were interested in reviewing one of my books if I sent it to them.

Many reviewers were interested, so I would send them a digital copy through kindle or nook or smashwords, depending on what sort of ereader device they had. Some reviewers took months to get the review done and many posted the review on Amazon. I would then Tweet or put the review on Facebook. This helped to get my name out in the beginning. The more reviews on Amazon, the more sales, more interview requests…more opportunities. Below are just two of many sites where you can find long lists of reviewers. These are the types of people I would send an email asking them if they would be interested in reviewing my book. I did this for the first three months in my self-published journey.”

So again, not only did she upload her book to Createspace and self-publish, she didn’t rest there. You can’t just go back to your desk and write another novel. You have to keep choosing yourself in every medium. Publishers will not market you. Amazon will not market you. If you don’t promote yourself, then nobody will. So she used every social medium. She emailed all the reviewers she could find. She was polite and asked them if they wanted a book rather than shoving it at them. So it was bulk asking, Then she would take the review and spread it across all media: Facebook, twitter, Amazon, etc. And for each review she saw a corresponding increase in sales. And because she was prolific, her backlist would sell as well. So all seven book started becoming major sellers.

But there’s one key component she needed in order to select herself. I wrote her again and asked her if she was frustrated during the 19 years she couldn’t publish. Here is her response:

” I was frustrated and in the middle of my journey I was even feeling a little bitter about not selling. In 2007, I read The Secret and a book by Eckhart Tolle and those changed my life literally. I also love your book!

I never wrote for money, but I did want readers. And I did want to see my book in bookstores. That was definitely a motivating factor. Making money now is icing on the cake. It’s more than I ever imagined. If it all stops tomorrow, I am happy and grateful.

In 2007 I began to appreciate all the things that had always bothered me…like weeds growing in the yard and the fact that I had a roof over my head. I began to appreciate my family and every single thing I had…water to drink, legs to walk, eyes to see. Becoming a positive person has changed my life. I started to see the world in a new way. My oldest son said that the world was always that way, but I was just seeing everything through rose- colored glasses, and he was right. Everything wonderful was always right there in front of me, I just wasn’t seeing it until I change my mind set.”

I have two takeaways from this. One is the psychological barrier it takes to choose you. First you have to love yourself. You have to understand that validation comes from within. Not when the big bad media company reaches down from the clouds and “accepts” you, like a parent loving a baby in a crib. You need to love yourself enough that the aura you spread is noticeable by everyone. That the love and validation you crave comes from inside first. And suddenly that validation will automatically guide your efforts as you go through the process of selecting yourself for success in whatever you endeavor.

Finally, I want to add, I have now read Theresa’s thriller, “Abducted”. I couldn’t put it down. It’s a page-turner, every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, and now I’m compelled to buy the sequel and then whatever comes after that. She deserves every success. Can you make money writing? Absolutely!

Read the transcript of the James Altucher show with Hugh Howey and Listen to Ask Altucher episode 120 for more. HOW TO CREATE A

PROFESSIONALLY LOOKING BOOK

he first and most important step of self-publishing your masterpiece is actually writing the book. I write every day after reading and two hours after I wake up, Twhen the mind is at its peak of productivity, and because of that, even if I write a thousand words I end up with at least 360,000 words in a year. That is enough content for 5 to 6 books.

Bleed in the first line.

We’re all human. A computer can win Jeopardy but still not write a novel. If you want people to relate to you, then you have to be human. Penelope Trunk started a post a few weeks ago: “I smashed a lamp over my head. There was blood everywhere. And glass. And I took a picture.” That’s real bleeding.

Claudia recently put up a post where the first line was painful:

On March 31, 1986, my mother jumped out of the 7th floor window of her bedroom. On her way down she crashed onto a glass table in the backyard of the owners of the ground floor unit. She died that day. She was depressed and desperate.

I cried reading it. The New York Observer picked it up. People wrote to her and shared their own stories.

Bleeding in the first line invites the reader in, it sparks curiosity for what is to come. A well-crafted first line also inspires confidence that the writer knows what is doing, and that it will carry the reader through.

Write whatever you want. Then take out the first paragraph and last paragraph. Here’s the funny thing about this rule. It’s sort of like knowing the future. You still can’t change it. In other words, even if you know this rule and write the article, the article will still be better if you take out the first paragraph and the last paragraph. But don’t believe me, do it and see for yourself.

Read. A lot.

You can’t write without first reading. A lot. When I was writing five bad novels in a row I would read all day long whenever I wasn’t writing (I had a job as a programmer, which I would do for about five minutes a day because my programs all worked and I just had to “maintain” them). I read everything I could get my hands on.

Because of my podcast The James Altucher show, the amount of reading I do has increased exponentially and now I read about fifteen books per week.

My recent reads on the Amazon cloud have “Triumphs of Experience” by George E. Vaillant, a book that follows men who went to Harvard in the 30’s and are now in their 80s; “A Curious Man” by Neal Thompson, a boo about Ripley’s Believe it or Not!; “God Bless You, Mr Rosewater” by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut is a regular read for me, I’ve read everything he’s ever written, twice. “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson, a book of short stories I’ve probably read over four hundred times; “The Martian” by Andy Weir; “The Power Of Now” by Eckart Tolle.

This particular week I had no podcasts because of the new year break, that is why the amount of fiction books is higher. I read fiction to learn how to write well. Any non- fiction writer could benefit by reading crafted non-fiction books.

Write

A lot. A typical book is anywhere from 40,000-80,000 words. So if you can average 1,000 words a day, seven days a week, you can write four to eight books a year. Or maybe just one very good, edited, revised, professional one. Or 10! Knock yourself out!

Read before you write

Before I write every day I spend 30-60 minutes reading high quality short stories, poetry, or essays. Books by Denis Johnson, Miranda July, David Foster Wallace, Ariel Leve, William Vollmann, Raymond Carver, etc. All of the writers are in the top 1/1000 of 1% of writers. It has to be at that level or else it won’t lift up your writing at all.

Write every day

This is a must. Writing is spiritual practice. You are diving inside of yourself and cleaning out the toxins. If you don’t do it every day, you lose the ability. If you do it every day, then slowly you find out where all the toxins are. And the cleaning can begin.

Coffee

I go through three cups at least before I even begin to write. No coffee, no creativity. Coffee can also help with the next suggestion.

Take a huge bowel movement every day

You won’t see that on any other list on how to be a better writer. If your body doesn’t flow then your brain won’t flow. Eat more fruit if you have to.

Sleep eight hours a day

Go to sleep before 9pm at least 4 days a week. And stretch while taking deep breaths before you write. We supposedly use only 5% of our brain. You need to use 6% at least to write better than everyone else. So make sure your brain is getting as much healthy oxygen as possible. Too many people waste valuable writing or resting time by chattering until all hours of the night.

Don’t write if you’re upset at someone. Then the person you are upset at becomes your audience. You want to love and flirt with your audience so they can love you back.

Be Honest

Tell people the stuff they all think but nobody ever says. Some people will be angry you let out the secret. But most people will be grateful. Else you aren’t delivering value. Be the little boy in the Emperor Wears No Clothes. If you can’t do this, don’t write.

Don’t Hurt Anyone This goes against the above rule. But I never like to hurt people. And I don’t respect people who get page views by breaking this rule. Don’t be a bad guy.

Don’t be afraid of what people think

For every single person that you worry about, deduct 1% in quality from your writing. Everyone has deductions. I have to deduct about 10% right off the top. Maybe there are 10 people I’m worried about. Some of them are evil people. Some of them are people I just don’t want to offend. So my writing is only about 90% of what it could be. But I think most people write at about 20% of what it could be. Believe it or not, clients, customers, friends, family, will love you more if you are honest with them. So we all have our boundaries. But try this: for the next ten things you write, tell people something that nobody knows about you.

Be opinionated

Most people I know have strong opinions about at least one or two things. Write about those. Nobody cares about all the things you don’t have strong opinions on. Barry Ritholz told me the other day he doesn’t start writing until he’s angry about something. That’s one approach. Barry and I have had some great writing fights because sometimes we’ve been angry at each other.

Take what everyone thinks and explore the opposite. Don’t disagree just to disagree. But explore. Turn the world upside down. Guess what? There are people living in China. Plenty of times you’ll find value where nobody else did.

Have a shocking title

I wanted to a piece: “How I Torture Women” but I settled for “I’m Guilty of Torture”. I wimped out. But I have some other fun ones. Like “Is It Bad I Wanted My First Kid to Be Aborted”. Don’t forget that you are competing against a trillion other pieces of content out there, as well as games, apps, calendar appointments, to-do lists, and TV. So you need a title to draw people in. Else, you lose.

Steal I don’t quite mean it literally. But if you know a topic gets page views (and you aren’t hurting anyone) than steal it, no matter who’s written about it or how many times you’ve written about it before. “How I Screwed Yasser Arafat out of $2mm” was able to nicely piggyback off of how amazingly popular Yasser Arafat is.

Make people cry

If you’ve ever been in love, you know how to cry. Bring readers to that moment when they were a child, and all of life was in front of them, except for that one bittersweet moment when everything began to change. If only that one moment could’ve lasted forever. Please let me go back in time right now to that moment. But now it’s gone.

Relate to people

The past decade has totally sucked. For everyone. The country has been in post-traumatic stress syndrome since 9/11 and 2008 only made it worse. I’ve gone broke a few times during the decade, had a divorce, lost friendships, and have only survived (barely) by being persistent and knowing I had two kids to take care of, and loneliness to fight. Nobody’s perfect. We’re all trying. Show people how you are trying and struggling. Nobody expects you to be a superhero.

Risk

Notice that almost all of these rules are about where the boundaries are. Most people play it too safe. When you are really risking something and the reader senses that (and they WILL sense it), then you know you are in good territory. If you aren’t risking something, then I’m moving on. I know I’m on the right track if after I post something someone tweets, “OMFG”.

Be funny

You can be all of the above and be funny at the same time. When I went to India I was brutalized by my first few yoga classes (actually every yoga class). And I was intimidated by everyone around me. They were like yoga superheroes and I felt like a fraud around them. So I cried, and hopefully people laughed. It was also a case where I didn’t have to dig into my past but I had an experience that was happening to me right then. How do you be funny? First rule of funny: ugly people are funny. I’m naturally ugly so it’s easy. Make yourself as ugly as possible. Nobody wants to read that you are beautiful and doing great in life.

The last line needs to go BOOM!

Your writing is meaningless unless the last line KILLS. Read the book of short stories Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. It’s the only way to learn how to do a last line. The last line should take you all the way back to the first line and then “BOOM!”

For example, Charles Bukowski finishes a short story with: “I got the hell out of there”

Dennis Johnson ends his short story entitled “Steady Hands at Seattle General” with this line: “Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine”

Deliver value with every sentence

Even on a tweet or Facebook status update. Deliver poetry and value with every word. Else, be quiet. I tried an experiment last week on crafting a Tweet, it was right after the mess over the release of the movie The Interview, it said:

I have one criteria now when I hit "send" on an email: am I comfortable with the leader of North Korea reading this out loud.

138 people re-tweeted it and 181 favorited it.

Use a lot of periods

Forget commas and semicolons. A period makes people pause. Your sentences should be strong enough that you want people to pause and think about it. This will also make your sentences shorter. Short sentences are good.

A copy-writer who generated five million dollars with one letter last year once told me that he cared not for grammar at all. I believed him.

Write with the same voice you talk in

You’ve spent your whole life learning how to communicate with that voice. Why change it when you communicate with text? Break the laws of physics

There’s no time in text. Nothing has to go in order. Don’t make it nonsense. But don’t be beholden to the laws of physics.

KISS

Use “said” instead of any other word. Don’t use “he suggested” or “he bellowed”. Just “he said.” We’ll figure it out if he suggested something.

Have lots of ideas

Your idea muscle atrophies within days if you don’t exercise it. Then what do you do? You need to exercise it every day until it hurts. Else no ideas. See Claudia’s Become an Idea Machine for prompts if you need them. She offers 180 of them, so you can list your ideas away. If you are not coming up with at least ten ideas a day your idea-muscle is dying.

Paint.

Or draw. Keep exercising other creative muscles.

Let it sleep

Whatever you are working on, sleep on it. Then wake up, stretch, coffee, read, and look again. Rewrite. Take out every other sentence.

Get the Last 1% Done Right

Someone asked me on Ask Altucher how to get the final stretch of a project done. In a book this can feel like hell, I hate the last touches, but they are key, it is what makes a book professional.

Clean up the whole area around you. Clean up the table, clean up the entire room. This will give you the feeling of a fresh start.

Next, list for yourself, even just in your head, why finishing this project will be good for other people. Remembering why you started this project will help you finish it. Lastly, picture in your mind what it will feel like when it's finally finished. You can listen to episode 168 on Ask Altucher to feel the inspiration.

Then take out every other sentence again EDITING

efore I decided to really get serious about self-publishing, my editing was just a spell check (which was actually more than some of my mainstream publishers Bdid.) Claudia asked me if I was kidding on this. But I told her to read my second book and she stopped questioning it. In other words, it was awful.

With Choose Yourself I went all out. I hired two copy editors to go through the basics on spelling and grammar. Then I hired a company run by Nils Parker to help me structurally edit, i.e. do the job that editors used to do (example: Maxwell Perkins in the 1930s) but have been sorely lacking in the past 20 years from traditional publishers. Nils has previously edited bestsellers from Tucker Max, Kamal Ravikant, Ryan Holiday, and a dozen writers, as well as written screenplays, books, etc.

I am not saying, “hire Nils” by the way. He is expensive now. I’m just saying this is who I used (and paid). Make sure whom you use is among the best in the world, or else you aren’t taking advantage of what the self-publishing world has to offer. Nils and I went back and forth on more than 15 different rewrites for my book. The difference between the original version and the final version is like the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad.

And yes, publishers have editors. But I specifically wanted to choose my own editor and use an editor that has worked on books that have sold millions of copies. The entire idea of self-publishing era is that I am not limited to who is on the publisher’s staff but I can pick the absolute best people in the industry. With millions of books out there, the competition is incredible.

My friend Jayson Gaynyard recently did something creative, he asked his audience to power read his book before his release and give him suggestions. There are many ways in which you can get collaboration other than editing. Regardless of the method you choose, an extra set of eyes is always a good idea; just make sure those eyes have glasses. Denial is the last thing you want in a professional book. DESIGN

never liked any of the designs on my traditionally published books, but I had no control over them. I don’t mean this to sound so anti-publisher. But they were busier I with bigger authors, and I don’t think they were always able to devote resources to me. So, when I made sure I put out a product I could be proud of, I used Erin Tyler Design who helped me find the right cover designer, and she also managed the interior design process, which was a lot trickier than I thought.

There is also 99designs or Fiverr. Finding a designer is now just a Google away. Do not cheap out on this because the way the book looks is the first thing your reader will see.

For this cover the winner was selected after running a contest on 99designs and looking through 50 different covers. TITLE

I had total control over the title. My first choice for Choose Yourself was “The Choose Yourself Era.” But whenever anyone asked me to say the title I had trouble saying it. “Era” sounds like “Error.” One person asked me if it was going to a book about archaeology. So somehow it wasn’t working.

So I picked 10 titles that I liked, combined them with the cover and created Facebook ads that I sent out to all my friends and friends of friends in the U.S. Then I sat back and watched the click-troughs. After a few days and thousands of click-troughs I had my title.

“The Choose Yourself Era” came in a distant third place. “Pick Yourself!” was right above it in second place. And “Choose Yourself!” came in first by far.

I then took the same Facebook approach to pick the subtitle and the final version of the cover design.

Results of the Facebook Title test:

Choose Yourself 72%

Pick Yourself 18%

Choose Yourself Era 7%

Become A Force Of Nature 2%

Only Do What You Want 1% AUDIO BOOK

was at an Amazon dinner once. One guy who was making a solid living self- publishing science fiction novels told me that he always made an audiobook. I I thought that was a horrible idea, and told him so. But two things about audiobooks: He said, “When people see you have an audiobook, they see your book as even more credible. It stands out from the average self-published book when you have an e-book, a print version, and an audiobook. Plus, the audio book is more expensive, so even though there are fewer sales, it’s decent money.” By the way, if you self-publish, always do a print book at the very least. Even if 99 percent of your sales are going to be e-book.

I asked the head of an ad agency what marketing tips he had for my upcoming book. He said, first thing, “Make an audiobook. For your kind of book, people will love listening to it while they drive into work.”

So Claudia, my wife who has been supportive of every aspect of this effort, set up her office in our house to be a mini-recording studio. I wrote to Tucker Max that I was going to make an audiobook. He wrote back:

“James, where are you doing the audio, and who’s editing it? Please tell me you aren’t just doing it yourself with your Mac and a mic you bought online.”

We looked at our Mac and a mic that we had just bought online and decided to go to a professional studio. Tucker suggested John Marshall Media. They had done audiobooks ranging from President Clinton’s autobiography to the Harry Potter books to Freakonomics. It was a thoroughly annoying experience but it was worth it. I felt uncomfortable just sitting there for eight hours reading words I had written. For one thing, it hurt. Reading for eight straight hours was killing my throat.

Second, I didn’t want to just read stories I had already written. So I did it totally unabridged and improvised quite a bit, making it somewhat original compared to the book. But the best reason for doing the audiobook is it forces you to really look at your writing and hear what works and what doesn’t. I rewrote about 20 percent of the book after reading things that didn’t quite sound right out loud.

It meant another round of edits to improve the book, a process I never would have gone through if I hadn’t done the audio version.

Uploading a book is easy once you have the professional files done.

You will however, need to have the book first as a kindle or as a soft cover, or both, otherwise ACX may not let you just upload audio.

Once your book is on Amazon it is easy to link and upload the files.

Make sure to get a five minute audio file that you will use as a “sample” so people browsing can click “Listen” when making up their minds on whether to buy the audio or the kindle or the paper back. FOREWORD/INTRODUCTION

homever you choose to be your introduction and foreword can be listed as such in Amazon. This means that if someone is searching, say for Stephen WKing, and you were smart enough to get him to write your foreword, your book will show up among his work.

This is why people will be hesitant to write an intro or a forward to your book. However, if you get someone famous to do it you get an advantage. This is why I worked so hard at courting Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, to write the forward for Choose Yourself. I wanted the book to spread, and having a sign of credibility such as the CEO of a major company helped it. BLURBS

he beauty of blurbs is that they are easy. You can ask people you like and offer them suggestions so they do not have to read the whole book. I say this because Tusually you will be asking writers for b lurbs, and writers write and they are busy, I know I am. So whenever you ask for a blurb be pro-active.

In the checklist I wrote that you need to ask for three. This is a minimum number, because less than three means you are not really professional. If you only have two it looks like you begged for it, but if you have three it seems you had to choose from among so many. Don’t ask me why this is, maybe is just my opinion, I like three. TESTIMONIALS

estimonials sell. Even though people think that they need to have them just on the website, testimonials are a great thing for people to see when they open the T“look inside” portion that Amazon displays. What testimonials do is give social proof that your message works.

But you need to do them right. If you can get a name, last name and location of the person, do that. But that is the minimum. If you can tell their web-site and even put a photo of them that is even better. Of course photos are not good within a book because they make files heavier and you have to deal with good quality and on and on, so you may want to save those for the website, but when you are collecting them, think of everything, not just the first name but their page, image, and anything that can further add solidity to their claim that your message or product works.

If you open Tony Robbins book: Money, the first line, of the whole book, says:

“He has a great gift. He has the gift to inspire”.

And then it says: Bill Clinton, Former President of the United States.

How about that for a first page?

Paul Tudor Jones II, Kyle Bass, and among others, Steve Forbes, T. Boons Pickens, Serena Williams, Oprah Winfrey, and on and on.

On the “Look Inside” (in Amazon) all I see is TWENTY SIX testimonials. Do you need more? Are you sold? And you have not even read what they wrote, you just see the names.

In the Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth I have testimonials of famous people and of people who are not famous (yet) but who used the daily practice and the idea machine and other principles described in Choose Yourself and literally transformed their lives. You and I may not be Tony Robbins but we definitely can get some testimonials and you should, because they work. PROFESSIONAL BIO

Let me give you an example of what it means to have a professional bio vs. an amateur life story.

When I was getting ready to publish Choose Yourself, I was getting a lot of help from Tucker Max, who now owns a company called Book In A Box (bookinabox.com).

Note that I am not promoting Tucker’s company I am just using the example because it makes it very clear what a professional bio would look like.

So this is my original proposal for bio, a sorry example:

James Altucher is a highly successful self-made entrepreneur, chess master, full-time writer (which means he writes religiously 3 hours each day) and angel investor. He has run over 20 companies and sold several businesses for eight figures+. He also has run a venture capital fund and a hedge fund. James sits on the boards of many companies, from where he has complete view of how the economic, as well as personal landscape is shifting. In 2010, after writing for ten years in the financial space and being published by the major publishing companies, he started writing the most intimate details of his personal life on his blog, attracting over ten million readers and provoking the creation of the first comic book ever to come out of the blogging format. He also self-published four non-fiction books. He took his experiences, his failures and successes, and distilled them into a methodology he used to achieve success. To finally choose himself. He shares that in this book. James has controversial stands on many issues and many people have accused him of having too much common sense. In 2011 Business Week called him: The Keeper of the Pain.

He HATED it.

This is what he responded, by e-mail: OK, I would totally scrap that bio. It is WAY WAY to self-promotional, and it reeks of someone deeply insecure--this is not the way you want to sound James. That bio sounds like something written by someone who has not done anything--you're the opposite. You've accomplished a shit load in yourlife. You know what people who have accomplished a lot put in their bios? Bare bones. Why? Because they have nothing to prove. Honestly, I'd go with something like this:

"James Altucher is a successful entrepreneur, chess master, investor and writer. He has started and run over 20 companies, and sold several of those businesses for large exits. He also has run venture capital funds, hedge funds, angel funds, and currently sits on the boards of many companies. His writing has appeared in most major national media publications (WSJ, FT, etc). This is his 11th book."

If your first reaction to that is that its not self-promotional enough,then its probably right. If I'm leaving out facts, then insert them. But that bio says to me, "Damn, this dude has some done so much crazy shit in his life, he just expects me to know the details. He MUST be big time." Don't believe me? Go pull some books down off your shelf. Look at the bios, and then think about what you know about the authors.

Claudia was a bit shaken when we read that, but we believed him, and it worked. So, to reinforce the points, your bio needs to be:

• Non-promotional

• Show accomplishments

• Bare bone and short

• Fact oriented

• Result oriented

• Have a KABOOM! Effect PROFESSIONAL PHOTO

ou can take a photo yourself. Claudia is very good at this and she always does it, but she has at least a thousand hours of doing photography and video because of Yher yoga teaching. If you have no clue get a professional to take your shot. There is nothing worse than a photo in which you have bad posture, or you don’t have a look that says something along the lines of what your book is about.

For example, Ryan Holliday has an interesting photo for his book “Trust Me I’m Lying” it is a headshot of him covering his face with his hands. This shows you that he is the man behind the scenes, the marketer you never get to see but who is orchestrating the promotion and sales of your books.

I work closely with Ryan and have learned from him that the photo is an essential part of a professionally self-published book, as it will help people with their first impression of both you and the message. THE ULTIMATE CHECK-LIST BEFORE SELF-PUBLISHING

Order is important when it comes to self-publishing professionally. Do not continue with the process unless you can put a check next to each of these items:

1. Write Every Day 2. Decide what the book is about 3. Write it well 4. Have it professionally edited 5. Have the interior design done professionally 6. Have the full cover designed in four formats: PDF, paper back, kindle (epub format) and Audible (following the format suggestions of ACX.COM) – Just ask your designer 7. Create your Amazon Author page. Link to your Twitter, your blog and anything else. Put a nice photo in it, and your bio. Make sure to link your books to you. 8. Determine what is the objective of the book (business card? Hit a list? Make Money?) 9. Make sure you are adding value in a special way. 10. Come up with at least 100 ideas on how you will be marketing your book 11. Give a thirty second speech on what your book is about (your elevator pitch) 12. Think about a dedication 13. Think and get a Foreword 14. Get blurbs from at least three people 15. Think and if you want, get an Intro 16. Do the last page of your book (your bio). Make sure to include where people can find you 17. Have a professionally done photograph that goes with the look of the book

18. Record the audio book 19. Wait until you get the files back from the recording studio 20. Select a five minute period of your audio to be used as the “sample” that people will hear and tell the studio to give you this file as well

Now you are ready. You know your message is good. You are proud of what you are looking at, and you can tell in a short sentence what the book is about. CREATE SPACE

recommend you start here, at CreateSpace.com. You will need an account, so go ahead and sign up, then click on “add new title” and go for it. It is very simple; you I need to fill up the tittle, the sub-title, the author, foreword and introduction. The ISBN will be provided for you, both for paper back and kindle. As of the writing of this book there is no way to create a hard cover version of your work, but this is likely to change in the near future, so always stay tuned to Amazon and sign up for their updates.

Once you get to the page where you upload the cover and the content, if you followed the ultimate checklist from the previous chapter you will be ready. Just upload the file from your computer and you are done. KINDLE

reateSpace now gives you the option to create the kindle version right from their page. Follow their prompts because you already will have all the files (if you C followed the ultimate checklist from last chapter). However in my experience it does not always work. In order to avoid trouble I would find a designer that can convert your files to e.pub (which is the format that Kindle uses). BUT make sure to revise the files before uploading them because there will be differences between the layout of the create space manuscript and the kindle one. It is just in the nature of how they work. Always open and look at your files.

Book Proof

Create Space will offer you to get a proof of your book, meaning that you will get a printed paper back BEFORE you hit publish.

You may be like me and get really impatient, but you do want to get a proof before you hit publish onto the word. This is your professional baby, treat it with care.

There is something special about holding a copy of your beautiful work of art in your hands, and you can use it to promote it on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else to start creating noise around it.

Hit Publish Only After:

I recently published a book and got myself in trouble because I misspelled a word in the sub-title.

NOTE: CREATE SPACE WON”T LET YOU CHANGE A SUBTITLE ONCE YOU WRITE IT.

You will actually have to find their help page and hit the button so that they will call you.

The original information on the book, like the title, sub-title, author and forward/intro, cannot be changed once you upload it. Also, the day you upload things, even if it is for the purposes of getting your own proof to look at, CreateSpace will consider it as the “day of publishing”. So make sure to call them if you want another day to be reflected.

Do not go into Create Space without your e-pub files. Get everything ready before you start the process so you will not miss anything and your book can come out professionally.

This means that you open and look at all the files.

Always get a proof file, a physical proof of the paper back, because there is nothing like the printed thing to notice the mistakes in the table of contents or how you added a word here or there that should not be there.

Once everything is done and you’re satisfied go ahead and hit publish. See your baby go onto the world and take on a life of its own.

How to promote and sell your book

Okay. So you have written your book and self-published it. Now what? BUILD YOUR PLATFORM

uilding your platform should actually be something that you do before, during and after writing your book. Connecting others, like for example people who like Byour work, and who like what you have to say, and how you say it, is how you find your true fan base.

It took me a long time to understand that having a personal newsletter is an important part of the writer’s life today. I resisted it for a long time, but eventually I started it and now I communicate directly with over a hundred thousand people, and reach another huge audience, in the millions of readers, by propagating through LinkedIn, Quora, Positively Positive, Thought Catalog, and on and on and on.

The audience will not find you in today’s world because everyone is already into his or her thing, so you need to find them, or at least meet them half way. My strategy is to be everywhere, so whoever may have not heard of my writing will have a chance and if they like it they may keep coming and reading.

I have seen great books fail because authors only begin to promote their book once they are done writing it. They spend years writing the book, only to have it flop on release because nobody knows who they are. Writing and promotion should go hand in hand with each other. ULTIMATE GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR PLATFORM

A. Blog Everywhere. Have an honest voice. Don’t be afraid to say things about either yourself or your industry. Provide unique perspective. If it doesn’t bleed it doesn’t lead. Make sure every post or video you do bleeds from the heart, entertains, and educates. In that order. But once you do it make sure to distribute your posts to all sites you can. At the moment I distribute my content on so many bigger sites that I’ve lost count, but they include Yahoo, Huffington Post, Quora (where I am a top writer), LinkedIn (where I am an influencer), Thought Catalog, New York Observer, and on and on and on. People need to find you, and your own blog may no longer be enough. Make sure to get out there and be everywhere.

B. Become a Quora Top Writer. I love Quora, I like hearing what people ask and reading responses, and I also love that I can distribute my own writing by answering questions and by posting, or even creating questions and then answering.

One morning last October, as I was preparing for a TED talk in San Diego, Claudia came running from upstairs, jumping around all excited. She had just been named top Quora writer. That is how she feels about it. And it is a good thing, because being a top writer means more people will follow you, more people will talk about you, and more people will read and come to like your work.

To become a top Quora writer you need to feel passionate about your topic and answer the questions in an intelligent way, always adding value, seldom linking to yourself unless it is an absolute necessity, as it would be if you were to point to a special talk or something that would add extra value, but always staying on the topic.

LinkedIn: As of the writing of this book Linked In has a special program called “Influencers” but it’s a closed system and they are not opening it up further. I made it into the list together with Branson, President Obama, A.J. Jacobs, and other luminaries mostly because I posted heavily and on issues related to people who hang out in LinkedIn a lot. It is key to respect the reader in LinkedIn and write things that are career oriented. My post on why you need to quit your job reached over 1.8 million views and became the #1 post in 2014 hen it came to engagement, I am not sure how they measure that. I am not saying this to brag, but to make a point. When you have hundreds of thousands of people

C. Podcast: A lot of people say that podcast is the new blogging but I don’t buy into that. It is however a great way to expand your audience and learn. People now have cars with access to podcast streams and radio audiences are moving towards more specific content. If you become the authority and trusted source on your specific topic people will want to read your book.

D. Go on other people’s podcasts. This is a great way to strike deals. For example you could do a special pricing for your book for people who listen to your friend’s podcasts and distribute it in PDF form.

E. Create a story around your book. When I first published Choose Yourself I offered it in Bitcoin, making it the first book ever to be sold through that currency. The story landed me on CNBC where the anchor asked me if I had done it for publicity reasons, to which I honestly answered that one way or another I was there, so yes, why not? I also sold a fair amount of copies that way too, and since the value of Bitcoin went up huge since, it ended up being as if each one of those books sold for 100 dollars. Not bad.

F. Forget TV. TV does nothing. Trust me. You sell zero books unless you get an hour on a popular show like Oprah, but that is not so easy to come by, and there are other ways, for example, recently someone at USA Today ranked Choose Yourself as the second most powerful business book of the year. That lucky mention (over which I had no control) got me back to a really low ranking number in Amazon, a very good thing.

G. Free and Extra. Offer bundles with lots of valuable and free offers. For example, you can design a landing page on which people can get the book and fremiums. Same can be done through people who have newsletter businesses.

H. Give a TED talk. OTHER MERCHANDISE

Since YOU own the rights to your book, you can do whatever you want with it.

For Choose Yourself, I created a poster that is designed like the cover of the book when you look from afar but when you get close to it you see clearly all 67,000 words of the book. I’m also making that into a shirt. What will I do with it? I have no idea. But it’s fun and I wanted to do it. FOREIGN RIGHTS

found with my prior books that the traditional publishers would more or less wait for foreign publishers to call and then they would sell the rights and my split would I be minimal. Typically the split was 50-50, but out of my 50 would come my agent’s split. I was competing with too many of the other authors in the publisher’s stable to get any attention from foreign publishers.

Now I own all the rights to my book. Most people who self-publish aren’t thinking foreign rights. You still have to have someone who is going to be your advocate with the foreign publishers. So I got a foreign rights agency, 2 Seas Agency, to handle all of the foreign rights on a commission basis. They go to book conferences all over the world and have connections in each country.

In June, the first month the book was out, Marleen Seegers from 2 Seas sold rights to: Brazil (USD 2500), China (USD 4300), Korea (USD 5000). She is currently in negotiations with publishers from 10 other countries. The three mentioned above are where the contracts were finished blindingly fast.

The book is now in over 12 countries and languages. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Do I need to worry about an ISBN?

No, CreateSpace will assign one for your paperback and your kindle right away and free. No need to pay for that stuff anymore.

How do I design that page with all the rights and the legal terms?

Copy if from any book you like. They mean nothing in the end, or at least they mean little.

Do I need to have a professional do the recording of my audio book?

Yes, sound is tricky, don’t be cheap with it

Is it hard to upload the audio files I get from the recording studio?

No, go to acx.com and follow their guidelines. It’s easy. You DO however need a book for an audiobook to appear in amazon as a pre-requisite so you can link to it, so do the book first.

Do I really need all three formats? As in Kindle, paper back and audio?

Yes, if you want to be professional about it. Otherwise it looks unfinished.

Do I need to write every day?

Only if you want to have a quality book. Do I need to worry about what the reviews say?

No, in fact most best-seller books have a low star review first, it is like a rite of passage, a badge of honor, it means your book is being read and caused a reaction.

Do I need to worry about copycats in Amazon?

These are everywhere but they will vanish soon. I had someone do that to my books and I put a one star review saying I had nothing to do with it. People do read those and if they are written by the actual author they may respect it, if they don’t then I don’t care.

If someone uses your name as author or foreword and that is not true, you can report it to Amazon, they will take it out.

Do I need to worry about Barnes and Nobles and Independent stores?

Sure. Every one of these questions is a Google away, but I find that Amazon is the source, and whatever appears in Amazon will eventually make it to every other venue.

What should I price my book?

Amazon will give you guidelines (a low level minimum), in general, depending on what you want to do you will price for that. If you want more people to buy the book then charge less. Do not make the mistake of pricing too high, you want readers, that is the purpose of writing books.

Should I Enroll in the Lending Library?

Yes.

Should I distribute onto all countries?

Yes, as wide as possible

Should I line up people to review my book on the first day?

It is a good idea to offer the book around for people to read it before you launch it and ask, if they are willing to, to give an HONEST review. If you have 100 reviews on day one people will get suspicious and will start giving you one star reviews because they will label you as someone who is trying to scam the system. It is not worth it. It takes away from your message.

Do ask your true fans to help you, but remember that you cannot solicit reviews unless you specifically want them with truth. Integrity is a part of writing your best work.

Should I try to book myself on TV?

TV does nothing for book sales. Wayne Dyer went on Oprah for his latest book, and, even though I don’t follow all of the numbers, I do know it hit the New York Times best-seller list but only for a week or two. That was it. TV is useless.

Should I go on Podcasts?

Yes. Absolutely. Go on as many Podcasts as you would like. That is exactly what Tony Robbins did with his book Money that I believe is still in the NY Times list. And that is what all authors that know what they are doing do. Because podcasts open the door to new audiences that otherwise you would not know existed.

Should I start my own podcast?

Yes

What if I get bad reviews?

Bad reviews seem to go with the territory. I would never engage with a bad review because it gives the reviewer power. It signals that the author is giving more attention to someone who is bad-mouthing the book instead of pouring her energy towards true fans that loved it.

It is best to let the reviews take care of themselves.

Should I do a video to promote my book?

No. It does not pay, and it is very expensive. Unless you can do it yourself, and in a professional way. How long should my book be?

Nobody cares, as long as you are offering something special. A 40-page booklet in six by nine is pretty solid these days. Many sell for 2.99 and do very well.

In fiction it is a whole different story, your novel can be anywhere from 100 pages (a novella) to a masterpiece of 500 pages.

Worry more about offering a good product rather than the length, and you will see that the length takes care of itself.

INTERVIEW WITH HUGH HOWE

James Altucher: This is James Altucher at the James Altucher Show and I have a very special guest today, but first welcome to my cohost, Aaron Brabham. Aaron, how’s it going?

Aaron Brabham: Man, I’m doing great James. It’s another beautiful sunny day in Orlando although it’s a bit chilly. Only high of 63 today.

James Altucher: Don’t make me jealous. You know its negative three degrees here in New York.

Aaron Brabham: Oh, is it? I didn't even know that James. I'm sorry.

James Altucher: You’re just rubbing it in. I know, I know.

Aaron Brabham: All right, so James look, you know for all of your guests I always know the name in the very least, if not I'm very familiar with their work, but today I was unfamiliar with your guest name, so I had to do a little research. I want you to tell your listeners who the guest is and why you decided to have him on your show.

James Altucher: Sure. First off, his name’s Hugh Howey. He’s the best-selling author of the Wool series. It’s a science fiction series. There’s something very unique about this series in that it was self-published. He had no publisher for it. He just basically uploaded his files to Amazon, published the book.

As he explains in the interview, well you’ll see, it was his ninth book that he had self- published and the book just took off and became this massive bestseller. He’s made, I don't know, seven figures on these books. He wrote an entire series and then another series after that. Ridley Scott bought the movie rights.

Two years ago or two and a half years ago, this guy was shelving books in a bookstore making $10.00 an hour. And then choosing himself by; you know a lot of people want to be writers, but they get rejected by the publishing industry and they give up. He chose himself. He uploaded the files to Amazon.

He published himself and after the course of nine novels a book finally hit the bestseller list and he quit his job. He’s made his own career and many people have done this. He’s not the only one. We discuss this on the interview. It’s really a fascinating way to choose yourself and it’s a vehicle that’s open to anyone.

I want to tell you one other thing. I just came back from Amazon where I was visiting their self-publishing group, and those guys all they think about is how they can help writers self-publish more books, make more money. They’re very writer-oriented. It’s just an excellent vehicle for choosing yourself and Hugh Howey is a great example of it. Plus, by the way, he’s an excellent writer. I mean I highly recommend not only the Wool series, but many of his books.

Aaron Brabham: Yeah, that’s outstanding. You know it’s good to see that Amazon is still sticking to their roots, you know, because they originally started their company for book publishing and of course it’s transformed with the Kindle and your Choose Yourself book was huge and you self-published it through some of their software. It makes me happy to hear that they still have their roots. Well, James let’s not delay any further. Let’s jump right into the interview.

James Altucher: Great Aaron. Thanks. So, Hugh Howey, welcome to the show.

Hugh Howey: Thanks James. Thanks for having me on.

James Altucher: Hugh, many of the listeners might not know exactly who you are, but I’ll give a brief bio and then I have some questions about your bio which you can elaborate on. Basically you’re the bestselling author of Wool. Essentially you’ve written about 24 novels that are on Amazon were bought by Ridley Scott, is that correct?

Hugh Howey: Yeah, the number of novels is probably inflated by the fact that some were serialized, but yeah many 15 or so novels that –

James Altucher: Okay, only 15 novels. Only 10 more than Thomas Pynchon has written. Hugh Howey: Well, I think Thomas would say that he aims for quality over quantity, I don't know.

James Altucher: I don't know. I’ve read a good chunk of your novels. If you’ve written 15, I’ve probably read at least 8 or 9 of them and I would say you have very high quality, but what’s really interesting in your story – there’s two things that are interesting that I want to get to. One is how you got to be a bestselling novelist was a very unique path that most people have not taken.

I think it’s a path that can be actually followed by many people who listen to this podcast to some extent. Not maybe to the highest extent, but to some extent. I think also you have a site authorearnings.com which discusses kind of the pros and cons of the particular approach you’ve taken, so I want to get right into that, but I want to start off with a little more background.

While you were writing or basically before you started selling big quantities of fiction, what were you doing for a living?

Hugh Howey: I was paying my bills as a bookseller. When I wrote my first novel I was out of work. I was trying to help launch a website doing book reviews and I was covering the book industry from the inside doing interviews with authors, going to book conferences, trying to review a book a day.

James Altucher: You were using the World Wide Web?

Hugh Howey: Yeah, I was using the World Wide Web. I was on the internet.

James Altucher: The internet, okay that’s new technology. How’d that work out for you?

Hugh Howey: Well, it worked out great because it invertebrated me to write my own book. It didn't work out so well for the website ‘cause I got lost writing my own novels and I was doing 90 percent of the work on the website, so the website floundered after that.

James Altucher: Did it motivate you because were you thinking to yourself “Gosh these guys suck so bad I can write a novel better than them”? Hugh Howey: No way. What happened I started one of these conferences and meetings; well, I was doing interviews. I was doing at least one interview a week with really topnotch writers and I was going to conferences and meeting them and what was cool is learning how down to earth and normal these people were and the fact that they all had day jobs.

The only thing different with them and myself was that they got up every morning and spent a couple hours writing. I realized I was doing the same thing with –

James Altucher: What time would they wake up?

Hugh Howey: Oh, it varies. But most of them had to write before they went to work. A lot of them were university professors or they had jobs in journalism and so they devoted a couple hours here and there. Some of them, you know, what I model myself on were the writers who were getting up at 5:00 in the morning to write before they went in to their day job.

James Altucher: So they weren’t making a living from their writing. It was just sort of out of the pleasure of writing fiction and having it published and having a few readers that drove them to this?

Hugh Howey: Yes, some of these were New York Times bestselling authors. I assumed they were millionaires and that started dispelling to me the fantastical image I had of what a writer’s life was like. That helped me. I think not putting authors on pedestals has been crucial to me visualizing myself as not.

I don't have delusions of grandeur and I thought writers were some kind of special magical beasts and it was really nice to get to know them and for them to offer encouragement. I realized I was writing a couple hours every day for the website and for my blog, so why not put that time into writing the fiction that I’ve always dreamed of writing.

James Altucher: Did that disturb you a little bit though that they were New York Times bestsellers and they weren’t making a living at it. They still had to teach or be a journalist or whatever. Did that strike you that maybe the system was broken a little bit? ‘Cause a New York Times bestseller is going to sell like what, 30,000 to 50,000 books in a couple weeks. That strikes me as a way to make a living. Hugh Howey: Yeah, some of them, you know, you don't have to sell quite that many to hit the list especially those who are non-fiction New York Times bestsellers. It’s pretty startling how you can creep onto the list with just a few thousand hardback sales in the opening week by targeting certain bookstores that report their sales.

Being a New York Times bestselling author is something that follows you for life, so some of the authors that I met in my bookstore were New York Times bestselling authors, but they hadn’t hit the list in several years. So, you’re trying to live off of for some it’s maybe $25,000.00 or $50,000.00 advance and after your agent and your taxes you’re looking at trying to live off of $25,000.00 or $30,000.00 even on the high end.

James Altucher: So, even a New York Times bestseller, they’re only gonna get a $25,000.00 advance on their next book on average would you say?

Hugh Howey: I don't know what the average would be, but I mean I can only talk about the anecdotal numbers that people would share with me. The six figure advance kind of had it’s heyday for a while, but it’s very few authors who get that much money upfront. For a debuting author the number that I see most often is around $5,000.00 as an average.

Of course, the ones you hear about are the six and seven figure authors. I think it’s dangerous to model our expectations around the outliers. I'm an outlier in the self- publishing world and they’re outliers in the traditional publishing world, but most people don't get deals like that.

James Altucher: Well, okay so you were doing this website and talking to lots of authors and then you decided to devote your time more to your own fiction. This was like inspirational to you talking to these authors. What happened next in terms of making a living?

Hugh Howey: Well, not much. I wrote my first book and I’d planned on giving it away and gave it to friends and family and the feedback was that I should actually try to get this published, that it was better than the last thing they had read from the bookstore. Quite a few people told me that. I started doing some research to find out what that was involved in getting a book published and learned about the query letter which I found was more difficult to write than the novel itself. That one page took almost as much time as writing the hundred thousand word novel.

James Altucher: This is the letter that you would send to publishers describing your book?

Hugh Howey: Yeah, right. This is you going from being a fiction writer to a business pitch artist. I found it very difficult to write like a one-paragraph synopsis of either who I am or what the book was or why this agent should care about it. I did that for a few weeks. Sent it to agents and to small presses that took un-agented submissions and I got two small presses interested.

One made an offer that I was happy with and I was shocked that someone was going to pay me money for this manuscript. It was very little money, but it was I anticipated having to spend money to self-publish it. To kind of cut to where I am now it went well, but I saw that the tools they were using –

James Altucher: I'm sorry Hugh. What was the title of that book?

Hugh Howey: Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue.

James Altucher: Okay great. Then you continued to write a series on that.

Hugh Howey: Yeah, when I published the second book I had an offer from the publisher. They sent me a contract for the second book and I thought I think I can do everything that they’re doing on my own and have more creative control and quicker time to market and I would keep a larger share of the earnings. This time I wasn’t thinking about e-books at all. I was producing e-books, but they were an afterthought.

James Altucher: What wasn’t the publisher doing that you thought you could do?

Hugh Howey: They were doing a good job. It’s just I wanted to change small things throughout the process and I felt like I was annoying them to have to email them and say “Could we tweak the back jacket this way?” I wanted to fire up InDesign and Photoshop and do some of the stuff myself and it seemed to be quicker that way. I was also doing a lot of research on which print-on-demand company to use and how to do the e-book, things that they weren’t doing yet, and what their publishing model. I saw that maybe these were helpful avenues to explore. Then I was walking them through using Lightning Source to try to get Baker & Taylor and Barnes &Noble distribution.

I started thinking. Man I'm doing a lot of the publishing work on my own. Why not just take on a few extra things like the editing and hire that out and strike out on my own, basically do what they’re doing.

James Altucher: Striking out on your own of course makes a big difference financially because instead of getting, I don't know what your royalty was, but instead of getting let’s say a 15 percent royalty, you could get 80, 90 percent or does Amazon have 70 percent. I don't know how that financially affected you given the advances you were getting from the small publisher, but I can't imagine they were giving huge advances either.

Hugh Howey: No, they weren’t. It wasn’t all financial, but it definitely paid dividends. I started within a year of writing I was making at least $100.00 a month which to me I lived on a very small budget and never dreamed that people were going to pay for my writing. So, having my cable bill paid by my hobby every month was pretty startling. I think that was only because I was in control of it all.

James Altucher: So Hugh, you wrote the first novel. You did it with a small press. What got you from writing like one novel to having this huge amount of novels and then making a living from it? Like what were you doing? What changed?

Hugh Howey: I think the biggest thing; I think this is the difference in the two methods of publishing now. I have friends who have published through traditional publishers who were given one or two books to hit it big and if they didn't have a blockbuster there were enough other up-and-comers for publishers to choose from that someone else was given a chance.

I was able to kind of ignore the challenge of continuously writing books and selling them to publishers and just concentrate on the writing itself. I know that sounds counterintuitive. You would think that a self-published author would spend more time doing other things, but when I got busy was later in my career where I signed on with publishers.

When I was working in a bookstore I spent my time writing the stories that I enjoyed and getting them out there and then moving on to the next one. I didn't worry about how that book was selling. I didn't spend a lot of time promoting it. I didn't care what the rankings or sales were doing on that book. My idea was I love writing now.

It’s been 10 years writing and later in life I might have 20 or 30 novels that I can tell people that I wrote and to set up a booth in an arts and crafts show or go to book conferences and set up a table, but you know I wasn’t going to make it with one book. I was gonna have to write all the stories that were in my head and get them all available and they weren’t getting old.

It wasn’t like they were dying on the vine. They were brand new to everyone who hadn’t discovered them yet.

James Altucher: You basically were working in a bookstore, but you felt your best marketing for your books, in some sense, was writing a new book?

Hugh Howey: Absolutely. I think part of what motivated me was 20 years of wanting to be a writer and not being able to finish a novel or putting it off and procrastinating and feeling like this was something I would never get done. When I finished that first novel, I realized that I could do it.

It was almost like summiting my first mountain and I got so addicted to the high of being up there and feeling that sense of accomplishment that all I wanted to do was go climb another peak. I didn't want to go around the country showing people slides of my not nearing exploits and try to be someone who spoke about moutaining. I wanted to do it again.

My passion was writing and I say this kind of with a lot of stark, but unfortunately I didn't get 10 years of writing in before things took off. I was just putting books out there and I think within 2 or 3 years I had about 5,000 books sold which is what I’d planned to do in my lifetime if I was lucky to sell that many books. You see I had very low expectations this whole time. But then this one short story I threw up there took off and kind of gave me an opportunity to focus my efforts on this series and the sales got to the point that I could quit my day job and really focus everything on my writing career.

James Altucher: This was Wool, right?

Hugh Howey: It started off as a short story.

James Altucher: It’s interesting because you call it a short story, but it was about 70 pages ___ __.

Hugh Howey: I think it’s 12,000 words, so when it’s formatted by itself it’s about 40 pages long. I guess it’s considered a novelette would be its technical term.

James Altucher: And then so you wrote Wool, one through four, and then you did the Wool Omnibus which is when I read it. By that point it had really taken off. I mean your Wool, one through four, plus the Omnibus was like one through five on Amazon science fiction list.

Hugh Howey: That was an unexpected benefit of having written it in parts, but the exposure of the series was, you know, if you see one book in a bestseller list it looks like every other title. It just blends in. But when all five of the parts of Wool were all sprinkled throughout the list and all kind of climbed together I think they gave the series a lot more visibility and they supported one another.

Yeah, at one point it was pretty obnoxious. You would get on Amazon and you would see all five parts in the Top Ten. When I combine them into the Omnibus there’s individual parts kind of died down and the standalone novel is what went on to hit the New York Times list and do really well by itself.

James Altucher: At this point were you still working in a bookstore?

Hugh Howey: Yes. Right up until, I think my last day was right around when the Omnibus was released because even when I only had three or four parts out I was making as much in a day as I made at a week at the bookstore. I was working a 30-hour job for $10.00 an hour. That job really allowed me a lot of time to write and what time I wasn’t writing I was spending around books. I was doing a lot of author events and dealing with reps from publishing houses and it was very useful I think just to have those years spent in a bookstore while I was writing. It taught me a lot about the industry.

James Altucher: Bookstore ______that they had like this writer there or did they all have kind of a novel in a desk drawer that they wanted to put out?

Hugh Howey: No, my boss who sat right beside me. It was really just the two of us ran the bookstore and we had some student employees who filled in every now and then, but the two of us ran the bookstore. He didn't really think of me as a real writer ‘cause I was writing genre fiction. He’s still a really good friend of mine, but I think he’s baffled by it all because he really loves literary fiction and that’s what he likes to write.

I like to read literary fiction as well, so we have a lot of the same taste. But he did not like to shelve science fiction or young adult up on the front shelves and I was always fighting to get those books better placement. Yeah, we had a fun relationship and I think when the series started blowing up he was pretty baffled by it all.

James Altucher: The series started blowing up and you quit the job to do this full- time. What did you do with this new time? Were you writing more or were you dealing more with the publishing side of the business?

Hugh Howey: I would say I was writing about the same amount. My day job was replaced with a day job spent answering emails and doing a lot of traveling, dealing with demands from agents and publishers, and people who wanted me to come to conferences, a lot of social media interaction.

My thrill with having a readership has been having something in common with all these strangers online and my use of social media has basically been to make myself available to existing readers. I don't really use social media to try to win over new readers. I just don't think that works very well.

I became really swamped with emails and contacts on Facebook and through Twitter, and I would spend a couple hours a day just handling those sorts of things. James Altucher: Well, it’s really the opposite of a lot of marketing efforts of writers where they do use those. You know a publisher will ask you “What’s your social media platform like” because they expect you to, you know, the average writer to use that social media platform to sell books. But you were using it more to build community among existing readers and I think that worked very well for you.

Hugh Howey: I think it works better because it’s disingenuous I think for a writer to tell strangers “You’re going to love my book” or “My book is great.” Or maybe that just takes some kind of self-confidence that I don't have. I think it’s more effective to have a great relationship with your existing readers and those are the people who are going around telling other people “You should check out this work.”

I mean I don't read books that are recommended to me from publishers and authors, people who have a financial stake in my decision because I don't know what their – I guess I know what their goal is. Their goal is to make money off me and I understand that completely, but I would rather listen to my friends and family whose goal is to make me happy with a good book and I think those are the people we listen to more.

We trust friends and family and word of mouth more than we trust either a paid critic or the people who have a financial stake in that product.

James Altucher: Well, it’s interesting because after I became a fan of your books, I also found books that you would either blurb or mention. For instance, I really like the Marcus Sakey book Brilliance on your recommendation. I never would have known about it, so that’s really true.

I wanted to get into kind of the technical details at this point. So, essentially what was your writing schedule like at this point and just technically how did you publish, like, what platforms you used and so on? How did you get your books out there?

Hugh Howey: Well, I'm more creative in the morning. I do my best writing early when my kind of my dream state I guess is still lingering. I find my vocabulary is a little more – it’s not that the correct word is always available; it’s just that I use more creative word sentence structures early in the morning. A lot of times I have to revise those scenes to make sense of it later in the process which I do better in the afternoon. Everyone has to figure that out for themselves. There’s no right answer for when to write. The right answer is to find time to write. The people who are doing it wrong are the people who think they don't have time in the day to do it.

James Altucher: Why do you think they think that and then they watch four hours of night of TV? What things did you have to eliminate in your schedule to find the time to write? Because you already had a schedule, so you had to eliminate something in order to write.

Hugh Howey: For me, I stopped playing video games and I stopped watching TV and I was spending several hours a day during those two things. I'm still able to get as much reading done as I was before and I just replaced some of my passive media consumption with my active media production. I think we can all do that. It’s just difficult to do. Writing is a lot like dieting and exercise.

It’s something that we all wish we could do more of and we have a hard time finding the willpower to do any of it. There’s really no answer to it other than you have to just buck up and stop thinking about it and dedicate yourself to it. And if you can't do that, you know if you can't write every single day your chances of making it as a writer are really difficult.

James Altucher: I think people don't realize the impact of, like let’s say you just write 500 words a day. Well, by the end of a year that’s 180,000 words.

Hugh Howey: That’s two novels.

James Altucher: Again many traditionally published authors write like three or four great novels in their lives. If you’re writing two novels a year or more it’s enormous. People don't realize the impact of a little bit a day how quickly that adds up to something significant.

Hugh Howey: Yeah, and if you do that for five years, you know your first two novels might not be great and that’s part of writing a lot of novels is you have to write a couple just to learn what you – just to get better. You do that for five years. Let’s say that gets you five novels that aren’t so good, but it gets you five novels that are great. That’s enough to five years later to sit and try to market or at least if nothing else be proud of. I think anybody who dedicates five years to writing every single day has a good chance of making supplemental income off their work.

James Altucher: Well, how many books did you have out before you quit your job?

Hugh Howey: I believe Wool was my ninth title.

James Altucher: Your ninth title, so nine novels or novelettes or whatever you want to call them, you had written and published before you quit your day job?

Hugh Howey: Correct, yeah. And I had planned on, you know this was two and a half years in; I had planned on writing for ten years before I even worried about what I was making off my writing.

James Altucher: So, in two and a half years you wrote nine novels?

Hugh Howey: Seven novels, a novelette and then Wool was my ninth which was a novelette, and then I had some short stories that I’d also put on my website for free.

James Altucher: Just as an aside I have to tell you The Plagiarist and The Hurricane, I think that’s the title, those were two of my favorites as well. I enjoyed Wool, but I really liked some of your standalone science fiction and The Hurricane was more young adult, but I really enjoyed those books as well.

Hugh Howey: I have a lot of people tell me that The Hurricane is my best work and that, I believe, was my first or second NaNoWriMo book. National Novel Writing Month is something I recommend to anyone who wants to make a living as a writer because it teaches you the value of writing every day.

If you miss a single day, like, you use 500 words a day as your goal. If you miss a day you have to write a 1,000 words the next day in order to maintain your pace. If you miss that second day, now you’re up to 1,500 words and so you can really – the same is true of eating right and exercising. Taking one day off just snowballs into taking a week or a month off. You just can't do that if this is your goal and what you want to do with your life. You have to be consistent and NaNoWriMo teaches that better than any other program out there.

James Altucher: You know it’s not just the word count. I find for myself if I don't write every day, then my writing is not as strong the next day. Like I have to kind of stay this kind of consistent. I don't know. It’s almost like a muscle that you have to keep in shape or else you have to reduce how much you have to weightlift because you won’t be as strong any more.

Hugh Howey: Not only that, I think my best writing comes when I'm writing a lot. The idea that it takes five years to write a novel, the disjointed mess that I would write if I spent five years writing a novel it would be atrocious. I think when people say they spent five years writing a novel it means they started it, then they procrastinated for five years and then they finished it.

My best writing comes from when I'm writing 5,000 words in a day. That’s when I stay in my book and in my characters mind and the words are flowing. I don't think people should have a word count because the danger of that is that; let’s say you aim for 500. Usually 500 words just primes my pump and my next 2,000 words are great.

But if you set a hard goal for yourself, then when you hit that goal you give yourself an excuse to say “Okay, I'm done” and walk away from it.

James Altucher: Right, that’s a really good point.

Hugh Howey: I think you should write as much as you can in a day and set aside the number of hours and don't give yourself a word count goal. Just say “I'm gonna write as much as I can for two hours” and if that’s one perfect sentence that’s gonna resonate in your readers minds for years, that’s two hours well spent.

If it’s 10,000 words of action and adventure that people are gonna stay up till 3:00 in the morning ‘cause they can't put the book down, that’s 2 hours well spent. Use every bit of free time that you have to further our novel along and eventually you’ll complete it.

James Altucher: Do you heavily outline in advance or do you let it just flow? Hugh Howey: I do a lot of brainstorming to know my story in advance. I make notes, but I don't write a heavy outline. I think the best method for me to get writing done is to daydream the next day’s, like I’ll do my writing this morning which I’ve already completed and then I’ll spend the rest of my day thinking about tomorrow’s writing.

The one scene that I need to write that day. It could be two characters meeting. It could be them traveling a little bit or a bar scene or whatever it is. I daydream that scene all day long. So, when I sit down to write tomorrow I’ll know that scene. I’ll know some of the conversations they have.

I’ll know what needs to happen during that entire scene. If I finish that scene in my head I’ll daydream a little farther along, but I always have to know where my story ends. You Lost the TV show showed us what not to do when it comes to plotting. You have to know what your story is about and what that final scene is gonna be like in order to have some destination to move toward.

When I'm reading I can tell when the author did not know what was gonna happen next and that – those books never resonate as much with me.

James Altucher: That’s really interesting you bring up Lost because the story every step of the way was so powerful and so intriguing and yet you could tell, particularly in the last two or three episodes, you could tell the writers in the beginning really had no clue how this was going to end.

Hugh Howey: Yeah, you can write some of your best stuff when you’re writing by the seat of your pants because you’re just surprising yourself all the time and you’re just making stuff up and making sure something exciting is happening at every turn. But it’s easy to do that and to write adventures for which there are no adequate solutions to and then you get into ______and all these ways of, you know, it’s all a dream.

Just ways of tying things up that are less than satisfying. I would much rather have foreshadowed events that if you read my novels a second time you can see these hints dropped in very early that kind of tell you exactly what the story is gonna be about and you just don't notice them the first time around. James Altucher: Although so Wool eventually ended up being, you know Wool, Shift and Dust like the whole kind of silo saga. When you were writing Wool did you know how, you know, 12 novelettes later how it was going to wrap up like in terms of sequel and prequels and all of that?

Hugh Howey: No, when I wrote Wool that was the entire story, so I didn't have anything else that I wanted to write in that world. If you’ve read the novel you know that after that first story there’s really nothing left to write about this character, so you have to start a new story in the same world about new characters, and that’s what I did. I didn't really try to pick up with existing characters. I used the second book to transition to a new character who took over for the rest of the story.

James Altucher: In general it’s like you built a world, populated it with characters and every character really could have a story. Like you were shifting character stories quite a bit throughout the whole series and that allows even the fan fiction to be popular. So you have a lot of fans who have now written books within your world and focusing on their own characters.

Hugh Howey: If we’re able to invent one character then we should have the freedom to move to other characters or to kill off characters and introduce other people in other parts of the world. It’s just I think we get so attached to our characters and we’re so mystified by our ability to create them even as writers who know we can do this.

It still seems magical when you do it that I think we get a little too attached to our characters. I think for world building it’s helpful to be able to take that ability to invent people and invent crowds of them and jump around and flesh out the world a little bit more. That also gives you the freedom to kill off main characters which heightens the tension.

I think we’re getting spoiled in books and movies and TV shows where we know yeah, a lot of dangerous stuff will happen, but nothing bad will happen to my main character. But once a show or a book shows that they’re willing to do that to kill the protagonist that creates a lot of tension for the rest of the series. James Altucher: Let me ask you this. Let’s say a listener has a book they’ve written. It doesn’t matter how many pages. 30 pages or 500 pages. Now they want to publish, but they don't want to go through the whole publishing route and they want to move to self- publishing just like you did. Technically, what should they do? Like what’s kind of an outline of steps to get your book up and out there like in the next week or two?

Hugh Howey: I’ll tell you what I would recommend and you should get a lot of other opinions because everyone has, you know, I have my own experiences, but other people would have their anecdotal evidence and their own biases.

I think there are three formats to concentrate on and I prefer using Amazon services for all three because they’re tightly integrated and I see Amazon as being the best and number one bookseller in the world, so it’s where I want to focus all my efforts. For the e- book, I focused on KDP which is the Kindle Direct Publishing.

All three of these services by the way are completely free. Everyone who has an Amazon account already has a KDP account. You can use your same login or password for buying stuff on Amazon to log in to KDP and upload your first book. For print books, I use Create Space.

There are other print-on -demand books that have better distribution into bookstores like Lightning Source, but Create Space is tightly integrated into Amazon. It shows up quicker. There are no fees for setting your book up. The copies you order for yourself are very inexpensive. Your proof copies are very inexpensive.

You can even do a digital proof online and not pay a penny to produce your print book. And then ACX which is the audible format is also a company owned by Amazon, and then what that does is populate your Amazon product page with three different formats.

It makes it look a little more professional and gives the reader options and also shows the e-book as being a discounted price from the print book which is very helpful. Having print books is crucial. You can take them to events and do signed copies and stuff like that.

James Altucher: I’ll just add so I’ve self-published – I’ve traditionally published five books and I’ve self-published about five books and I use the exact same three parts of Amazon. So, Create Space, Kindle Direct, Audible. I didn't always do audio, but I found again populating that page makes the book look more professional. Actually I found like I kind of wrote more self-help or personal improvement. I found that I was getting a lot of sales through my audible book that I did not expect; I was surprised.

Hugh Howey: Are you doing your own readings?

James Altucher: Yes, I'm doing my own readings and I do them completely unabridged. I can't really read off of a page. I get a little bored. So, I just kind of riff while I'm reading my book.

Hugh Howey: Oh, that’s cool. I love your Facebook posts, your blog posts. I think they’re really useful. So, knowing that you’re creating that sort of content for the audio format will probably be the first thing I look up after we get off the air here.

James Altucher: Did you do your own readings for audible?

Hugh Howey: I’ve done one only because they asked. It was an autobiographical piece that I did for the Kindle World’s program and Kurt Vonnegut’s World. My wife and I went up to New York and they put us in a booth and we did the audio for that. She did Montana Wallpack’s parts and I did my autobiographical parts.

James Altucher: That’s great. Just out of curiosity did you use John Marshall Videos?

Hugh Howey: I may have. It was Brilliance Audio set it up, but I think it may have been John Marshall’s. New York Times Square; just a little north and west of Times Square.

James Altucher: Yeah, that’s who I use as well. That’s who I think Harry Potter used their facility as well and Bill Clinton used their facility.

Hugh Howey: I remember seeing his work on the wall there when you walk in.

James Altucher: Okay, so nine books in. You use Amazon for everything. From beginning to end, you have a book done, from beginning to end how long before it appears on Amazon using all their tools? Hugh Howey: Well, once you have the final manuscript if you hit publish on the e- book and it’s usually up within 12 hours, sometimes less than that. With Create Space book, once you finalize the proof and hit okay, it’s usually up within a day. Audio takes longer. They do a quality assurance so she’ll want us to listen to the whole thing I believe before they make that live. It usually takes a couple of weeks once you submit the final files.

James Altucher: Right. I want to stress how different this is from traditional publishing. When you finish a book with a traditional publisher, it can sometimes take up to a year before it’s published.

Hugh Howey: Yeah, and what you’re paid on your advance is sometimes tied to the publication date and it might be tied to different formats. So, let’s say a third of it on signing. A third is on hardback publication and then a third of that might be on the paperback publication. So, it could be two years before you get the last third of your advance depending on how it was structured.

James Altucher: And like you said then the agent takes a cut, then the government takes a cut and meanwhile Amazon they’re about T plus 60, right. So, if you sell something in June, then by August you get the check for it.

Hugh Howey: Correct. And if it’s at the end of June, it’s just a little over a month before, you know, everything in June gets paid six days later, so yeah it’s pretty – I think publishers are having to respond to that. I’ve already seen publishers doing sales portals where you can see monthly sales data by format.

Random House has added a new sales portal and I think publishers are going to have to get on to monthly royalty reports and direct deposits to compete, so we’re going to see some excellent benefits trickle down to the rest of the publishing world because of what these digital retailers are doing.

I will say, you know, I publish on KDP, but and I like using KDP Select which is a 90-day exclusivity period, but once that’s over I also publish to Kobo and DiBookstore and Nook because it’s free to do it. You might as well get as many formats out there as you can. James Altucher: Although let me just say with KDP Select you don't get to use I- books or Kobol or Barnes and Noble, but people can lend your books out and Amazon has a weird way of paying. They have like a pool and you get your prorate portion of the pool based on how many books you’ve lent out.

That can actually be significant money if people are lending your book to their friends and stuff, so it can actually work out to be better results than –I mean I'm not trying to sell anything, but it could be better results than iBooks or Kobo or whatever.

Hugh Howey: Yeah, I can say that I lost money by going out of Select and offering my book in other outlets when I was doing really well two years ago because there weren’t enough sales in the other outlets and I was losing the lending bonuses and the extra product placement from Kindle Select.

But I had so many – I was making enough to make a comfortable living and at that point I was getting emails from people who had other devices, who didn't know that their device also read Kindle books or they didn't know how to do that and so I kind of succumbed to the reader pressure to have as many formats out there as possible, but you’re right you can lose money by offering your book in more places paradoxically.

James Altucher: Yeah, and it’s interesting that people who, like for instance have an iPad aren’t always aware that there’s a Kindle app for – there’s a Kindle app for every device essentially. But I think that over time people will realize that Kindle dominates the universe, so they’ll just switch to that from their Nook or Kobo or whatever.

Hugh Howey: Well, for me it’s like iTunes with my music. I don't want to have my library spread out everywhere. Even on my PC I haven’t purchasing my works through iTunes which I find to be the best website for discovery of new songs and to sample and listen to songs. But because that’s where I started buying my music years ago, it just makes sense to have it all in one place.

I can log into any device and access my entire iTunes library. The same is true for Amazon and their e-books. Once you start buying books through Amazon it doesn’t make sense to have them everywhere else. You know you have all your – so you really get locked in to one device and one marketplace. And for me it’s kind of a no-brainer which one to use. I mean the Nook is – there’s a lot of talk about being spun off from the physical store. I like what Kobo does and I like their devices, but I don't know that it’s as stable as what Amazon has.

James Altucher: Well, I'm curious now. Your coworker from the bookstore, he kind of had this – you sort of alluded to he was looking down on genre fiction. And I find a lot of people look down on just self-publishing in general and not as much now as let’s say five years ago, and not as much then as ten years earlier.

There’s always been a slight stigma or it used to be bigger, but there’s a stigma against self-publishing. How have you encountered that? Now let’s start moving into you also have this site authorearnings.com where you really dive down on the numbers of how much self-published authors make versus traditionally published authors.

Also there’s kind of the quality issue, like, does traditional publishing really produce higher quality in general on average? What’s some of your discoveries on that? Like can self-publishers make a living and do self-publishers write better or worse books according to the readers?

Hugh Howey: Well, that is a lot of topics to cover all at once.

James Altucher: Answer them all in five minutes.

Hugh Howey: I think self-published authors are generating the same quality of content that people going the traditional route are producing. I know that’s probably controversial to say, but the difference is we see all self-published books. People that choose to go the traditional route; we don't see all those books.

We only see the ones that publishers produce. That’s with their curation and their gatekeeping powers. We only see the top 1 percent of books that go the traditional route. With self-publishing I think we should really only look at the top 1 percent of self- published books. That ignores the what people would consider the slush file.

There are some books that I have written that are part of the slush file that are not my best works and that I wouldn’t want to include in the top 1 percent of books. So, I include myself in that category. There are a lot of traditionally published authors who not all of their books, you know, they all have a couple of books in their drawer that no one will ever see.

When you compare the two top 1 percent against each other – and and anyone out there who takes writing seriously and devotes time and energy into it and takes the craft seriously they can get themselves into the top 1 percent. You have a lot of people who aren’t trying very hard that you’re not really competing against.

When we compare those two tips of the icebergs together which is what we do when we look at the top 50,000 rated books on Amazon for instance, what we see is that readers review the self-published works higher. There are a lot of reasons why that might be. One is possibly that we’re producing more of the kinds of works that readers want.

There’s a bias in the publishing industry to publish more literary works and the kinds of things that the people who work in publishing enjoy, but that would be like promoting opera rather than promoting cinema. Just because you have high tastes that does not influence what the market wants. The market wants cinema not opera.

Even though I try to write as lyrically as possible and as high quality prose as possible, I'm writing the types of stories that I want to read where lots of exciting things happen and that tends to be what self-publishing provides to readers, more genre fiction, more romance, and action and adventure, and science fiction, and what used to be considered pulp

We can denigrate that if we want, but I mean traditional publishing has made it’s living publishing biographies of people like Snooki and whatever they think will sell. For some reason the non-fiction categories with self-help and religious text and other things, they are willing to cater to reader demand, but in the genre works it just does not seem like they are willing to output as many works a year as readers will consume.

James Altucher: In terms of money now, what would you say is the kind of comparison between the top 1 percent of traditional versus self-publishing? As you mentioned you’re an outlier, but can one make a living from self-publishing in your opinion? Hugh Howey: Yes, you can. There are several reasons why you can. One, you have much higher royalty rates with self-publishing. You’re talking 70 percent for digital versus 12 and a half percent off the list price. So, if you’re self-published you make 70 percent of what the book sells for.

If you’re traditionally published you’re gonna make around 12 and a half percent of the list price. People will say that 70 percent of the market is still print which I think is not accurate, but even if that is true that 70 percent is not what the author is making. The author might make 12 percent of the list price. The retailer and the publisher make more on the sale of the book than the author does.

So, you’re not giving up much when you self-publish on the print side, but you’re gaining a lot on the digital side. What we saw when we compared the top 50,000 books on Amazon were the self-published books were earning more in that daily snapshot for self- published authors than traditionally published authors were making.

James Altucher: Is that per author or all across the whole group?

Hugh Howey: Well, that’s an average earnings per author. And then we also broke it down to how much authors were making in each bracket and from the outliers which were dead even the people making seven figures all the way to the people making a few thousand dollars a year where the self-published authors vastly outnumbered the traditionally published authors.

In every one of these categories self-published authors were doing better. It also turns out that Amazon appears to be making more money from self-published authors than from traditionally published books. The results were pretty startling.

James Altucher: That must be why Amazon has so little friction between, you know, as you mentioned all of their services are free to the writer. Like it’s a very writer-friendly environment.

Hugh Howey: It’s massive because when we think that 70 percent royalty is outrageous, but it’s really a fair rate when you think about what – it’s not really a royalty, it’s a distribution agreement. We’re providing them a finished product that they only have to list and put on sale and handle the transaction side. They’re not doing editorial. They’re not handling cover art.

They’re not doing print distribution and all that stuff. That’s what publishers do and so they pay the author royalty. What Amazon is paying you is similar to what a bookstore pays a publisher to carry a book. At my bookstore we typically got a 40 to 45 percent discount off of a book’s retail price which means we paid 55 to 60 percent to the publisher and we had to warehouse and staff and sell the physical book.

So, what Amazon’s doing is they’re taking a finished product and charging 30 percent where we used to charge 40 percent for a digital book versus a print book, so it’s a very fair transaction. Very sustainable. It’s a higher rate than they’re paying their traditionally published books where they might only make 10 to 20 percent per sale of the book and I think it might be a lot less than that.

James Altucher: Now are you ever disturbed by the fact that self-published authors don't make it into the bookstores because, for instance, at least for most self-published authors Amazon doesn’t offer the return policy that traditional publishers do.

Hugh Howey: You can make it into bookstores if your book does well enough. For the outliers bookstores will carry your print-on-demand books. I’ve seen this personally and I know other authors who aren’t near, you know, my level of sales that are seeing their books show up in bookstores and they’ve had success getting their books into Barnes and Noble.

I have a friend who’s done several signings in this area in his area at Barnes and Noble and have been very well supported by them. I think this will change. I mean we’re very early in this process, but I would not be surprised to see Create Space do some sort of pooled marketing where they would have sales reps and view their Create Space books as their own in-house books.

And they would go to bookstores with a catalog and say “Hey, these are our top sellers. This is the book we’re most excited about that just came out. These are the books we think you should carry.” And basically do what publishers are already doing and offer books returnable and just eat the cost. I don't think they’ll actually return the books. To writers I don't think they’ll ding their accounts. I'm not sure how they’ll work that, but my guess is they can be profitable and eat the returns the way publishers do.

James Altucher: Well, again I find Amazon to be incredibly writer friendly, so when they have to make a decision that’s either for the writer or against the writer, they usually make that decision for the writer even if it hurts their immediate bottom line ‘cause they’re looking at this long term. They’re creating a long term eco system for all writers, so I think that helps the writer.

Hugh Howey: I’ve seen this over and over again with Amazon where – and we read their clauses and we read what their lawyers wrote and everyone freaks out, but when you deal with the people at Amazon they make commonsense decisions and they ignore their contracts and they’ll say “Look this is what makes sense.”

Every time they’ve had to make a decision like that they’ve made it against their own best interest and for the writer and I'm baffled by that because I’ve also worked with traditional publishers and it doesn’t work that way. It’s also the only company that’s ever called me to say – and this is before I’ve had this level of success that I’ve had, but called and said “Like hey what can we do better?”

You know just as a random survey sort of thing. I know a lot of authors that they’ve called like that and they bring in to look at new products and systems and say “What can we do to improve this?”

James Altucher: I just want to mention, so just two days ago I was at Amazon and I met every single division of Kindle and Create Space and so on and I was astonished how humble they were and every group asking “What can we do better to help you?” And it was really great to see that in action.

Hugh Howey: Yeah, what’s amazing is self-published authors know a lot about marketing and a lot about their readership and I think this is something about the New York publishers should really tap into. They should really contact their writes and say “Hey, what are you noticing? What can we do better?” They should really pool those resources. It’s an unbelievable tool at their disposal and Amazon’s taking advantage of that and other publishers should as well. They’re already doing that in the marketing side. When you sign a contract with a publisher there’s this assumption that if you’re with a big publisher they’re gonna handle everything for you.

But the first thing they’ll ask as you mentioned earlier is “How big is your social media platform? How many Twitter followers do you have? How are you gonna sell your book?” And I think that’ll surprise a lot of aspiring writers when they get that first contract that their publisher is asking them what they’re gonna do to sell the book. But that’s the reality.

They have to leverage the muscle of all of those authors in their stable and they can do that as well for market research as well as they do on the actual sales and marketing side.

James Altucher: Why did you decide to do this authorearnings.com? What was your goal with that? ‘Cause it was a lot of work. I see you’ve put a lot of work into analyzing the data.

Hugh Howey: Yes, it’s been a lot of work and a lot of money hosting the site and getting things put up and formatted. My motivation has been the same for the last several years. I’ve been trying to do what I can with my agent with our negotiations with publishers to make changes in the way publishers deal with manuscripts and with the authors. I think we should have limited terms of license.

I think royalty rates should be better for digital works. There’s no reason publishers should make a higher profit margin off an e-book that they make off a hard back. We’ve seen changes in every other entertainment and media format in Hollywood when digital streaming became a revenue stream the writers had to strike basically to get what was a fair payment for their work.

I don't think that‘ll happen in the publishing world without pressure from self-published authors because right now publishers just don't compete with one another. They compete on the size of advance which the differences there are small. They’ll go to auction and they’ll have competition there, but their contracts are boilerplate and they resemble each other too much. The reason for that website, you know an author contacted me with the first bit of data from Amazon that anyone had ever really seen in a very clever way of coming up with that data. And I saw this as being really hard proof of what I’d already seen anecdotally for years. If you’re in the trenches this matches everything that you’re seeing from authors on both sides of this equation.

Dissatisfaction from traditionally published authors and complete befuddlement from self-published authors who can't believe how much money they’re making whether it’s several hundred dollars a month or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

There are people that you’ve never heard of that are making six and seven figures a year and their stories are popping up everywhere and it’s hard to rationalize until you see this data and you realize “Oh my God, self-published authors are out earning traditionally published authors on Amazon.”

James Altucher: Well, I think what’s particularly important is what you mentioned earlier. It’s not just that they’re making it on one book. A lot of times, I mean I know some authors who have written over 100 books and all it takes is like a $100.00 per month per book, and if you’ve written 100 books, you’re making like a good living in the United States.

Hugh Howey: Yes, incredible. Well, you know, that’s one of the things that we were concerned about when we saw these earnings. We have the author names, so we’re able to see how many books they were earning across and what their total earnings were. So, one of the things that we looked for was well is the difference in earnings only because they’re publishing more books.

Well, that was only true of the authors earning seven figures. In every other bracket self- published authors were earning more money on fewer titles than traditionally published authors.

James Altucher: You know what’s interesting also and your numbers probably don't cover this is many of these self-published authors are in charge of how their books get distributed as opposed to letting the publisher be in charge of how your books get distributed. So, for instance for me I often will bulk buy a print order and then sell through an email list, so that doesn’t get reflected at all in terms of how much I'm making ‘cause I can put together bundles of my books. I think there are a lot of creative ways that self-published authors can market and sell and distribute their books which is also interesting.

Hugh Howey: Yeah, and you can give books away if you want. Through Create Space I can get copies of my books for like $3.00 or $4.00 each which is cheaper than some other marketing materials that you might, you know, if you wanted to give away thumb drives or other doodads at a conference.

Giving away the book itself is cheaper than a lot of those things. I know people who they get really fancy business cards that are about a dollar each. Well, I can print a novelette for a dollar and hand that out. So, and it’s hard to do that through a publisher.

James Altucher: You know what I did with my last book; I had all 67,000 words printed onto a t-shirt so you could actually read on the t-shirt every single word. It’s readable. I sometimes give that away.

Hugh Howey: Was that through Lithograph?

James Altucher: Yeah, exactly.

Hugh Howey: Yeah, they approached me at AWP and wanted to do that with one of my works. I thought that was brilliant. I couldn't believe you can print that much onto a t-shirt, but they showed me one. I was dumbfounded.

James Altucher: One of the things I wanted to do when I was up at Amazon just again two days ago was allow them to let me put a t-shirt slot on the title page instead of – along with the audible paperback art cover, also a t-shirt ‘cause the whole books there.

Hugh Howey: That’s brilliant.

James Altucher: I want to ask you also switching topics, like Ridley Scott calls you and wants to buy the movie rights for Wool. What happened? How excited were you? When’s the movie coming out? Hugh Howey: Well, first thing I did was change my pants and told everybody I knew. My expectation with everything to do with my writing has been so low that when the movie talks started I just assumed no movie would ever come out because a lot of stuff gets optioned, very few things get made.

But everything that’s happened since then I just feel like they’re trying to get my hopes up before they dash them on a rock somewhere. They’ve written a screenplay and we’ve had all these pre-production meetings and everyone seems to be really excited about it. The screenplay is brilliant. I still tell myself it’ll never happen, but.

James Altucher: Did you help write the screenplay?

Hugh Howey: No, I met with the screenwriter. He’s from London and they flew me and him to LA and we spent a week together brainstorming and going over his notes, but I’ve agreed with his vision from the beginning. He knows what the heart of the story is about and he’s captured that in the screenplay.

James Altucher: Have you met with Ridley Scott or is he kind of hands off until production?

Hugh Howey: Yeah, I think he would just show up to, you know, if the movie won awards that’s when he would show up to collect all those and put them in his trophy case. He’s a busy guy and to be honest the movies that I know that he’s working on they’re a lot more that I’d rather him see as a fan make before Wool, so that’s one of the reasons I’ll be surprised if this gets made.

James Altucher: Well, are any actors interested yet? How far along are you in the process?

Hugh Howey: We haven’t done the casting yet, but I know actress who have read the book who have contacted me privately or in person and said that they are – especially female actresses who are dying to play Juliette. I was at a conference in Australia and some of the media stars there started passing the book around and there was a lot of in fighting about who was gonna get to be Juliette, so that was pretty cool. But if we do casting that will probably be the next step and it will be sometime this year. James Altucher: I know you keep your expectations low, but let’s say we have high expectations, when do you say a movie could come out?

Hugh Howey: My guess would be next summer if they – not this upcoming summer, but summer of 2015. If they cast it this year they will probably be filming in the fall and wrapping up and doing post-production in the spring and releasing in the summer of 2015. But that’s like absolute best case scenario. Again that’s not my expectation at all.

James Altucher: Hugh, two, three years ago you were like a clerk in a bookstore shelving books. Now we’re talking movie next year. You’ve got, I don't know, 15, 20 books out. You are continuing to write obviously. This like just blows the mind. Like how has your life changed? Did you buy a new house? Did you have a big party? What’s going on?

Hugh Howey: I haven’t had a big party. I don't have that big of a social network. My partying has been online with Facebook, but my wife and I will have celebratory glasses of wine every now and then. We had to buy a new house when we moved from North Carolina to Florida. My wife took a new job and we upgraded. We were living in a 750 square foot house in North Carolina and we upgraded to a 900 square foot house here in Florida.

James Altucher: Wow, a 20 percent improvement.

Hugh Howey: So, instead of bedrooms that are like 10 feet by 10 feet, they’re now like 12 feet by 12 feet and we’re really confused what to do with all the extra space. It’s been pretty amazing. Financially it’s a weird situation where I don't have to work for the rest of my life, you know, I can write.

I can write duds and flops for the rest of my life, but I don't think about it that way. I'm living the same lifestyle and still eat the same cereal every morning and wear the same t- shirt and shorts and just concentrate on the writing and enjoying life which was my philosophy beforehand.

James Altucher: Well, it’s really interesting because a lot of people always ask the wrong question which is how can I make a lot of money, but what they don't realize is that money is a side effect. Like if you’re doing something really well, then a) you’ll tend to love what you’re doing as opposed to the other way around.

People always say find what you love and then do that, but I find if you do something really well like writing say, you’ll love it automatically and then money’s just a side effect of that. And you don't really have to change your lifestyle ‘cause you love what you’re doing all of a sudden and you love what’s happening during the day. You don't write on a private jet or anything, you write in your home.

Hugh Howey: I think if people go into writing and we see this with the people who claim that self-publishing is a gold rush. Well, there are a lot of elements of traditional publishing that have the same mentality. There’s a big catastrophe or some big news event and everyone jumps on writing and pitching that book immediately.

I think any comparison you can make or anything you can say about one of these routes of publishing, you can say about the other. What I will say if you go into this to make money, I just don't know how you would ever be happy because your chances of making a lot of money are very slim.

Yes, they’re better as a self-published author, but that’s not saying a whole lot because the people who choose to traditionally publish which means they choose to submit to agents, that doesn’t mean they get their book on an end cap in a bookstore. They might not even get a publishing deal. You don't get to choose that.

You just get to choose which route you’re gonna go and that might mean rejection letters from agents for the rest of your life. That could be the route that you chose. So, yes you have a better chance of making money self-published, but that’s only because your chances of making money traditionally published are so woefully slim.

Why let money be your guide if your chances either route are that bad? This is where self- publishing really wins, not on the monetary side, but the satisfaction of writing a story that you believe in and making it available to the public and getting just one reader to pick that book up and enjoy it, that’s almost a guaranteed outcome if you dedicate yourself to self-publishing. By the time you write five or six completed works, you will have found one reader and made them happy. If you stick to that as your goal there’s no way you can lose. It’s such a liberating feeling to know that your success and all of your efforts and the ownership of your art is all in your hands.

James Altucher: We both know writers who, like, take Theresa Ragan as an example. She had been trying to traditionally publish for a decade or more until finally she went the self-publishing route and now just through self-publishing she’s a massive bestseller in both the romance and thriller categories.

Hugh Howey: She’s made a lot of money doing something that she loved that she could easily have given up on the other way. That’s another huge advantage is self- publishing inspires people to continue writing. I’ve got really good friends who have been published with big five publishers who have given up on writing because of how their careers have been handled.

They had something that they loved doing and the business side of it took all the passion out of it for them. With self-publishing, again it’s a paradox because you think you’ll be busier, but if it takes me two months to write a novel, it takes me two days to publish it.

So, when you think of all the stuff you have to learn and all the headaches of self- publishing you can do it in a weekend. You can get your e-book, your print book, and your audible book set up and formatted and ready to go in a weekend. That’s not a lot of investment and time.

James Altucher: It’s been really amazing for me as well. I have to say it’s changed my life and this is after having traditionally published. You know I published with Harper Collins, with Penguin, with Wiley five different books and self-publishing has been amazing for me. What are you working on now? Do you work on like a bunch of books at the same time or do you focus on one at a time? What’s your next bunch of projects?

Hugh Howey: I try to focus on one at a time. Right now I'm moving several projects forward to see which one is gonna grab my attention. I just published really three works this year already. That short story and the Kurt Vonnegut World for the Kindle World’s program a novel called Sand which has been a bestseller, and then an anthology with John Joseph Adams called The End is Nigh where I edited 22 short stories and contributed one of those and helped produce self-publish the book.

We just got that out a couple weeks ago. The last couple of weeks I’ve spent in the fifth Molly book playing around and also starting a couple of new novels and just see which one captures my attention. Probably in the next week or two I’ll pick one and run forward with that for a couple of months until that one’s finished.

James Altucher: That’s great. Hugh, thank you so much for coming on this show. I really think you’re living the dream and congratulations for all your success. Also, I think you’re really helping move forward getting rid of the traditional stigma that’s been associated with self-publishing and showing people that this is a viable route to either express yourself creatively or to even make a living and you’ve been doing that really well. Thanks again for spending the time and coming on this show.

Hugh Howey: Thanks James. It’s an honor and I’ll do it anytime man.

James Altucher: Excellent. Thanks Hugh.

Aaron Brabham: Well James, that was an excellent interview. What’s the one big takeaway that you had?

James Altucher: It’s really interesting to me that here’s a guy who followed his dreams. He kept his expectations low and then he blew away those expectations. Now not everyone is gonna write a bestselling novel and note it took him nine novels to write a bestselling novel. But I guarantee you for just about everyone there is something you can do where if you’re persistent and you keep, you know, your positive expectations high, you keep your optimism high, you’re going to find success.

You’re going to be able to choose yourself and find freedom. Everyone wants freedom of choice in their lives. Hugh found it through writing. Other people find it through building apps. Other people find it through owning a franchise or investing or whatever, but there’s always a way. If you do what you do well, you’ll end up doing what you love and money is the side effect of that and freedom is the side effect of that. So, I encourage everybody to choose this route really. Aaron Brabham: That’s great James. It’s a theme that you have over and over and it’s what a lot of your guests have pretty much done with their lives. They’ve all kind of bottomed out at some point, chose themselves and it pays off, but it is scary. One of my favorite sayings I ever heard was when one door closes, another one opens, but sometimes it’s hell in the hallway and it’s good to go to the new door.

James Altucher: That’s a good analogy and it’s one to think of even when you’re being persistent in the same area. Just because some agent rejected your book, you know, I tried to write fiction 20 years ago and I wrote 4 or 5 novels. I got rejected everywhere. Then I started publishing non-fiction. In my most recent book Choose Yourself I totally self- published.

I used the exact same techniques and the exact same companies that Hugh talks about in the interview and my book the day it was published hit number one for all non-fiction on Amazon over every other book in the world. So, it’s possible and it is the dream. Everybody’s got a dream and I encourage everybody to pursue it.

Aaron Brabham: That’s awesome. One more note for the listeners out there. You know we talked about doing the Ask Altucher segment where it’s a daily podcast about ten minutes long. We’ve recorded a series of those. We’re just doing the technological ends of it right now, but we should have those up in the next couple of days or so.

It’s a chance for all the listeners out there to ask you a question or go to your Twitter which you do a Q&A every Thursday. What is it, between 3:30 and 4:30? I forget the exact time.

James Altucher: Yes.

Aaron Brabham: 3:30 and 4:30 and your Twitter handle is @JamesAltucher is that right?

James Altucher: Yeah, and people ask me anything. You could ask me about relationships, divorce, hate, anger, anxiety, fear, startups. People ask me anything. I answer on the spot. But now Aaron, now that we’re doing this Ask Altucher we’ll be able to also take kind of the best and most interesting questions and expand on them further. Aaron Brabham: That’s outstanding. Also you can also email James; you go to the email address [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. I hand select these. I’ll ask you one a day. We started it. We’ll get ‘em up and running real soon. So, please we encourage everybody to do that.

James, another phenomenal podcast. I know your guest lineup that you have coming up. It’s spectacular. I'm really looking forward to these and I hope everybody else just hangs in there and keeps listening.

James Altucher: Honestly, I can't believe some of these people said yes to coming on the podcasts, some of the guest that we have coming up, but I'm excited. I'm excited to talk to some of them since some of the interviews haven’t happened yet.

Aaron Brabham: Yeah, absolutely. All right James, well another spectacular show and we’ll talk to the listeners soon.

James Altucher: Thanks Aaron. INTERVIEW WITH STEVE SCOTT

James Altucher: This is James Altucher with the James Altucher Show. I’m very excited to have Steve Scott on the show. Many people might not know who Steve is, but you’re gonna find out quickly because I’m gonna ask him a bunch of questions that will show you what an incredible job this guy has done to make a career for himself out of nothing. So, Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Scott: Well, thanks for having me on, James. A big fan.

James Altucher: Thank you, Steve. And, Steve, I’m gonna just ask you straight out. How many books have you published on Amazon?

Steve Scott: Forty-one.

James Altucher: Forty-one books. How much money did you make last quarter?

Steve Scott: The last quarter I’ve made, like I would say probably $45,000, but this month I’m on track to make about $40,000 just from this month.

James Altucher: Just from this month.

Steve Scott: Yes.

James Altucher: So has it been kind of like an upslope ever since you’ve started the strategy that we’re going to totally get into, but I just wanna know if it’s been a general upslope.

Steve Scott: I would say upslope, but it’s ___ some dips. I would say as good as this month was, I would say the last month of April, that was definitely a downslope. So it’s – if you look at a chart, it kind of goes up and down, up and down, up and down, but every time it goes up, it goes up just a little bit more.

James Altucher: That’s great. So when you say 41 books, it’s not under – only under Steve Scott. It’s under S.J. Scott as well. Steve Scott: Yeah, and I have another whole line that’s about, like, children’s animal books, but those kinda tanked, but I kinda took the lessons from those and applied them kinda what I’m doing now with the habit books.

James Altucher: Now, so I’m just gonna read some of the titles of some of your books because it seems to me like you took one huge book and divided it up into, like, 40 smaller books, but it’s an ingenious strategy. So, for instance, one title is Make Money Online: 55 Ways to Make Extra Money Fast Using Your Computer. Another is Internet Lifestyle Productivity: Master Time, Increase Profits, Enjoy Life. Your recent ones, which actually have been selling better than mine, let me find them. I think these are under S.J. Scott. You’ve been crushing me.

Steve Scott: I think just with the one book, though

James Altucher: Yeah, yeah. It’s that last one about – yeah, Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes that Take Five Minutes or Less, which I’ve read, by the way. I couldn’t remember the title of it just now, but I have read the book. So that one’s been doing better than mine this month. Also you’ve been doing very well with Twenty-Three Anti- Procrastination Habits: How to Stop Being Lazy and Get Results in Your Life. So I love all of these – like, here’s another one, Seventy Healthy Habits: How to Eat Better, Feel Great, Get More Energy and Live a Healthy Lifestyle. Who’s not gonna read that book?

Steve Scott: I hope as many people as possible. Yeah, you touched on the first one, the Fifty-Five Ways to Make Money Online. I cringed a little bit when you read that one off. That was my first attempt of Kindle publishing, and that was kinda – if you look at, like, someone’s first blog post, that’s almost how it kinda related to the first feeble attempt of someone who didn’t really know what they were doing.

James Altucher: But you blow away a lot of conventions about what a book is. Like, you know, some of your books are 40 to 50 pages, but you’ll – you know, you price all over the place. Like, you’ve really played with the concept of what is a book, and you’ve used Amazon as almost a place to distribute these, like, I don’t want to call them mini-books, but they’re not quite large blog posts. You’ve – you know, you’ve developed your own genre, and so let’s take it back a little bit. I always – whenever there’s a superhero, I always like to know the secret origin. So what were you doing before all this? Like, where did you come from?

Steve Scott: That’s actually a fairly long story, but I’m actually kind of writing an e-mail about that for my list. But actually, I’ll try and think in the Cliff’s Notes version. I would say I started online about a decade ago. Basically, I went through a divorce, I had to move from where my ex-wife lives now in South Carolina back home to New Jersey, and at the time, I literally –

James Altucher: Now, wait, wait. There’s a lot in there. What were you doing as – for work when you got your divorce?

Steve Scott: Well, actually – let’s see, I was in the military before that and I had, like, your typical entry-level job at Prentiss-Hall as a marketing assistant. But when we were in South Carolina, and that was part of my frustration of living there and actually probably what ultimately led to divorce is just kind of a little bit of self-hatred in who I was as a person. But basically –

James Altucher: So were you guys just unhappy and you weren’t getting along, you decided, you know what, let’s call it quits. Did you have any kids with your ex-wife?

Steve Scott: No, I didn’t, but – basically I would say it’s mostly my fault. I do like to take the blame on this one just because I was so kinda angry at myself that I just – I’m sure I was a very unpleasant person to be around, and that factored into a couple other things, but I really – we’re still friends, so it’s not like I hold a grudge and I hope she isn’t holding grudges, but I basically, at the end of the day, I had to move home and basically with my parents and –

James Altucher: Wow. Where in New Jersey? ‘Cause when I moved to New Jersey, I had to move back home to my parents’ so where in New Jersey?

Steve Scott: Red Bank, New Jersey. It’s right in the Jersey Shore area.

James Altucher: Yeah, I know. I know where it is. Bon Jovi lives there.

Steve Scott: Yes, he does. He actually – I saw him in passing, him and Bruce Springsteen a couple times growing up. James Altucher: Cool.

Steve Scott: Yeah. So basically I had to move home, and at the time, from like 2003 to 2004, I basically had internet – like, I had a couple small internet web sites, so basically only prospect that I could see was really building an internet business and eventually, after about six months, I managed to earn enough where I basically got to move out of my parents’ house, but it was definitely touch-and-go for a number of years where I was basically trying to do the internet thing, but also I just had a whole gamut of just part-time jobs like the temporary – I forget what that’s called, but those temporary employment agencies and I was a part-time DJ, so basically anything I could do to make money and hustle on the side, I pretty much did it, but I kinda ___.

James Altucher: And what was the internet business that you started?

Steve Scott: At the time – I’ve had a whole bunch of them, but at the time, I had – I sold Evil Eye jewelry that I imported from Turkey, and I sold directly through eBay and on the eCommerce web site.

James Altucher: And how would you do that? So you’d buy this, like, kind of Evil Eye jewelry from Turkey. Would you build a store ___? How would you then up the price on eBay to justify, you know, making a profit?

Steve Scott: Well, they weren’t too expensive per piece of jewelry. They were only about a buck or two, and on eBay, you could sell them for $15 or $16, so the margins were actually pretty good. And eventually someone a lot smarter than me came on eBay and basically cornered – like just used intelligent marketing, basically priced it down a dollar or two, and what I didn’t realize at the time is they were just making a lot of money on the back end, but basically trying to compete with this person would just eat out my costs, so for a year or two, I had just an eCommerce web site for people just searching through Google traffic, but that kind of kept me afloat from there, but I would say, after that, it was one series of kind of small businesses that went well for a year or two but then completely died out, so that was kind of my life for a while. James Altucher: What do you mean he was making money on the back end? So he would – this competitor came on, dominated the market and underpriced you, and then you said he made money on the back end. What’s the back end?

Steve Scott: I think, and this is kind of my own stupidity and naiveté is I didn’t really analyze what he was doing and try replicating. I just gave up. But basically I think what they were doing was they were basically selling, you know, a bracelet for, like, 15 bucks and they would get just the customer. That’s all they really cared about was they would just basically – it was a lead loss. They would just get – the eBay campaign would pay for itself and then they would have the customers’ e-mail and potentially mailing address and they would send follow-up, I’m sure some types of mailers and there’s more expensive Evil Eye jewelry that you could price anywhere from, like 50 to 60 bucks, so I guess they try upselling them, but at the time, I didn’t take the time to really analyze what they’re doing, see how I could have done it myself. I just gave up basically.

James Altucher: But, Steve, though, it sounds like you learned an incredibly important lesson because I see this all over your web site now. Building an e-mail list, getting that e-mail address so that you can later market to and upsell to that person, that is the key to success in a lot of these types of businesses.

Steve Scott: Oh, absolutely. Like, I really – I bang that drum nonstop. I believe now, like, getting those customers and getting those e-mail addresses is really the most important thing to do and –

James Altucher: I think you have it in all your books too, like, to sign up for your list, you know, give me your e-mail address. Like, people can click right on through your books to your e-mail list.

Steve Scott: Yeah, I’m definitely not subtle about it, but yeah, I feel – I’d almost rather not make money initially just to get that e-mail address, to be honest.

James Altucher: Well, a lot of your books are priced for free, so I can tell you you’re not making money on them, and you even have a book – an entire book titled 99 Cents is the New Free. It’s 45 pages. You sell it, obviously for 99 cents. How do you get, like, an entire book out of a topic like that. Steve Scott: If I remember correctly, I wrote – sometimes I writ these things so fast I kinda forget what I write about, but I wrote it, let’s see, right after I came back from Greece. I wrote it last August, but basically the whole premise was I just took the whole analysis of what people think was conventional wisdom at the time for Kindle publishing that you just release a book for free for five days and you just get a flood of sales, and I really wasn’t seeing any evidence of that. Instead, I would launch my book for 99 cents, and which I currently do now pretty successfully, is I launch a book at what’s considered a pretty low price point for 99 cents. I get a lot of those initial sales, and then from those initial sales and review, Amazon kind of just does the rest of the legwork. Once they see that little bit of, hey, this book has some marketability, there’s an audience, there’s some sales, they actually do a lot of the internal sales that they do with, you know, as far as their e-mail campaigns and attaching book to people’s other customers also bought. I guess to answer your question is I really just kind delved really into the – to what I felt was a better marketing strategy, which is launching a book for 99 cents.

James Altucher: So okay. So let’s take a step back. So you’ve done all these businesses, you did the eBay business. It worked out for a while. You moved out of your parents’ house. But we’re talking – it seems like a common theme was bulk businesses, like doing quantity. So you’ve had all these different activities that were making money for you and, with that, you started to rebuild your life in New Jersey. What happened next?

Steve Scott: Well, basically I eventually did stumble on – not stumble, actually, put effort into it, but I eventually did build a couple reliable internet businesses, and it goes back to e-mail marketing, but I really got heavily into affiliated marketing, which I pretty much did up to the point where I found Kindle publishing, and that was pretty successful. Like, the idea you build an e-mail list around a topic, you provide free content, and if you find an affiliate offer, you promote it and then you get what’s basically a sales commission. So –

James Altucher: So let me ask you. What’s like an example – a very specific example that you did? Steve Scott: I would say I kind of did a lot of exercise and dating offers. So basically, obviously I would do a front end of some sort of, you know, how to lose weight in, like 50 steps or something. I’m trying to use a random example. And basically you get a bunch of people who are particularly interested in that topic, and I would basically provide content to them. At the same time, I would find a couple of really good products I felt were valuable to the end user and I’ll promote those. It was kind of a merging of good content with also some pretty aggressive marketing. Since then, I’ve kind of dialed back the aggressive marketing angle, or at least what I’d like to think I do.

James Altucher: And were those good businesses? Like, were the affiliate fees high enough that they pay the bills?

Steve Scott: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I really liked it but I also felt it just – I didn’t like the idea of absolutely running a business where I always had to promote the latest good offer, and I guess you can make the argument I do the same thing with Kindle books, but I felt that sometimes I’d promote something, they’d charge 70 bucks and sometimes I really didn’t feel like it was really worth 70 bucks and I just – a little bit of guilt was involved where I just didn’t really like the entire business I was involved with. I feel you can be a good, ethical affiliated marketer, but it’s also kind of a slippery slope sometimes.

James Altucher: And I know we’re covering a lot of stuff really quickly, but it’s really fascinating to me. How would you build the list? Would you put Google ads up like here’s a free report, 50 ways to lose weight?

Steve Scott: Yeah. At the time, it was a lot easier to kind of – I don’t want to use the word gimmick, but it’s easier to get people towards your e-mail list ‘cause basically all you have to do is just create a free report, a squeeze page, which is basically the place that you sell your book for free – or not sell, but basically promote your book for free. And then there are a lot of sites like ezinearticles.com, and back then YouTube was really easy. You just create free content on all these sites that basically drive people back to that single page. So really, you didn’t even need a blog or any sort of content type of machine that we have now with podcasts, YouTube channels or blogging. All you had to do was just basically drive free traffic back to a squeeze page and, for a number of years, that worked. Actually it’s still stuff I haven’t touched in five years, I’m still kind of making money from just from the fact it ranks well.

James Altucher: What was the best way – what was the best method for driving traffic back to the squeeze page?

Steve Scott: At the time, it was ezinearticles.com, but basically they had a really good – they were given natural ranking preference in Google, but eventually Google basic came down and they kinda just shut down that kind of – that marketing method, basically. If you want to post articles on ezinearticles.com, it doesn’t really do anything for your web site now, but back then you could write an article and it could rank really quickly for pretty much in-demand key word. You could drive a lot of traffic back to your squeeze page.

James Altucher: What would you do now if you were gonna be in that business? Where would you post?

Steve Scott: I would say – that’s actually part of the problem. I would say probably what I would do now is kinda what I’m currently doing but just a different revenue stream, but I would basically build a while authority niche around one particular topic by blogging, what you do podcasting, YouTube channels. I would actually, honestly, I would write Kindle books. That’s probably why I do it all the time now ‘cause I feel like you can really build an audience just by writing many books. And actually, I did agree with your assessment before. I do consider them kind of mini-books.

James Altucher: Yeah. So okay, so let’s get into that. So when was your first – when did you write your first Kindle book?

Steve Scott: I wrote that February 2012.

James Altucher: Wow. So, okay. And that was called what I said before. I don’t even remember the title now.

Steve Scott: Yeah, it’s – and looking back, it’s such a spammy sounding title, but it’s Fifty-Five Ways to Make Money Online and I honestly forget the subtitle, but that was basically I just took five old blog posts, I basically talked about the different revenue streams and just threw it into a Kindle book really, honestly not knowing what I was doing. Just kind of threw it up there and thought it might be a good traffic generator more than anything.

James Altucher: And, you know, I just want to point out you’re self-published. You didn’t have a publisher for it or anything ‘cause on Kindle, it’s ridiculous – not – and we keep saying Kindle, but in general with books, it’s ridiculous to have a publisher that’s gonna take 15 percent – that’s gonna take 85 percent of the profits when you could – when Amazon allows you to publish a book and they’re the biggest publisher in the world and they only take 30 percent of the profits.

Steve Scott: Yeah, absolutely. No, I – once I actually discovered what I have with Amazon, I was just amazed at what the opportunity that they provide to authors, or even bloggers.

James Altucher: And how did that first book sell?

Steve Scott: It did – actually it did terribly, come to think of it. I was about to say it did well, but the first couple months, it was – like I kinda mentioned before, but I just consider it more of a traffic generation ___. I really, honestly, truly didn’t believe it would actually make money. So I threw it up there and I had a follow-up book a couple months later, and I remembered that I had the first book in what they call KDP Select, and at the time, you could give away a book for free for five days and it would actually kinda trick Amazon into saying, hey, it’s a good book and then suddenly you would get some initial sales. Well, I put the first book under KDP Select for five days, and when I looked at the stats afterwards, it was selling, you know, five to seven copies a day, which was 10, 15 bucks. Not bad at all for something that was more of an afterthought, and that’s kinda what gave me the kind of Kindle bug where I was like, well, I knew the first two books really weren’t my best efforts. What if I actually sat down and wrote a detailed book instead of blog posts, just write a detailed book about specific tactics and try to do that once every month.

James Altucher: And what was that third book? Steve Scott: It was a – and looking back, I guess I really didn’t have the authority, but basically it was about how to find good e-book ideas, even though the first two weren’t that good. But I basically kind of reverse-engineered what I was figuring out with Amazon and just wrote a book about that. But I knew at the time I couldn’t get away with writing a book – writing like one of those meta-topics, like writing a book about how to write a book or even writing a book about how to sell books because I really didn’t have the authority, but I felt that I was really good at least discovering what are good ideas for books, so I just wrote a whole book about that.

James Altucher: Okay, this leads to two questions. What is authority? Like who has authority in anything?

Steve Scott: That’s ___ something I debate with myself. I would like to think of myself – for running, I would like to think of myself as an absolute authority, but sometimes I don’t know if I’d really even want to get into that just because it’s – the sheer volume of the topic, but I would say really the definition for me is at least you know more than what most people do. You at least have some knowledge and – or you at least have some passion and stuff that you’ve tested on your own or have some life experience in that particular topic, but I would say really it’s in the reader. There’s honestly probably people that buy my habit books that probably know more than I do, but I would like to think that, at the end of the day, I know a little bit more than most people.

James Altucher: Well, you’ve been so involved in – at least online, in the habits of not only weight loss and health and running, but writing is a huge habit. So, you know, that has, over time, made you an authority on all these different topics, but let me ask you what are – how do you find good non-fiction ideas? You have several books about how to find good non-fiction ideas for books. So what are some of the ideas?

Steve Scott: Well, there’s two answers. There’s what I do for myself and then what I recommend. What I do for myself nowadays is really just kinda what I’m personally interested in. Like, for instance, a couple months ago, I really like what was really kind of an annoying thing for me was handling e-mail and I was just spending hours a day responding to e-mail and it was really just eating into my life and my free time. So I really just kinda got down a whole system, the whole inbox zero type of concept, but really just practice it for myself for a couple months, and I felt just the experience from that made a good book. Honestly, that one doesn’t sell very well, so sometimes my book ideas aren’t the greatest, but for me it just always comes down to personal experience. But what I recommend is just basically just kind of reverse-engineering the Amazon Marketplace. I would say start out by looking at blogs, forums, basically Yahoo! answers, even ClickBank, which is kind of a depository of information products. Basically just look at what’s out there and kinda use those to see what’s selling and basically just write down, I would say, 50 ideas. Literally just keep on writing down every possible idea and then go to Amazon and just keep on looking at different books and seeing how they’re ranking. And the litmus test I used for a long time is the 20,000 rule, but it’s kinda bumped up to 30,000 rule, but basically if you look at the Amazon bestsellers and if you see the number – any number below the number 30,000, that means it sells at least five copies a day, and if you’re selling a book at $2.99, that’s, like, 10 bucks a day. It’s not a huge amount of money, but if you have a catalog of books that are each selling 10 bucks a day, it can quickly add up. So I kinda like to use a combination –

James Altucher: If you start selling 300 books, you know, now you have 40, but if you get up to, like, 300 books, that’s 3,000 bucks a day.

Steve Scott: Yeah. It’s – like I know obviously the math, and some books the sales will drop down and some books will really just take off with what have happened with a couple few, but I like the idea of basically just five sales a day is what I’m happy with for pretty much any book in my catalog.

James Altucher: And so, like today, for instance, I don’t know if you went through this exercise today, but what would be some ideas in ClickBank or on Amazon that you might find today that – ‘cause you also seem to be on one particular category, which is, like, the personal improvement category. So, like, what books would you look for today or what titles would you think about today?

Steve Scott: I would say – see, this is a hard one to answer because I actually really also really believe in the idea of building authority on a platform and not going, hopping from idea to idea, but I know for a fact that Minecraft is a big popular idea right now. I actually don’t even know what that is; it’s like some type of video game or something, but I know that –

James Altucher: Yeah, a lot of kids play it. It’s big on YouTube.

Steve Scott: Yeah. I know people play that all the time. I would say maybe a Candy Crush strategy guide. Wheat Belly Diet, I know I see stuff like that popping up. But all that being said, I really don’t believe in the idea of basically finding a topic just because it’s selling well right now and just writing a book about that because honestly, from my experience, what’s been the driver of most of my sales is building a whole brand around a catalog of books with the idea that, hey, if someone like one habit book, the more inclined they’ll go buy a second habit book, a third book, a fourth book, a fifth book.

James Altucher: You’re not gonna piggyback trends, for instance. Like, if Kim Kardashian is trending on Twitter, you’re not gonna write a book about Kim Kardashian.

Steve Scott: No. I don’t, but I know people who do, and I’m sure they do it successfully, but I think my strategy’s more of the slow play, but I figure that ultimately you will do better, have a more successful business long-term if you just stick to one topic, and basically also build an e-mail list around it, like build a whole authority writing about one type of Kindle books.

James Altucher: So I feel like your topics, and they’re all sort of related, you write about writing, you write about how to make money online, you write about, you know, healthy habits and, you know, those are kind of your main things.

Steve Scott: I would say right now, and I would like to think that down the road, in a couple years when I start a family and stuff like that, I’ll probably come out with a parenting habits or relationship habits. I like the idea of any type of habits because, honestly, I like just testing new things in my life and just seeing if I can improve my life in some way just by developing small new little routines.

James Altucher: And so – okay, so the third book came out and when did you start seeing, like, money trickle in? And then how does the flow work? Like, you obviously, you know, get people to come to your blog, you get people to sign up to your list. What else do you sell off of that? Steve Scott: Well, let me try answering the two questions separately. The first one, like, the third one’s when I really started picking – things started picking up. That was September 2012. And then I wasn’t making a lot of money. If I look back, I think I was making a couple hundred bucks a month at that point. But then I came out with the fourth and fifth and sixth books, and basically those were all basically internet business books just ‘cause I ran a business for about eight years before that, so I kinda knew the – like, how to get a lot of traffic. I knew how to basically, after writing a couple books, I knew how to write a book pretty fast. I knew about how to make a little bit of money from YouTube, so I basically took all these little small little niche strategies I kinda knew and just wrote whole books about them and just based them off my own experiences. And I would say by December 2012, I was making a couple thousand a month. And then, from there, it’s been progressively getting a little bit better, but kind of like I mentioned before, some months it would go down a little bit.

James Altucher: So from September 2012 to December 2012, you went from making a few hundred to a few thousand. Is that because you wrote a whole bunch of more books or, like what did you do?

Steve Scott: Yeah, I would say really my only major strategy, and let me also preface this one quick thing, but my major strategy was basically write a book every three weeks, and that just – I stuck to that schedule pretty well for, I would say at least four months. But what else, kind of the one benefit I had that, unfortunately a lot of people don’t have, is I was blogging for a couple years up to that point about internet business, so I did have a collection of e-mail subscribers. And at the time, I basic – my strategy was just release a book for free for a couple days and just basically like, hey, the book’s free, guys. Please just do me a favor, go review it. And I would get 30, 40 reviews pretty much overnight just by giving away a book for free, and I kinda milked that strategy for all it’s worth, but kinda what I mentioned before, the giving away a book for free, I’ve moved away from that strategy.

James Altucher: Right, right. So – okay, so we’re at the beginning of 2013. How many books do you have out at that point? Steve Scott: I’m trying to remember. At that point, I think I was at seven or eight.

James Altucher: And what was your most successful one at that point?

Steve Scott: Mine was kinda the metabook about how to write a book in 21 days. So basically I wrote a book about writing a book, and that one did quite well for a while.

James Altucher: I love that one.

Steve Scott: Oh, thanks. Actually – and that was actually the moment where I found my e-cover designer. I’ve really felt that really was a huge – made a huge difference in my business ‘cause I feel that he has a particular good eye for creating really awesome e- covers. As a side note, if anyone wants the name of this guy, just e-mail me and I can supply his name. But, yeah, I felt like he did a really good job with that particular e-cover, and since then, I’ve really felt – I’ve been kinda having a visual representation of my brand just by what he designs.

James Altucher: Why are you so open with, like – you’re totally giving away your whole strategy and now your cover guy? Like, anybody can wake up tomorrow, call your cover guy and write, you know, ten steps to writing the best non-fiction book in the world.

Steve Scott: I’ve had people rip me off, but I’d be honest. I feel that most people will do themselves a disservice if all they’re doing is just ripping people off and, to be honest, my strategy involves just a lot of hard work, and most people don’t really want to do the hard work, and I’m sure they could shortcut a couple of my suggestions, but I’ve honestly – the people I look up to online, like the Pat Flynns of the world, the people that actually are the most open about everything that they do, and I feel that long-term-wise, they do the best, so it only makes sense to model them and to really just be honest about what works. And a lot of times, I’m honest about what doesn’t work for me.

James Altucher: Right. So – okay, so you’re at several thousand a month, you know, in early 2013 and you’re writing a book every three weeks. You’ve stuck to that, I think, pretty much through now. Like, I see a new book from you every three or four weeks. What’s been working? How has the strategy evolved? What’s going on? Steve Scott: I would say about – so I‘d say right around February or March ’13, I would keep – same thing, internet business books I’d keep on releasing. And I got three or four negative reviews, and they really got to me, and one of them, basically it was the same theme. This guy, all he does is make money online by teaching people to make money online. And, yeah, I could definitely say I was doing that at the time, and I was so convinced that I knew what I was talking about. I was convinced I could go into any market, write about it consistently in that market and still turn a profit. And basically, I just said challenge accepted. I’m gonna find a market that I’m really interested and just write books about that. So I went through a month or two of trying to figure out what I was gonna write about and I chose just the habits market ‘cause I felt that, at the end of the day, everything I learned in the past decade since kinda my lowest point of my life had to do with habits. So I just sat down, same thing and just wrote about small little habits that either I’ve learned or basically that I could at least teach someone just from my own experiences. And if I didn’t know that topic, I would just go out and test it for a couple months and then write about it. But I just felt like – the idea there that I felt that you really could just build a brand on Kindle just by writing about one specific topic, and the harder you work and the more books you produce, the better of a business you’ll have.

James Altucher: Yeah, and I see that, you know, you developed another persona, the S.J. Scott persona, and the last three books are Habit Stacking, Twenty-Three Anti- Procrastination Habits and Writing Habit Mastery: How to Write 2,000 Words a Day and Forever Cure Writer’s Block. So it seems like you almost use that persona to really kind of do the habits, but it still revolves around internet businesses and writing and so on.

Steve Scott: Yeah, it’s still – like, I started habits with the glorious idea that only write about specific habits, but at the end of the day, I realized I know a lot about, like, productivity and time management, so fortunately or unfortunately, I’m not too sure which way you look at it, it would – I just – a lot of that time management stuff definitely creeps into my books ‘cause I’m like a – basically a time management junkie.

James Altucher: Well, like, tell me about your typical day so I understand what that means. Steve Scott: Sure. Basically I get up every morning and I do my one thing. That’s basically – for me, it’s whatever is the thing that either could be the biggest growth of my business or the one thing I’m working – or the one challenge I’m having. To give two examples, writing was my – basically my first thing. I would do writing before I opened up my e-mail, look at Facebook or anything. I would just sit down and write for two or three hours. And right now, honestly, my biggest challenge is I’m having trouble with recording video. I’m trying to actually create an extensive video course, so I’m just not really a natural presenter. I just don’t really – I’m not comfortable talking information. So I know if I don’t do it right away, I’ll tend to procrastinate on, so I force myself to do video for the first couple hours a day. And then I also like to kinda the most important things that Leah ___ talks about is basically you write down three things that could be like – three things that basically are the most important part of your day. So I do those, like, those three things in the morning. So the one thing is part of that, and I find two other small projects that are really have the biggest benefit to my life, so I do those three things right away before anything else. And then the rest of the day, I’m just kind of closing loops. I’m answering e-mails, I’m doing small little projects, but a lot of stuff that doesn’t take a lot of high energy or a lot of, like, mental brain power. I tend to do the hot and heavy stuff right in the morning and then just kinda the lower-energy stuff in the afternoon and then I got to Starbucks and kinda putter around for the rest of the day, exercise, that sort of thing.

James Altucher: That’s a good life. Well, what did you write about today?

Steve Scott: I wrote, actually – I did those videos pretty much all this morning, and today I wrote – actually that’s why I was thinking about the decade ago. I basically wrote an e-mail that I’m gonna use as an autoresponder about how habits saved my life. So it’s basically – I realized that recently my e-mail sequence really doesn’t have much personality behind it, so I took kind of a long heartfelt explanation of really what I feel passionate about habits and really what I was like ten years ago, which I was basically a loser, so kind of the evolution of a few habits that really helped me along the way.

James Altucher: Can I tell you from my own personal experience and also I’ve read quite a few of your things, and all of your stuff’s great. I really am impressed, but when you start telling your personal stories, your reader interest and loyalty is going to skyrocket because that’s what people want to know. It’s like when I was a kid, you know, I would read about a Superhero, but my favorite comic book was Secret Origins, which tells the ___ behind every Superhero. And that’s – people wanna know this is where I’m at, how can I relate to what this author is saying, and if you give a personal story, they can relate and then they really take off with you.

Steve Scott: Yeah, and to be perfectly honest, I know all this stuff, but I’m like – sometimes I have problems with my confidence and sometimes I sit and as I’m writing I’m like, well, people really don’t want to hear about, like, all – a bunch of stories that I have. They’d rather just get the meat of the topic, and I do believe in good, like, step-by-step strategies, but sometimes I tend to leave the personality out of that, and that’s something I really need to work on and try to make a concerted effort, but you’re absolutely right.

James Altucher: You know, my problem is I’m the reverse. I actually think no one is gonna be interested in anything I say unless I tell my personal story, and it’s – I hate to bring Buddhism into this, but even Buddha said don’t try any of my advice. This is just what works for me. And you can then take it or leave it. It works for me. And so he started from the personal story. I mean, the guy obviously was an expert marketer for his day and age, you know, 500 B.C., and he did it by telling his own personal story, and that’s what works now too.

Steve Scott: No, I feel your absolutely right. I’ve read your Choose Yourself and I’ve really enjoyed all the personal stuff and all the – especially all the struggles that you talked about. It really does engage the reader, and I should know better. I should definitely include some of the stuff in my books.

James Altucher: So out of your 41 books, what’s done the best and why?

Steve Scott: The one recently, the Habit Stacking, that’s been in the Top 100 or hovering around the Top 100 for a couple weeks now, so it’s done exceptionally well for me. To be honest, why, I’ve actually been trying to reverse-engineer that over the last week or so. I would say maybe the cover. It has a catchy cover. I feel that it actually teaches a concept that probably no one’s ever talked about before, and I’m sure, like, the 97 Small Changes, it basically speaks as a couple quick things that people can add to their life with a whole new way of doing it without taking up too much time. I guess just the marketing presentation behind it is pretty solid and –

James Altucher: Well, I’ll tell you my opinion, because I’ve seen this in a lot of places. It’s the subtitle, and it’s the end of the subtitle where you say these small life changes take five minutes or less. Like, everybody wants to work the four-hour workweek or they want to have – they want to make changes that are gonna take five minutes or less or they want to be more productive without doing anything new. Like, I just see this in general. And not because people are lazy; they’re not, but I think people don’t know – they want to figure out the things that are out there that really are possible to learn in five minutes or less or they want to learn how to spend 36 hours a week doing things that they enjoy and only work for four hours. So they know these things are possible, but they don’t know – they wanna know the path that gets them there. And so I think when you throw that time element in, I’ll bet you if you look back, your time – the ones where you give specific times do the best.

Steve Scott: You know, to be honest with you, you’re probably right because I know the 21 – Write a Book in 21 Days, that was another one that sold really well for a long time and – yeah, I guess it speaks to basically giving people small wins or something that can immediately apply into the life, and I’m a firm believer in hard work and diligence, but sometimes it’s hard to market hard work and diligence.

James Altucher: Yeah, so – okay, so all together now, you’ve got 41 books. This Habit Stacking one’s gonna do great for you this month. Obviously you’ll make a few thousand just from that, and I’m sure like Twenty-Three Anti-Procrastination Habits, all these books probably are good, consistent earners. What do you then do to supplement income further?

Steve Scott: To be perfectly honest, right now I’m, besides I still make some decent money from ___ marketing firm, just stuff I’ve done years ago, but really I would say 80 percent of my income is just Kindle right now. I don’t really – I am in the process of putting together information to talk about my experiences with Kindle, but for now, it’s really I’m just making pretty much everything from that one platform. James Altucher: And so you’re earning about – almost 1,000 – on average, almost $1,000 a book from Kindle. Now, I know some are much less and some are much more, but this seems to be the average. And I bet you that average will hold on as you write more books.

Steve Scott: Yeah, I feel that there definitely is an 80-20 here that I would say there’s a couple here that do exceptionally well, and there’s a couple that really don’t sell more than one or two copies a month, so it’s – and sometimes it really just takes you publishing continuously to really find out what those slam dunks are.

James Altucher: You know what this reminds me of, and gosh, I should remember the name right off the top of my head, but the guy in the 1920s who wrote, like, 1,000 blue books. Like, they were all the books were blue and they had, like, all these titles, kinda like yours like, you know, how to avoid procrastination, how to – they would even have, like – you know, he would divide it into lots of categories. So he had a biography category, so like a biography of, you know, Napoleon. Or he would have a romantic category, so like, how to kiss better or how to, you know, pick up a woman or whatever. And he literally, I think he had about 1,000 books. And all together, he sold over 100 million copies of these blue books, and each one was a nickel. So at the time, he was making a small profit on each one, but if a book sold less than 10,000 a month, he would start to drop it from the catalog. Like, he was very disciplined, and he would do a lot of testing. Like, he would change the titles. So he would have some obscure title that would sell nothing, and then he would change it to, you know, how to have a blonde mistress, and suddenly that would skyrocket to 30,000 books a month. And he would do lots of testing. So I’m just curious if you do any testing on your titles or –

Steve Scott: I should. I think of the old thing of how to win friends and influence people. I forgot what the original title was, but I know they changed it to that and almost overnight, the sales side started skyrocketing, but yeah, I do – I’m kind of ghetto when it comes to my testing. I guess I should be a little bit better about it, but I do run it by a couple people. I’m in a Facebook group with Kindle publishers, so if I’m really struggling with a title, I’ll throw a couple up there. I do recommend a couple services. I think there’s Pickfu.com, P-I-C-K-F-U, that you can basically get 50 different people that basically vote on a particular title choice. And there’s also basically ___, Muturk.com. Basically both sites you can just poll a lot of people in a short amount of time, just basically get people to pick your title. I have been meaning to try those. I just haven’t really, like, had a chance yet, but I do once in a while will throw a different e-cover if I feel books are slipping that used to do pretty well. But for the most part, I’ve really tried to do all the heavy lifting before I even launch my book.

James Altucher: Have you also tried rewriting a book enough that Amazon then sends out an automated e-mail saying this book has changed so completely, you might want to buy it again?

Steve Scott: I have not. I know people who do that, but it seems – that strategy always kind of, to me, seems a little bit dodgy like, I guess if you really do a good job of rewriting it, but I’d almost rather take the book down, just rewrite the whole thing and just build a whole new audience behind the book and maybe improve it. There are a couple books that are on my list to basically do a whole new version of.

James Altucher: So I see. So right now, you make money off the books, but the books drive an e-mail list, but the e-mail list, it’s not like you’re upselling any other products. You’re just – when the next book’s released, you’ll inform or e-mail us, hey, I’ve got a new book out.

Steve Scott: Yeah. Really it’s like the whole jab, jab, jab, right hook that Gary Vaynerchuk talks about and what –

James Altucher: Yeah, and Gary’s been on the show here as well.

Steve Scott: Yeah, I think – I did hear it. I do remember hearing that episode. I really like his whole idea of basically give, give, give, give then ask. And when I really looked at the numbers, and I’ve tried promoting a few things on the e-mail list, but they really didn’t go anywhere, I recently realized that basically I don’t really need to do anything else but provide a couple of really good solid e-mails, send them some content, and then when I have a new book, just basically beg and plead as much as I can for people to go buy it and leave a review, and that’s all I really need to do for right now just to drive sales. Just as long as I get as many sales as possible when that book launches. It tends to just drive, Amazon tends to pick up the rest of the slack and does a lot of marketing for me.

James Altucher: What’s your ratio of, like, let’s say free content that you send via your e-mails to the begging e-mails?

Steve Scott: I would say, for now, it’s about 75 percent free content, 25 percent begging, but that – I’m definitely trying to actually increase the number of free content, and that’s the whole idea behind that story is I’m trying to actually become more personable and more engaging on the individual e-mail lists and maybe have five to seven e-mails that really kinda speak to the individual reader, and hopefully when it comes time to ask for something, they’ll know me better as a person.

James Altucher: I mean, I think, you know, you talk about personal stories, but I do want to say that I think the transparency, both in your books and on your web site is admirable. Like, I mean, you talk about exactly how much you make. I love your last post where you talk about exactly, and you break down the numbers, which marketing strategies work. So you have a lot of transparency and people really appreciate that. That builds a lot of loyalty. Maybe talk about that last post. Like, what are the best market – like, you have 41 books. How do you market these things, and what are the best marketing techniques?

Steve Scott: Well, basically what I did was about a year ago, April, I used Amazon Associate links, and basically what Amazon Associates is, it’s an affiliate program that Amazon runs where you can promote books through an affiliate link, or pretty much promote anything on Amazon through affiliate links, but what this program gives you is also – it shows you the exact clicks conversion rate and how much you made on every sale. So you could literally create an affiliate link for every type of promotion you do, and I decided I wanted to track each specific marketing campaign that I did with all my books, so I would track the sidebar on my blog, so how many people clicked on that, how many people bought through that. I tracked the individual e-mail campaigns. I tracked mentions in blog posts. I pretty much tracked everything I could possibly think of, and at the end of the day, really the results of the post is everything was predicated on e-mail marketing. Like, I bought a bunch of ___ gigs and Facebook advertisements. Those didn’t really go anywhere and all the stuff I thought was awesome marketing strategies, they sold maybe a few books, but they didn’t really do much for the overall brand, but my – the biggest sales and the ones that really moved a lot of sales was that initial e-mail, or even the follow-up e-mail where it basically said I have a new book, go check it out, and really I would say if that’s an 80-20, most of my sales are driven just by that first initial e-mail. So for me, it made sense to really focus on that one strategy and to stop puttering around with all this other stuff that doesn’t really work as well.

James Altucher: And what’s the best way you found to build the e-mail list?

Steve Scott: It’s cyclical. I’ve found that actually Kindle books help me build the books – help me build the e-mail list to sell more Kindle books. But basically –

James Altucher: Where do you put the sign up for the e-mails? You put it in the beginning or the end?

Steve Scott: In the beginning, and I just have a free report, 77 Good Habits to Develop a Better Life, or something like that. I forget the actual title. And I just send them right to a squeeze page that’ll run through the lead page’s software and now I’m currently testing a couple other things. I’m testing search engine traffic, blogging and SlideShare. I’m trying to drive traffic from those sights as well, but for now it’s really the Kindle list – or the Kindle books is what’s really growing the e-mail list.

James Altucher: It sounds like, also you mentioned in your post that SlideShare was really good for building the e-mail list. Not for selling books, but for building the e-mail list.

Steve Scott: Yeah, exactly. I try to do direct sales, so I had a couple, basically every purpose ___ content, like from the procrastination book, I had a couple ___ to procrastination. I tried to have a direct sales at the end, and those didn’t convert at all, but I found that those same presentations, as long as you provide a decent deck or SlideShare presentation, people will go to your e-mail list and join, and so I’m trying to really leverage that. I’m trying to increase the success for that strategy right now.

James Altucher: What about working with other people who have authoritative voices and big e-mail lists? Like, have you tried working, you know, deals with them? Steve Scott: The one thing I’m exploring are all the paid advertisement platforms – BookBub, e-Reader, Newsday, all the ones that really promise to promote books for you. Definitely I’m gonna throw some money at that and see how well those convert. Unfortunately, they don’t really have sort of tracking links, so I just kinda have to take them at their word that they’re actually doing it.

James Altucher: I’ve tried that, and they don’t really work so well, at least for me. But I will tell you my numbers. So on Choose Yourself, so far it’s sold about 150,000 copies, and 40,000 of that was through direct e-mail marketing. So e-mail marketing, by far, was number one for marketing. You know, and the rest was mostly organic.

Steve Scott: Is that e-mail marketing through your list or were you just able to talk to people in your – like, people that you know and friends and stuff?

James Altucher: People would reach out to me and say I really love your book. Can I promote it on my e-mail list and we’ll do a 50-50 split. And then I would put together – like, we did this actually – so Stansberry & Associates is hosting this podcast. Porter Stansberry has an e-mail list. We put together a bundle of Choose Yourself hardcover, which wasn’t being released by Amazon, and I threw in some free books, and we priced the bundle at $20.00. I think the real value was something like $60.00. And then we split 50-50 the result. He sold 30,000 copies in, like, two weeks and, yeah, it was great. And then one other group sold about 10,000 copies. So e-mail marketing was really powerful. So I think your strategy of just focusing on the e-mail list, nothing is stronger. Number two was Reddit was very strong for me.

Steve Scott: Really? I’ve had some traffic from Reddit. It doesn’t convert at all, but I think that’s more just blog traffic. I wasn’t – it was more of a random thing than more of an actual trying concerted effort on my part.

James Altucher: Yeah, Reddit was good because I did it in AMA, you know, an ask me anything, and so if you did, like, and AMA about habits or how to make – you know, if you did an AMA how to make $40,000 a month on the internet, you would – what happened was people who weren’t aware of me at all suddenly became aware of me and bought the book. Steve Scott: I’ll have to definitely check that out. I actually do remember you now. I think you were talking to Gary Vaynerchuk about that strategy in that interview.

James Altucher: Yeah.

Steve Scott: Yeah, actually I wrote that – it was one of those writer-downers, and I forgot to write it down and actually follow up on it.

James Altucher: So what’s your next couple of books that are coming out?

Steve Scott: Lately I’ve been really kinda just trying to fine-tune my to-do list and kinda – I use a couple different to-do lists, and I really felt that kinda helps my productivity, so I’m writing about that. And I’ve been really getting into the Evernote app, so really been using that to kind of manage my entire life, so those are the next two. And there’s another strategy you can basically put a book for free on Amazon through just a couple little techniques, so the one after that is basically I’m gonna write about how to develop good habits and kinda repurposing some blog content, but put it more of a step- by-step strategy, but I hope to actually get that completely free on Amazon so I can use that to kinda drive people potentially who would want to check out my other books.

James Altucher: And now that you’ve built this channel, have you thought – and I think I know the answer to this, but have you thought about writing, like, a novel or, you know, a book on how to cure cancer or anything like this? Like taking you out of your bread and butter?

Steve Scott: I guess so. I did talk one time to, like, an actual, for real publishing company. I just don’t really – I don’t know. I don’t really have the interest there, and I know, like, getting to New York Times bestseller, like, that’s like a dream of most people. I don’t really have any desire to have that happen. I’d rather – I’m kinda happy with my own little niche that I have right now and the idea of writing a book is pretty daunting.

James Altucher: You know how many copies it took last week, so this is a very good publishing month, you know, May, so a lot of people buying books, I guess. You know how many books it took to get – to be Number 20 on the New York Times bestseller list last week? Steve Scott: What was that?

James Altucher: Just try to guess.

Steve Scott: I would say 5,000 copies.

James Altucher: Eighteen hundred.

Steve Scott: Wow. When did that ___.

James Altucher: Yeah, so being on the New York Times – and that’s a guy, whoever it was, I don’t know who it was, but whoever it was was published by a mainstream publisher because you can’t really sell publishing yet on the list, so he got only 15 percent in royalty on 1,800 copies, so you basically make no money being on the New York Times bestseller list. I almost shouldn’t say this out loud. Maybe New York Times will, like, block me after this, but you know, so I think your strategy of making $40,000 a month and growing is a lot more powerful than a strategy of getting on the New York Times bestseller list.

Steve Scott: Yeah. Let me do say that I think that I’ll probably reach $40,000 this month, but it’s not a very typical month. I – usually I do, lately, anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000, so this month’s pretty good.

James Altucher: Yeah, but you never know. Like, haven’t your – you know, what it’s showing me is that your skills are getting better, you have more books out there, so there’s no reason to think it’s gonna go down a lot, and you know you’re gonna have more books out in the next month, so look at it that way.

Steve Scott: That’s shocking for the – like, I knew the New York Times it was a low volume, but I’ve definitely done that in the last week. I’ve done, like, triple that in the last week so, man, I kinda wish I had a book out there ___.

James Altucher: Well, you know, eventually they’ll do e-books, I bet, on the New York Times. You know, they do e-books now, but you also have to be in bookstores at the same time, so like the – and I’m talking about Number 20 on the advice list, which is roughly the same as the nonfiction list, and you’d be on the advice list anyway. But if you were published by a mainstream publisher and you were in bookstores and e-books, even if it was just your e-book selling, that’s all you would need to sell is 1,800 copies.

Steve Scott: Yeah. Oh, wow. That really doesn’t seem that much.

James Altucher: So, you know, you don’t do anything with, like, ads on your web site. It’s all just kind of Kindle.

Steve Scott: Yeah, I just – I guess those hard lessons I learned way back when, even from the initial Evil Eye jewelry site is that you really just want to focus on building your brand, and I really try not to dilute it by just sending people all over the place to different products and offers. That being said, there are a couple of people that I really like their books, like, I’ll recommend those, but those are more of a I just liked this book; you should go check it out, not like a trying to make money avenue. But yeah, I just felt it’s better just to grow your brand and really – since e-mail marketing is really my one thing that’s really driving sales, I should just really focus on (A) getting as many people as possible on my list and (B) really engaging them so when they do come time for the ask, they’ll actually go buy the book.

James Altucher: And how big is your list now?

Steve Scott: Right now, I have two different lists. For the internet marketing list, I have 13,000 and for the habits list, I think it’s right – today I think it was, like, 7,500.

James Altucher: That’s great. Okay. And what made you decide to be two people – S.J. Scott and Steve Scott? And, you know, your photos even look totally different between the two authors.

Steve Scott: Yeah, actually I really don’t. I don’t think I do. I’m not even trying to hide the fact they’re two separate people. Basically I’m pretty honest about it. The reason I chose those two is because I didn’t want habit people to suddenly see a bunch of internet marketing books and potentially lose a sale because it has nothing to do with what they want to learn, and the same goes for pretty much internet business. I want basically to have two totally separate lines where basically people can read the type of content they want to read. James Altucher: But you know, though, like internet marketing feels like declutter your inbox to me as well. You know, they’re all kinda related.

Steve Scott: And I’ll be the first to say I definitely promote the habit books to the internet marketing crowd. I’m not afraid to do that, but I also feel that if you’re in the habits market and you don’t run an internet business, I don’t want potentially lose a lifelong customer just by them getting it confused looking at 55 Ways to Make Money Online. I wanna make absolutely sure they get the book that they want to read and, unfortunately the way Amazon’s designed, it’s really hard to set up a really pleasing dashboard where I can – I can’t really tuck those books away. They have to be front and center, so if you have more than 30, 40 books, it gets really cluttered on the actual dashboard or the actual author page.

James Altucher: Well, you know, I love your strategy of using different Amazon Associates affiliate links to track your – essentially your book analytics. You know, Amazon offers no platform for tracking analytics, and I’ve talked to Amazon about this. They are interested in eventually doing it, but it’s – it takes a lot of work. So your workaround is very powerful. I think it’s a business idea. I think you can basically go to any author who has a lot of books or go to a publisher and say we have a way of tracking analytics across marketing programs across all of your books. You know, charge Harper- Collins, like, you know, $5,000 per book per month and they’ve got 200 books they wanna track, I bet you can make a lot of money that way.

Steve Scott: Yeah. I’m sure you could. That being said, I’ve recently learned that maybe putting associates links in e-mails is not really – is not allowed according to Amazon Associates term of services, so I might have to rethink that. Like, for me, the worst thing that happens I lose my Associates account, which that doesn’t really make a whole lot of money for me, but I’m not too sure it’s completely kosher with their rules.

James Altucher: I see. I see right now, actually, in self-help, S.J. Scott is ahead of – is right ahead of Ryan Holiday in your author rank. You know, if you had S.J. Scott and Steve Scott combined, you might be, like, the number one self-help author in the world right now on Amazon. Steve Scott: Yeah, I was thinking that the other day. I’m like, too bad I didn’t combine these books, but I made a decision for a specific reason. I like to stick to it, and at the end of the day, if I’m not number one, I guess it’s more kind of a vanity metric. I’d rather just run a successful business than have some sort of accolade, I guess.

James Altucher: Yeah, and your author rank is number six in business and investing and numbers one and two are the freakonomics guys, then Thomas Piketty, who had the number one book, and then I don’t know these next two, and then is you. And then you’re after – you’re higher than Michael Lewis, who wrote Flashboys.

Steve Scott: Yeah, sometimes – that’s always – that’s for Kindle books, and I try to remind myself it’s just for Kindle books. I’m sure if we did print versions, they’d kill my numbers, but it’s kinda cool sometimes to see my face ___ a lot of people I deeply admire.

James Altucher: What’s your ratio between Kindle books sold and paperbacks?

Steve Scott: My paperbacks are terrible. I would say maybe 1 percent, 2 percent. It’s really low. I’d say this month I think I’ve sold 160 physical books so far, really not a lot.

James Altucher: And why don’t you do audio books? Because, you know, the personal improvement category, audio books like Amazon owns Audible, audio books do very well.

Steve Scott: I do, actually. Six of my – well, Habit Stacking is still waiting for approval, but it’ll be number six, but six of my habit books there is an audio version.

James Altucher: Okay, great. And how do they do percentagewise?

Steve Scott: They do well. I would say maybe 5 to 10 percent of my Kindle book sales, so nothing like the Kindle books, but they sell pretty well and at a little bit higher royalty rate. I think I get 350 for every audio book sold.

James Altucher: Yeah, yeah, no, I was surprised how well audio was. I only did it once for my last book and it was great. Like, the results have been fantastic. Steve Scott: Yeah. I definitely like it. I feel that people are going to be listening to more audio content in the future, so I don’t do them myself. I just – I’m not a natural speaker, like I mentioned before, so I have a guy who basically records them for me.

James Altucher: And so I always get worried about if I’m gonna do a bunch of small books that I’m almost, like, saturating my – let’s say my personal brand too much, you know, so I’ve been doing kind of like a book a year, but you know, you’ve sort of convinced me, like just seeing you in progress, you know, (A) books can be smaller and more frequent and just another outlet for releasing content, the way blogs are. So it’s interesting.

Steve Scott: Yeah, I – the way I kind of describe it to myself and others is everyone knows about blogs, and basically the idea of blogs, you write about one particular topic and you kind of deep dive, and everyone knows about books that are pretty much extensive 300, 400 page books. I like to think of kind of these Kindle books as a little bit more advanced than a blog post, but not quite the multiple levels of edits and all the stuff that goes behind publishing a traditionally-published book. But it’s just kind of like you basically take a pretty extensive blog post concept and really do your best to answer every possible question about that, and for me, that’s what a Kindle book is. It’s that kind of merging area.

James Altucher: So let’s take this to the listener who’s listening to this right now. They have an interest or a passion. Let’s say they’re interested in, I don’t know, golf or computer programming or starting a business or whatever. How can they start doing what you’ve done, basically, you know, let’s take them to the end where you have 40 books out there and you’re just making this passive income stream that’s coming in every day.

Steve Scott: Well, let’s use golf as an example, and forgive me if I screw up any golf terms ‘cause I just – I don’t golf. But I know from a fact that golfing is like a huge market. People absolutely love the idea of golfing. But I would take each individual part of what it takes to be a good golfer and actually break it down into individual small little books. So there’s how to improve your golf swing or how to take ten strokes off of your golf whatever, but basically you would break it down. I would say – even how to find the best equipment. They could write a whole book about that and maybe even whole product reviews of certain drivers and putters and that sort of thing. you literally just take the whole broad golf topic and just write a small book about each specific golf topic and just build a brand around all these tiny little topics and just – basically, I would start with what you know best, what is the one thing you really know about golf and you write about that and then get some feedback from readers what they like about it, what they don’t like about it and just keep trying to iterate and improve on every single future book that you release.

James Altucher: And how would you market that first, let’s say five or six books before you have, like, an e-mail list. So you have a sign-up for – so you’re gonna have a squeeze page and a special report for free, so people sign up for the e-mail list. Initially you have zero people on the e-mail list.

Steve Scott: Yeah, I would say first off, and actually let me go back real quick and say the first thing you should do is, honestly, you should start building the e-mail list. So you want to create some sort of free report or some sort of quick offer that you can get people to joint your e-mail list. So that could be your old – like, how to reduce your strokes off your golf swing or whatever.

James Altucher: And then where do you market that?

Steve Scott: I would say just put it on a squeeze page or a blog. I like squeeze pages ‘cause it’s a simple yes or no action. Either they join your list or they don’t join your list and you could basically type squeeze pages into Google and people can – you’ve got to find templates for free. You could go to Fiverr.com and pay someone to design a quick squeeze page, or I use lead pages, which is, like, 30, 40 bucks a month, which is a little more expensive, but basically there’s lots of different software out there where you can just host it on a single page and people can either join the list or don’t join your list. And then, from there, I would put in the front of – put in front of your Kindle book. Release the Kindle book for free, honestly, because, like, you really don’t have an audience there, so trying to release it for 99 cents, you won’t have the traction that’s required, but you want to start building your audience and start getting those people on e-mail list. And in conjunction with that, I would recommend starting one of three platforms, either a blog, a podcast, or YouTube, just something where you’re providing free content. It can even be free content you ultimately put into a Kindle boo, but continuously provide free content and throughout this free content, just kind of bang the drum of join my e-mail list for this free report and try to build – like, try to get as many subscribers as possible from this one platform while you’re writing Kindle books. I would just basically recommend do those two strategies and just repeat those two strategies.

James Altucher: I see. So you wouldn’t necessarily pay for, like, Google ads to drive traffic to the squeeze page.

Steve Scott: Yeah, I’m more of a bootstrapper. I’m sure, if you have a bankroll, you could definitely pay for traffic, but what I’ve found for paid traffic is you really need to convert that traffic and basically you need to make your money back as quick as possible, and I just don’t see the ROI on Kindle books being as – I don’t really think you can make your money back as well if you’re having these lower-end ticket products.

James Altucher: Well, if you think about it, Amazon is probably one of the biggest search engines on the planet, and it ties right in very highly to the Google search engine, so what better place.

Steve Scott: Yeah, absolutely. And I like the idea of you’re basically building your platform at the same time as you’re making money, and honestly, I wouldn’t – I would say don’t be afraid of making mistakes or writing something, maybe, that doesn’t go over well. Like, I’ve had a couple books that are complete disasters that just – I thought they were great ideas and they just – they tanked, and just –

James Altucher: Like what?

Steve Scott: Resolutions that stick. I was so absolutely sure that would be an awesome slam dunk book right around New Year’s Eve, and no one wanted to be lectured to about changing their New Year – or the way they approached New Year’s resolutions. So basically it was just –

James Altucher: You know what I would do? I would write a book why you don’t need to do any resolutions anymore. Like, ‘cause people don’t wanna do stuff. Steve Scott: Yeah, I kinda try to hook them in with the idea that they want to find out about resolutions, but basically the whole book is about how you don’t need New Year’s resolutions; it’s better to create goals and to do things in small increments, but yeah, that book tanked. It was – I did make my money back that I invested for the e-cover and the edits and all that, but yeah, it sells, like, two copies a month.

James Altucher: So you keep track of the P&L for each book.

Steve Scott: Yes. I’m sorry, what’s P&L?

James Altucher: P&L, profit and loss.

Steve Scott: Yeah, I definitely – I’m a big believer in keeping track of every expenditure, how much you invested. I do keep track of each individual book and I make sure that I at least make my money back and so far, I don’t think I’ve lost money on any book. I might not have made a lot, but I’ve at least made, you know, $500, $600 back on the book where it’s not a total loss.

James Altucher: And do you sell on iBooks as well or do you stick to Amazon?

Steve Scott: I stick to Amazon just because I found, for me, the key to the ___ program, especially now that they have countdown deals, they really drive a lot of traffic and they really drive a lot of sales just, for some odd reason, having a ticking clock really kinda can push readers to really buy books ‘cause they think oh, it’s a low price for only a certain amount of time. Let me grab it now before it’s too late, and now that I have so many books, I can basically have something on countdown deals pretty much every single week and I really feel it helps the overall brand.

James Altucher: Well, I really hope my two daughters listen to this podcast because I think this is what people should be doing instead of – honestly, instead of going to college. Like, this is how they’re gonna learn about topics, will start making money, they’ll build community. I’m sure you’ve met a lot of people in the kind of publishing and self- publishing space, and you start to build a – like, what did you major in in college?

Steve Scott: I majored in psychology. I had illusions of being a criminal profiler in the FBI, and that went away pretty quickly. James Altucher: So yeah, you don’t – who was the last criminal you’ve caught?

Steve Scott: Yeah, exactly. None.

James Altucher: Right. So –

Steve Scott: I would have been a terrible FBI agent.

James Altucher: Are you in any debt from student loans?

Steve Scott: Oh, no, no. I was in debt just for, like, dumb mistakes I made with a credit card, but I was fortunate enough to have my grandfather pay for my super high-tech Montclair State University degree. But yeah, I didn’t really – no student loans but, you know, I was in debt for a long time, but I got myself out of it and I’m doing pretty well financially now.

James Altucher: Well, Steve, thank you so much for all that you’ve shared on this podcast. Like, I honestly think this one podcast is business or self-sufficiency in a box. Like, people could take this, take what you’ve just said and build careers for themselves, and I hope some people do that because I think this is really great info. I know I love writing so this is really fun stuff for me to hear about, and it was – it’s great to have you on the show.

Steve Scott: Well, thanks a lot, James. This has been super fun.

James Altucher: Yeah, thanks, Steve, and I’ll talk to you soon. And look, I’m gonna sign up for your list so I get your next habit – habit-breaking, or habit-forming books.

Steve Scott: Okay, cool. Thanks.

James Altucher: Thanks, Steve. Bye. INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL DREW

James Altucher: This is James Altucher and Claudia Altucher with another episode of Ask Altucher.

Claudia Altucher: Hello.

James Altucher: And, Claudia, we have with us a guest that I’ve been dying to ask this one question of. It’s Michael Drew. Mike, how are you doing?

Michael Drew: I’m doing great, James.

James Altucher: And, Mike, I’m just gonna give kind of the highlight of—or some highlights on your career, but the main thing is you help authors get onto the New York Times bestseller list. And you’re basically—and correct me if I’m wrong—you’re 80 out of 80, so 80 authors you’ve attempted to get onto the New York Times bestseller list, and you’ve succeeded all 80 times. Is that correct?

Michael Drew: That is absolutely correct.

James Altucher: Okay.

Claudia Altucher: That is amazing.

James Altucher: Yes, because it’s actually—we’ve seen—and you saw this with us, Michael. We had an example on our most recent book where we got on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, we got on the USA Today bestseller list, and people we beat got on the New York Times bestseller list but we didn’t get on the New York Times bestseller list. And so now you magically can get anybody it seems on the New York Times bestseller list, so we have to ask you—the question of the day is how do you get people on the New York Times bestseller list?

Michael Drew: Oh, James, I’d love to say I’m magical. That would make me in much more demand than I am. James Altucher: You are magical and you should be in demand because, you know, as much as I am a believer in the choose yourself philosophy where—and I think the New York Times list is just a gatekeeper, like anyone anywhere else. It actually is still looked up to in the industry, so if you’re gonna go that route of the traditionally published author you might as well try to get on the New York Times bestseller list. It can’t hurt, so you should be in demand. So that’s why I’m asking the question.

Michael Drew: I appreciate that. So here’s the thing to know. The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, they’re not real bestsellers lists. They don’t count real sales in real time.

Claudia Altucher: Wow.

Michael Drew: They don’t—they don’t—

James Altucher: Now you don’t think the USA Today or Wall Street Journal one does? Because it seems like—again, because we made those lists, it seems like they were pretty accurate.

Michael Drew: They have different sets of criterial that allowed you to make their lists. But they don’t count all the sales either. USA Today is probably the cleanest. If you meet some very rudimentary criteria of having the right number of reporting channels, they will count all of the sales that are reported if you have enough reporting channels, whereas say BookScan, which controls the Wall Street Journal list, has about 70 percent of their sales that come in counted. They are known—they have it stated in their system that they discriminate against book based upon very specific criteria. As an example, my good friend Bob Hughes used to compile the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list. He is now a co- owner of the company with me. And he—when he worked at the Journal compiling the bestsellers list, you would see Seven Habits of Highly Effective People on the business list almost every single week, and that’s because the book as a business title sells exceptionally well with corporations. Well, BookScan has a policy that says if there are any bulk orders at all—B-U-L-K—they will not allow that book to make the bestsellers list. That is their policy. James Altucher: How do they know something’s a bulk order, like if it’s order though 1-800-CEO-READ?

Michael Drew: No. You know, Jack is a friend of mine; I’ve known him for many years. But they used to—well, certainly 800-CEO-READ reports bulk sales, but it’s now those sales are reported that makes a difference. If, as an example, you place an—if a corporation buys 50 copies of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People from Barnes & Noble at an individual store, that individual store’s computer system will report to Barnes & Noble corporate that they sold 50 books to one customer, right? So that is then reported by Barnes & Noble corporate office to the New York Times as, “We had 3,000 orders last week with a total of 500 consumers placing the orders for those 3,000 books,” so they know the number of orders that are being placed.

Now in some regards I appreciate, say on a book of fiction, where you should not be seeing many bulk orders coming through; that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But again, the Wall Street Journal through BookScan does discriminate against any order where you have a bulk order. And if you were on the nonfiction side of things, you have a business book or a self-help book or even some diet and cookbooks where you could have corporations or associations buying in bulk, what you actually have is a discrimination by BookScan based upon their own arbitrary decision to now count those sales.

And so every bestsellers list has their own criteria for how they count the sales. USA Today simply says, “If you have X number of reporting retailers, we will count all of the sales that are reported.” Now you could sell—if you had one retailer, call it Amazon, and no other retailers reporting, then USA Today will take a look at whether or not they should count your sales or not. But usually if you have Amazon reporting you’ll have probably Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million or one of the other—two or three other retailers reporting, and it’s not that difficult then to make the USA Today list, ‘cause you could sell 1,000 at Amazon and 100 over at Barnes & Noble and 100 at Books-A-Million; if those are all reported you’ll make the USA Today list because you had enough sales reported collectively and enough reporting channels. But if you only had say Barnes & Noble, you had no other sales from anywhere else period, then USA Today may consider not counting those sales. So I would say in terms of sales volume, USA Today is closest. The Wall Street Journal has their own criteria for discriminating and eliminating sales. And the New York Times, as the oldest list, has a more archaic system in terms of how they gather the data and a further archaic system for how they count those sales that are being reported.

One thing to note, you still have a person at both USA Today and at the New York Times that counts those sales. You have a person at Barnes & Noble and Amazon and Books-a-Million and Ed Hudson’s and beyond that reports those sales to the bestsellers list. The only electronic system that you have is BookScan and they still only represent about 70 percent of all books that are sold. And even then—I’ll give you an example. I had a client who did a book signing in Cleveland. The retailer bought in 1,000 books. They sold, I’d like to say, 500, 600 books—

James Altucher: Wow.

Michael Drew: One week, so—at that event. So that retailer reported to BookScan, hey, in one week that they sold 500 books, but the next week when that retailer returned books back to Ingram, the wholesaler, then BookScan showed that that book retailer had sold a negative 500 books for the week.

Claudia Altucher: Uh-oh.

Michael Drew: [Laughter] Which is silly, ‘cause they didn’t not sell the books. It wasn’t negative. There was a—what I call a precipitory event, a book signing. They sold the books, they didn’t need the excess inventory, and rightfully returned that back to the publisher. So you have systems that are not flawless.

You know, getting a book on the bestsellers list is not that dissimilar to getting your website ranked in search engine optimization except that the criteria is based around the number of books that are being sold, the number of reporting channels, the weight of those reporting channels within the algorithm at the various bestsellers lists.

James Altucher: So how do you—so two questions really. How do you personally guarantee a book to be on the New York Times bestseller list, and then what should somebody do if they don’t have you on their side to get something on the bestseller list, any of the bestseller lists? Michael Drew: Well, here’s the thing. First of all, I don’t guarantee my service. I’m just that good where I don’t miss. Pardon the—

James Altucher: Good confidence.

Claudia Altucher: [Laughter]

James Altucher: I respect the confidence, Michael.

Michael Drew: So—and thank you; I appreciate that. So—but I’m pretty darn good at what I do. Here’s the thing: you have the mechanics on the back end of how the retailers report sales to the bestsellers list. The books that I would call organically make the list, meaning there’s not a specific marketing campaign designed to drive traffic into stores to buy books, so it’s just naturally, organically selling. Those books have between 30 to 40 percent of their actual sales being reported and counted by the bestsellers lists. So when a client hires my firm, what we’re doing is we’re leveraging what we call their marketing platform in selling the book in a controlled fashion so that we can ensure that we have the right number of sales going through the right reporting channels at the right timeframe.

We actually call this the Harry Potter effect. What most people don’t realize in publishing is that if you’re Harry Potter or you’re a John Grisham or a Steven King, you have a competitive advantage over everyone else because your publisher will have a legal agreement with the retailers called embargoing. And this legal agreement literally states if a retailer, say an individual Barnes & Noble store, puts a copy of, say, Harry Potter on their bookshelf before the pub date, that that retailer will pay a penalty of anywhere from $2,500.00 per book to $2.5 million per copy of the book, which was what the penalty was on the last Harry Potter book.

James Altucher: Wow.

Michael Drew: Now the advantage of that to these big authors is that the retailers are spending a year or two or three years holding these sales on behalf of these big books. So when a Harry Potter book was announced you had all of these fans go into local bookstores, order the book. The retailers would hold the money, and when the Harry Potter book was released you have a million or two or three or four or five million sales that are dumped into the system all on the same day. So obviously the book is going to hit number one when that book is launched.

Well, that’s unfair to everybody else, because the legal cost for embargoing is hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to the publishers and they don’t do it very often, and the retailers hate it. So what I advocate for my clients is to embargo their own sales to consumers and to do a controlled release of those sales directly to the retailers the week or two after the book’s been launched. Now the way—

James Altucher: How do they do that, though? ‘Cause most of your clients are probably—you know, have publishers.

Michael Drew: Well, I—so I’ll give you a couple of examples. One of my authors, his name is Roy H. Williams. He’s known as the Wizard of Ads. He owns the fourth-largest ad agency in North America for buying radio advertising. He’s exceptionally well-known in radio. Every general manager of every radio station in North America knows who Roy is because they’re always vying for his clients’ money, and so ______literally controlling that. He also writes for Radio, Inc., which is one of the top trade publications for radio.

And what we did is we leveraged what we call his marketing platform, his name and reputation within the radio industry. And what we did is we mailed out an advance copy of the book to the 10,000 radio station general managers in North America with an offer that said, “If you buy 20 copies of this book on this date from this retailer and run 200 radio ads promoting the book, we’ll give you a copy of Roy H. Williams’”—this was a few years ago—“12-tape training library which will train your sales reps on how to better sell radio, and this book should be given by your sales reps to potential customers. The book will advocate and ______your customers on buying radio, and because these books are given to them by your now-trained radio sales reps that were trained by Roy, you’ll increase your sales conversion rate.”

And so we mailed that out. We had 1,100 stations that participated. We launched the book to number one on the Wall Street Journal, number three on the New York Times, had over a million radio ads played nationwide. We leveraged his platform to be able to generate those sales. Another example would be I have a client—his name is Ivan Misner. He owns a company called BNI, Business Network International. It’s the world’s largest business referral organization. And in BNI what they do is it’s a weekly chapter meeting, and a chapter of New York or LA are basically the same. They allow one person per industry per chapter, and essentially what they do is they have a forced referral system. So every week they pick two members that all of the other chapters must go out and get warm or hot leads for.

BNI is also a franchised organization, and so what we did—and we did this with two books, Masters of Networking and then Master of Success, is we had the franchise owners contribute a chapter to the book, Masters of Networking, and then we did a membership drive by doing the first time 56 book signings in 56 different stores nationwide at the same time on the same day. We burned every Guinness World Record and some other things, and we again launched the book—number one Wall Street Journal, number two New York Times, so on and so forth. And then when we—

James Altucher: How did you know which stores to focus on?

Michael Drew: Well, here’s the thing. There are some obvious ones. Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and at the time when we did that book Borders was still a relevant retailer. What you know definitively is that the major chains all report to the New York Times—Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Borders did, Amazon, Hudson’s. So there’s very clear national chains that report. The chains that they rotate or the retailers that they rotate for counting are the independent stores. One of the things that most people don’t realize is that, well, there’s probably 800 stores that report to the New York Times each and every week. They’re only counting 50 to 75 of their sales every week and they’re rotating which retailers they’re counting the sales from because they don’t want you to go into the independents to be able to game the system essentially.

So what I do with Roy and with Ivan and beyond is make sure that we’re leveraging the big boys, which in some ways isn’t as fun; in other ways it makes it easier because we know that they’re reporting. We leverage the big boy reporters in driving the traffic and sales to those stores, and then the independents come in. We do have independent stores that we work with like 800-CEO-READ and Tattered Cover and BookPeople and others, but we primarily focus on the big retailers.

Now it’s truth that requires having a relationship at the corporate office with those retailers, which I do, because they know that my clients are genuinely generating sales. As you can imagine, having the information and knowledge that I do it would be very easy for someone to come in and game the system and literally buy their way onto the bestsellers list, which people have done in the past. But for me and my clients, what I—I won’t allow my clients to do that. We are genuinely leveraging their existing platform to sell those books and driving those sales through the retailers. We’re simply—we’re not breaking the rules. We’re simply playing the game better than anyone else because of my relationships and understanding of how to leverage ____ platform to pre-sell books so that we can have that Harry Potter effect.

Claudia Altucher: That’s very interesting, and I have a question, Michael. There was recently—I don’t know; you probably weren’t involved on this. But there was that book America: Imagine a World Without It, and I think it released together with a movie, and it was a little bit of a sensation throughout the United States. And the book made all the lists except for the New York Times bestseller to the point where people started writing articles on the Huffington Post and other media outlets saying, “Hey, what’s happening here? How is this possible?” And eventually the book did make it to the list on the New York Times bestseller. And I was wondering, what are your thoughts on that? What do you think happened?

Michael Drew: Well, there’s politics that’s involved at the New York Times. At the end of the day you have someone that is the editorial director of the book portion of the newspaper that approves the bestsellers list. So they go through and apply their system, but don’t be fooled. There is politics at the New York Times. In fact I worked on a book by a Christian pastor a number of years ago, and we made number one on USA Today, number one on Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times literally stated to us, “We don’t allow religious books on our bestsellers lists so we are not going to include it on our list,” right?

Claudia Altucher: Wow. Michael Drew: It’s why you also don’t see, say, the Bible on the bestseller list either. I guarantee you year in and year out the Bible sells hands-down far more books than any other book. It just does. Regardless of what your religious persuasion is, that is fact. But the New York Times is a political list. It’s a political decision.

James Altucher: So wait. Were you able to get that pastor on the list? Were you able to kind of fight it?

Michael Drew: I fought and fought and I was able to ultimately get them to not allow us at number one but get us at number two.

James Altucher: Oh, okay, and on the nonfiction or on the advice list?

Michael Drew: On the nonfiction list.

James Altucher: Great. So—so—

Michael Drew: But note, we had the sales to be number one. We had more than triple the number of sales for six weeks before they finally let it on the list, and it was a political fight that I had to put my own reputation on the line for.

James Altucher: So here’s a question, and I know this changes week by week, but what’s the minimum number of sales usually—like let’s say mid-March or mid-September, what’s the minimum number of sales to get on either the nonfiction list or the fiction list for any of these lists?

Michael Drew: Well, you know, that’s an interesting question because the New York Times just changed their list yesterday. They added eight new monthly lists so that they could bisect out diet and health and other things into smaller lists. So it’ll be interesting to see what those new numbers are going to be as they change. September, December, and January traditionally speaking are always very—the sales numbers are very high. Typically speaking if you want to make the New York Times list in September you’re gonna need to have 6,500 to 8,500 sales to have a shot at the bottom of the list. Typically speaking with my clients we’re aiming for 10,000 sales a week so that we can get the middle of the list.

Now I don’t run campaigns after Thanksgiving, US Thanksgiving, because sales volumes after US Thanksgiving become very hectic. I have had clients who launched a book after Thanksgiving and hit number one with 15,000 sales. I’ve had clients who sold 30,000 books and hit number 15 on the list or 20 on the list, at the very bottom of the list because of the sales volume. So what I can tell you is that sales volumes between Thanksgiving and New Years can be incredibly hectic, and in terms of the bottom of the list I wouldn’t even want to predict what those numbers are. There’s not a historical week after Thanksgiving that’s normally high or low as it pertains to book sales. I’ve been following this now for 17 years and there is literally no pattern in that timeline. You can see the total volume of sales are about the same every holiday season, but which weeks are gonna be high or low are not clear.

Now that being said, come New Years, the first two weeks after the first of the years the sales volumes are always high and are usually going to be in the 7,500 to 10,000 book range to make the bottom of the list.

James Altucher: Wow.

Claudia Altucher: Wow.

Michael Drew: The rest of the year the numbers we’re looking at are—on the low end are 4,500 or more. Now yes, it is possible in any given week that 1,000 or 1,500 sales could get you the very, very bottom of the list, but that is a crapshoot that if you are aiming for— you’re really aiming for hope at that point.

James Altucher: So another thing that we haven’t discussed but seems to be important is what percentage of your books are selling where, because I know for instance we sold enough books to be on the New York Times list at least two different weeks, but because most of our sales were on Amazon I think that kind of hurt us rather than helped us.

Michael Drew: Yeah, yeah. It was a balance. And again, the New York Times is different than USA Today. At USA Today you have enough reporting channels; they don’t weight the retailers. But at the New York Times they do. So what they’re looking at—and this changes from one year to the next, but they’re looking at the total volume of sales. So if you have a pie of 100 percent and Amazon is the number one retailer and they represent 17 percent of all sales last year, and the number two retailer is Barnes & Noble and they represented 12 percent, they’re expecting that your sales at Amazon are roughly 30 percent, give or take, more than Barnes & Noble. Now if you have Barnes & Noble coming in at 1,000 sales and Amazon coming in at 750, that also would raise a red flag at the New York Times because that’s not normal either, right? They’re weighting is based upon the volume of sales—based on the overall pie. So Amazon should be the biggest, should be roughly 30 percent more than—at least for this year roughly 30 percent more than Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble is about 25 percent bigger than the next retailer, which is again about 10 percent bigger than the next, and so on and so forth.

So they’re looking at volume of sales. They’re looking at the number of reporting channels. They’re looking at the weight of those reporting channels. They’re also— although this is inefficient, they’re also looking at the number of independent stores as well. The New York Times wants to see that you have a strong presence at the independents as a whole. Now it may not be that any one independent sells particularly well, but if you look at the independents as a chain, one broad chain, then you would look at it as, hey, it needs to be roughly two-thirds, three-fourths of what Barnes & Noble would be selling.

James Altucher: And so how important are these lists, do you think? Like, why do you have clients who want to be on these lists? Like, what benefit is it, other than just pure ego?

Michael Drew: Well, ego’s a big part of it. My mentor and first bestselling author Roy H. Williams would say if you eliminate fear as a motivation—so in business, why would you do something positive like a bestseller campaign? Your motivations are one of three things: fame, fortune, or making a difference, or some combination of the three. Most of my clients—not all, but most of my clients fall either into the fame or the fortune category. They’re doing it for a financial benefit—essentially they’re using the book as a business excuse to launch a new product or a new service or to be able to separate themselves in their category from their competitors—or they’re doing it for ego. I would say that the majority of my clients are doing it for a business reason. I’d probably say 60 percent of them are for financial gain, 30 percent are for ego, and the rest are for genuinely making a difference. But that would be the broad reason why someone would want to do it. Now what I’ll tell you is—and this is a dirty little secret—the benefit of doing a bestseller campaign isn’t in appearing on the list. There is benefit there. I’m not saying that that’s not true, and if you live outside of North America there is still a huge intrinsic value of being a New York Times bestseller. And when I started in this industry as a publisher 17 years ago, being a New York Times bestseller was huge. Between—just to give you some context, between 1880 to 1980 the average number of books published each year was 40,000 unique titles. Last year there were 1,076,000 books published.

Claudia Altucher: Wow.

Michael Drew: That means there were more books published last year than there were books published between 1950 to 1980.

Claudia Altucher: Jesus.

James Altucher: Is that because of self-publishing?

Michael Drew: It is. It’s because of self-publishing. It’s because of digital publishing. The world is now our oyster because of technology. What’s interesting is—and the thing with what happened in 1980 was personal word processing. We could now start writing books on a word processor versus having to handwrite them out, and that made a big difference in terms of the number of people who thought they could write a book.

So what happens with the bestseller list is as we’ve—as more books have been published, the focus has gone from the value of the content of the book to the author’s ability to market the book. The average retail bookstore only carries 100,000 unique titles. Of those 100,000 unique titles, between 70 to 80 percent are what we call backless titles, which are your perennials, your classics, and last year’s bestsellers. What that means is of the 1,076,000 books published last year, only 20,000 to 30,000 of them made it onto a retail bookstore shelf. And while it’s true digital publishing is increasing in terms of the number of sales they have each year, if you took all books sold through an electronic format, be that a printed book like a hardback book or paperback book sold through Amazon.com or BarnesAndNoble.com or a book sold through Kindle or iPad or Nook or Kobo, they only represented 36 percent of all books sold last year. That means that those brick and mortar stores as a whole still sell more books today than all of the electronically- sold books combined.

And so what you have in this game, if you’d like to look at it that way, is the need to be able to get that retail shelf space. Now I predict in the next five years that that will reverse and we’ll sell more books electronically and online, but today the name of the game is still that brick and mortar distribution.

So what you’re looking at is the need to be able to get your book onto the retail bookstore shelf and play with a publisher in a way that will maximize the distribution of your book. And what publishers—because there’s so much competition for so little shelf space, what publishers are looking for is how they can best sell their books to the buyers at Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million and Hudson’s and beyond. And note, Barnes & Noble has 12 buyers. They have 12 people that make the decision on how many copies of different books they’re going to carry on their shelf. And so you have a situation where the buyers at Barnes & Noble, they don’t read the books. They only care about how many copies of the book they’re going to sell. So what they’re looking at is past sales history, and they’re looking at the marketing of the book—cover and other things make a big difference there. But literally the ability to market the book is—in the book marketing and publishing games is the most important thing, the ability to drive traffic into stores to sell the book.

Claudia Altucher: Right.

James Altucher: Michael, I’m so grateful you were able to kind of shed so much light on the publishing industry. This is—you know, I’ve written 13 books. This is more information in a short period of time than I’ve ever had before on the mechanics of publishing, the bestseller lists, and all aspects of the industry, including kind of the numbers you just shared of how many books are in a bookstore, how many books were published last year, and so on. You should—are you writing a book on publishing?

Michael Drew: You know what? There’s not a huge demand for a book on publishing. I do have a whitepaper that I’ve written titled “How to Publish a Bestselling Book” that goes into a lot of the numbers that we’ve gone through here plus a lot of the machinations of how publishing actually mechanically works and how to play within publishing. So we do have that as a whitepaper.

James Altucher: So where can—how can we help you? Where can people go to find you? What would you like people to look at? Share some info.

Michael Drew: Cool. So the marketing agency that I own is called Promote a Book, and so our website is that easy; it’s PromoteABook.com. And we have a blog, and our blog sheds quite a bit of information on the reality of publishing and how to properly and successfully publish and promote your book, and our blog is at BeneathTheCover.com. And we have a newsletter that we call the Midweek Missive. If you sign up for that on BeneathTheCover.com we give as a thank-you the “How to Publish a Bestselling Book” whitepaper.

James Altucher: That’s great.

Claudia Altucher: I’m gonna sign up right away.

James Altucher: Yeah.

Michael Drew: Well, thank you.

James Altucher: And anything else you want to kind of get people to or promote?

Michael Drew: Well, [laughter] you know, the big thing is really—you know, I own the marketing agency. As a side note, and perhaps we could have this as a conversation in the future, Roy Williams and I have been researchers or marketing and cultural movements, and we have done seminal research on the swing of society from one ideology to another, from the ideology every 40 years of me to an ideology of we, and back from we to me, and what that means both culturally and from a business standpoint. If you’re interested or if your listeners are interested we have more information on that over at PendulumInAction.com. I’ve been invited to speak at Harvard three times on that specific subject. So if you’re interested in understanding cultural swings or—and how that applies to marketing and how to have a competitive advantage, go visit PendulumInAction.com.

James Altucher: Well, okay, so last quick question, and yes or no. Are we in—or not yes or no, but are we in a me or a we? Period. Michael Drew: Well, if you want a short answer the answer is we. We shifted in 2003 from a me into a we. We will be in this we cycle until 2043. Right now we are on the upswing of the we. We are starting to take we too far, and there are some dangerous cultural things with that. From a business standpoint what that means is we are heading into 20-year micro-cycle of witch hunts. In business what we need to do is replace our unique selling proposition with a statement of what we stand against. And by 2033 we’ll have taken we so far that the youth of society will reject taking we too far and will become the gravity that pulls us from we back into me.

James Altucher: Well, this is all extremely fascinating, Michael. Thanks for joining us on Ask Altucher.

Claudia Altucher: Thank you.

James Altucher: A lot of incredibly useful information that I know people will make use of. And good luck with everything.

Michael Drew: Thanks, I really appreciate it. I look forward to chatting with you soon.

James Altucher: Thanks, Michael. INTERVIEW WITH TUCKER MAX

James Altucher: Okay, so, Tucker, welcome back. This is also the first time – not only are you the first repeat guest, this is the first I'm having having back-to-back episodes with a guy.

Tucker Max: Excellent.

James Altucher: So I wanna talk about totally different subject. Last episode we talked about fatherhood, and you were, like, somehow a world's expert on having a baby. And now I wanna talk about the book publishing business because you, more than just about anybody I know, know more about book publishing. I'm just gonna tell a little story.

So I was at Tim Ferriss' launch. He had this dinner launch for The 4-Hour Chef, and I was talking to him just in general about how I wanted to kind of professionally – I didn't wanna just self-publish the normal way. I wanted to professionally self-publish so that – almost as if I was pouring my own publishing company. And Tim yells out to someone, "Hey, e-mail Tucker's post on this to James." So I got the post, and I already knew you from e-mails, but then Claudia and I flew down to Austin, hung out with you and really kinda mapped out the process that became Choose Yourself. So I wrote – it's a little different than – so now you're doing a business Book in a Box, which is a little bit different than what we did 'cause I wrote Choose Yourself, but describe Book in a Box, and you just started this and it's – you just told me offline, since you started it in August, it's made $360,000 _____.

Tucker Max: No, no, no, no, no. Actually more. So we did $200,000 the first two months. We probably did – that LinkedIn post is gonna make us anywhere between $250,000 and $400,000 in revenue. So we're gonna be over $500,000 for the year – the first six months.

James Altucher: So I don't know my math. It's, like, four months. Tucker Max: Six – just call it six months.

James Altucher: So describe the business and then let's talk – and also, just in general, I wanna talk about publishing with you, but discuss this business first. What is this business?

Tucker Max: All right. So Book in a Box is very simple. It is essentially – it's kind of a new way to write a book. For ten years, I've met people who have come up to me, "Oh, you're an author. I have a great idea for a book." I'm sure you hear this all the time, right?

James Altucher: Yeah.

Tucker Max: Everyone's like – and then they usually –

James Altucher: Everybody wants to co-author or, you know, it's – those are the only thing like I have nothing else to do with my time.

Tucker Max: Right. Let me coast off your success for my book. No, but people always ask me how do I become an author? How do I get a book? How do I get published, right? And so – and then I start usually explaining the process and their, like, eyes glaze over 'cause no one wants to do the work. Everyone wants a book but no one wants to do any of the work, right.

James Altucher: And it's hard work. Like, sitting – you know, slouched over a computer for, let's call it, a year is not fun – is not a fun activity. It's not a – you know, we're used to hunting for food. We're not used to sitting over a computer, and you get that fight or flight, but you can't fight or flight; you're just sitting in front of a computer.

Tucker Max: It's a very unusual emotional and sort of neurological process, right. It's very specific and it's a very specific skill, and some people are very good at it, but most people aren't.

James Altucher: And on that point, how many New York Times bestsellers do you have?

Tucker Max: Three.

James Altucher: And how many book copies overall? Tucker Max: Three million.

James Altucher: Okay, so you know what you're talking about.

Tucker Max: Right. I have some idea what it means to be a good writer. The only three people to ever have three books on the New York Times bestseller list at one time, nonfiction, are me, Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis.

James Altucher: At the same time.

Tucker Max: At the same time. Three books at the same time on the list. Only three of us. And so right. I have an idea of what I'm talking about when it comes to writing, and so anyway, like, it's funny. I never define myself as a writer, but when people ask me that question how do I – you know, how do I get a book, then I always, like – I kinda get a little snobby and elitish. Well, you have to write it and you have to do this and you have to do that and it's, like, the work and the hard work and the process, and that's really the cultural narrative. If you look at anything at all about books or writing books or publishing, it's like everyone emphasizes how hard it has to be. First off, because it is a hard process. But then, I think there's a narrative in sort of publishing – in the publishing sort of informational system or the publishing media that, like, the more you suffer, the more valid your art is or whatever, which of course is total bullshit, but whatever.

James Altucher: And by the way, book writing doesn't have to be art. I would say there's also only a handful of writers who are artistically writing.

Tucker Max: I don't really make the distinction. I think if you're expressing yourself and create a medium, it's art.

James Altucher: But a lotta people wanna kind of pass on information but they might not have had the experience writing, and so they're good at passing on the information but it might not be – like, you might not _____ I just read the most beautiful prose or ____.

Tucker Max: But why is that not art? I mean, like, you know, listen. David Foster Wallace maybe is a much better – a much more beautiful sentence crafter than I am, but why is his stuff art and mine isn't? Or just for example? James Altucher: I would actually say the reverse, but that's another discussion.

Tucker Max: Right. I think it's all art. Some of it is maybe good art or bad art or some of it is high art or whatever. I know what you're saying, though. So most people don't read for art. They read for information, right. But anyway, so I used to kind of give people the answer, "Oh, you've gotta put in the work," and whatever. And that's the narrative is that, like, this is a hard process, right. And I think a lot of writers say that because first off, they like their identity. They like the exclusivity of being a writer, right, that it's hard to get a book deal, it's hard to get anyone to buy your book. It's a hard thing to do, so if I'm in the club, it makes me better than other people. There's really a snobby sort of elitism to it. And I fully fell in that camp for years, right. And about, I don't know, six months ago, or a little bit more, eight months, I was at an entrepreneur dinner in New York, the LDV sort of series, and –

James Altucher: What's LDV?

Tucker Max: I forget what it stands for. Evan Nisselson runs it. It's like a – sort of like an invite-only – I should introduce you to Evan. I can't believe I haven't. I'm kind of embarrassed. I know. You two would love each other. He's, like, a, you know, a mentor, 500 start-ups, he has his own VC – or angel fund. He's, you know, exited a bunch of companies. He's a really cool dude. He's sort of like, maybe not quite, but like the Ron Conway of New York, right. Not quite that big, but a connector. Very much of that type of person. And so I forget how I met him, but he invited me to one of the dinners, and at the dinner, you know, he introduced me as a publishing guy, sort of like what you did. And so one of the female entrepreneurs – his dinners are really cool too 'cause they're always 50/50 split – 50 percent women, 50 percent men. And so one of the women came up to me after the, like, the little intros. She's, like, "Hey, I wanna write a book. You know, can you help me?" I'm, like, "Yeah, of course." And so, like, long, long story short, she basically – like, she doesn't have the time to write a book, and she kinda tried to figure out the self-publishing and the traditional publishing process and she's, like, they're both ridiculously complex and nonsensical and this is a mess.

James Altucher: Right. Unless you put in – like with self-publishing, this is why I was – this is why I originally came to that question when we went down to Austin. To professionally self-publish is 1,000 percent different than self-publishing and 1,000 percent different than traditional publishing. And very few people have done it like, I've done it. Like, I don't know other people who have ____.

Tucker Max: There are a few others, but you're one of the shining examples of professional self-publishing.

James Altucher: I would say – I don't know if you call it this but, like, with Sloppy Seconds, your book, was that sort of a high-end professional self-publishing.

Tucker Max: A hybrid. Yeah, sort of a hybrid, yeah. Well, I mean, like, you know, like – well, we can talk about my publishing company and what I did with Simon a little bit later, but – so basically, like, she wanted – she's smart, she had good ideas, and she wanted a book, but she didn't wanna go through the normal book process, right. And so, of course, you know, I start – I give her my little canned speech about, "Well, writing, you gotta sit down and do the work," and blah, blah, blah, and she rolls her eyes at me, right. Like, not like – her eyes didn't glaze over like, you know, like she wasn't listening. She straight up rolled her eyes at me.

James Altucher: So she pushed back.

Tucker Max: Right. She's like –

James Altucher: And she called you on it.

Tucker Max: She did, and she goes – I'll never forget it. She's, like, "I'm an entrepreneur. You're an entrepreneur, right." And I'm, like, "Yeah, of course." She's, like, "Well, in my role, or in my job, I solve problems. That's what makes me an entrepreneur. Can you solve my problem or not?" I was, like –

James Altucher: So that's a great way to put it 'cause – so entrepreneurs solve problems, but they also do it with an unfair advantage. So she couldn't write her book with an unfair advantage 'cause she wasn't a writer.

Tucker Max: Right. So actually, I think her exact quote was, "Can you solve my problem or just lecture me about hard work?" And I was, like, ______, like – well, the funny thing is – 'cause she's right. Like, this woman is extraordinarily – her name's Melissa Gonzalez. She runs, like, a pop-up retail consultant company, Lion'esque Group or something. Very successful. She's, like, won Clio Awards and, like, made all this money and done all this crazy cool stuff, right. And so she's a baller, right. She's not just some schmoe. And so, like, I was, like, "All right, fuck." So, like, I was kinda embarrassed at the time, and so I couldn't really – you can't think when you're embarrassed. So, like, I went home, and a couple weeks, like, I couldn't get past, like, how do I get her a book without her writing it. And then eventually it dawned on me. I was, like, "Well, fuck, what if I just interview her? What if she just talks her idea out? That doesn't take long at all." And the reason I knew this doesn't take long – well, I can't talk about who it was, but I was supposed to do, like, a – I was supposed to be a co-writer on the memoir of a really, really big celebrity. I'll tell you who off air, but I actually signed an NDA. I really – 'cause I got paid and they didn't do the book, and I really truthfully can't say or they'll come take all my money. They cut me a big check, so I don't wanna do that.

So I researched this a lot. Like, I talked to Neil Strauss about this 'cause he's kind of done, like, all the big ones in that space, and you can usually get someone's full life story no more than 40 hours, usually 20 hours, right. And so you're talking about a nonfiction book half that time, maybe ten hours. I mean, if you're talking –

James Altucher: So what people need to know, then, is the James Altucher needs to know the exact questions so it's 20 hours instead of 40.

Tucker Max: Exactly. So that's why – so what I thought was, all right, let me outline her book. Let's figure out, like, let me get her idea clear, what she wants to say very clear, which is basically an outline for the interview, and then interview her over the course of, like, eight to ten hours, right. And usually normal talking, people can, with a good outline and good James Altucher, can get about 8,000 words an hour. So ten hours is 80,000 words. That's way bigger than her book needs to be, right. So it's more than enough time. So I called her up and I'm, like, "Look. What if I told you we can take you from your idea all the way through to professionally published finished book on Amazon, everything done, in twelve hours of your time?" She's, like, "Are you kidding? Done." And we – like, I forget what we charged her. It was less than what we're charging now, but not much less, maybe like $10,000 or something. And said, all right, like, let's do it. James Altucher: And just to be clear, this is important to her because it's one thing if you hand your business card out at a dinner; it's another thing if you hand somebody a book with all your curated life in the book. Like, this is me.

Tucker Max: Right. Well, so the process I'm about to outline, you can do for really cheap. We just charged her a lot because she has a lot of money and no time, right, so that's why she's paying us.

James Altucher: To be fair, like, I know the designer you use. We still use her for books.

Tucker Max: She's amazing.

James Altucher: I know the editors. I know your whole team, so it's – you provide value where there's value.

Tucker Max: Well, the fact – what you're paying for with us is our expertise and the fact that you only have to spend twelve hours on it. Like, you're paying for time, right. Time and expertise. So what we did is, like, we did the outline, came out really good, and then did the interviews and recorded the interviews, sent the interviews to, like, SpeechPad to get transcribed, right, which is, like, $1.00 a minute. Transcribed all of them. It was, I think maybe a 60,000-word manuscript when we were done. And of course, if you've ever seen a transcribed audio recording, it's gibberish. You can't read it. Like, it's a totally different thing. All these ums and uhs and likes and thoughts go different places that when you listen to make total sense don't make sense on the page.

So we took that 60,000-word manuscript, handed it to an editor friend of ours. She went through it, basically same words, same ideas, same concepts, just turned it into book prose, right. So she didn't rewrite it, she didn't write it. It's Melissa's ideas and her words and her text, and she's got the outline so she knows exactly what she's trying to say. She just makes the sentences read well then the paragraphs and then the pages and she's done. It only took her, like, two days to turn 60,000 words into, like, 45,000 words of finished manuscript, and it was great. I mean, it was fantastic. It was amazing and Melissa was super happy. I'm kinda speeding up the process. There were other little things. And then we did all the other stuff. James Altucher: Like what other little things?

Tucker Max: Okay, so it took one other round of content edits at the end because we hadn't refined our outlining process. Now we have our outlining process really tight. Like, if I showed you – it's almost an algorithmic process. Like, you can plug in anyone smart into our process and they can nail it first step.

James Altucher: What's an example of, like, the things in your outline?

Tucker Max: So we actually have a set of questions that we ask people to get the – we know where they have to get, right, and so we know what questions get most people there. Some people come in and they're fuckin' sharp and they're smart and they know exactly what their book is about, they know exactly what they wanna say, so the outline is essentially just putting shit in order, really simple. Some people come in – like, I'm working on one book now, even though, like, I'm the CEO, part of the rule of our company so far is that all the employees – sort of like in the Marines. Every Marine's first job is to put lead on target. You've gotta be able to shoot first, then you do your job, logistics or trucking or infantry, whatever, right. Our company's the same way. Our goal is to create great books, help people create great books, and so everyone has to work on some part of the process, regardless of what your job in the company is. You've gotta be good at outlining or editing, right. And so we all work on books because there's no other better way to understand the process and to get good at it and to make it really work well. So I'm working with this one dude –

James Altucher: And I think also, just to add, like, as a CEO, like, I have a sign next to my computer, which Claudia actually had me write, which is "Remove myself from the equation." So every project I get involved in, my first goal to the end is to remove myself as much as possible from the equation, which means everybody else has to take up the different parts of the equation. So it sounds like that's what you're trying to do with _____.

Tucker Max: Yeah, we're trying to, but we also eat our own dog food. You know, so, like, I'm writing a book now, how to write a book in twelve hours, which is essentially our process, and I'm using the Book in a Box process to write the book about the Book in a Box process, right, which is sorta like – James Altucher: Right, meta. It's like The Comeback on HBO.

Tucker Max: Well, it's like using a lathe to make a lathe, you know, like a machine to make a machine, right. So anyway, so yeah. So what I was saying is, like –

James Altucher: You did some content edits on –

Tucker Max: Right. We did content edits because, like, the outlining process really is the key. If you get the outline right, everything else is really easy. If you screw the outline up, then sort of like garbage in, garbage out. It becomes shitty later on.

James Altucher: Okay, so then you were saying you were working on a book right now where this is in the outline.

Tucker Max: Right. Well, this one guy I'm talking to, he's sort of like a real estate inspirational speaker type, and he actually has really good ideas and he's a really smart guys. He's just really scatterbrained. He's very dyslexic and he's very – he thinks in a very speech way, not a writer – writing way, right. So I have to, like, translate his ideas to a clear sort of order, right, and put them into not just an order but also a pattern and make them work in a book. All the content's there, it's just the outline process is very difficult with him. It's just more time consuming. It's not really that hard. It's just time consuming, right. And so we – what we're doing is developing a pretty clear set of questions and then – that help the person who does the outline 'cause we use almost all freelancers, right. It's not – I am being taken out of the equation, but the process has to be set really, really well before we can insert freelancers, right.

James Altucher: Like what's an example question you would ask this real estate guy?

Tucker Max: So – okay, so it's sort of like what's your book – what is your book about? Who do you envision the audience being? What value do you envision your audience taking from this? Why do you think they're gonna take this value? Like, things like that, like very sort of questions that really get to the heart of what is this person saying? How are they saying it? Who is it for? And, like, what are the really important parts of what they're saying, right? And so you'd kinda have to look at all the docs to understand, but it's kind of a pattern, a set of questions we kind of give to our freelancers to ask, right, and we've learned these over working with, you know, bunches of clients now, which questions get to the core of it. Another example is like, for instance – so we have the same thing for interviewing, right. So for example, like, we have a couple meta rules. If someone's being very general, ask them for a specific example. If someone's only giving specific examples, ask them for what the general rule is or application. There's, like, ten of those things, right, that really help the sort of interviewing freelancers go through it. And, James, you wouldn't believe. We have such high quality freelancers. I mean, we've got, like, people who used to be, like, feature reporters at the Washington Post and, like, it's actually easy to get super high quality freelancers.

James Altucher: So is that a statement on media in general? Like how the media landscape has basically shut down or turned upside down?

Tucker Max: No, it's changing a lot, and there's a lot of people – what we found is the freelancers who do really good jobs for us are ones who used to do specific jobs in old media, and those jobs have changed a lot or gone away because we can pay them really good. Like, we can take someone, like a Washington – the former Washington Post reporter, and we'll assign – I think it's a her actually – we'll assign her to a book, and she'll spend – so the outlining is done separately from the interviewing-editing. Interviewing- editing is one job, freelance job. So what she'll do is she'll spend eight hours on the phone with someone doing all the interviews and then someone else – SpeechPad – we actually don't – we use a different service now, but a service transcribes it. She gets a transcript back and she edits it into a book, right. It really takes her about 20 hours total, right, and we're paying a good four-figure sum to her. So she's, like, out of her mind excited 'cause basically three to four effective work days, she's making, you know, $2,000; $3,000; $4,000, right, and it's, like, amazing for her, and she can do four of those a month, you know, or even more. You know, like, if she really wants to work hard, she can do ten a month and she can make a six-figure income from us easily and do it from home and do work she really likes doing and help people do really cool stuff, you know what I'm saying. So we're getting really, really high quality freelancers. They're not cheap, but they're not crazy expensive either. You know, it's not like – ghost writing is $40,000 to start for even a mediocre ghost writer. Someone like Nils Parker is $75,000 now or something as a ghost writer.

James Altucher: Yeah, and ghost writers don't – Tucker Max: They don't do a good job.

James Altucher: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not the same.

Tucker Max: Because they don't have a process. The quality is all over the place. Some of them are amazing and some are crap.

James Altucher: And I think that was the criticisms in your – the comments on your article on LinkedIn about this. Everyone says, "Well, isn't this a ghost writing service?" It's totally not. It's the words of the person. But now, here's the question. When you have, let's say, that final 45,000-word document, do you do any kind of, like, content twists, like put a – at the end of one chapter, tease the next chapter, you know, have any kind of cliffhangers?

Tucker Max: We have a few things – like, we have a pretty good pattern for the introduction, you know. Like for – so we have a different sort of outline structure for three different types of books. We only do nonfiction. I think we're gonna develop a process for fiction. I'm actually meeting with a guy in New York when I'm here who I think is gonna be the dude who's gonna help us develop our fiction process 'cause it's totally different. But we have three different types. There's sort of how-to advice, right. That's one type of nonfiction. There's sort of memoir autobiography type. That's another type of nonfiction book. And then the third type is sort of like argumentation, like making an argument or, like, raising awareness, right. And they're very different types of books, and each one has a different outline structure, but, like, each one is, like, okay, like, an introduction for a how-to book. You'll wanna start with something that grabs the reader right away, a really interesting first sentence. Then, like, the coolest story from the book is the first thing. And then, like, after that, you kinda lay out –

James Altucher: I see. So you're using your experience, really, in what makes a good book to basically motivate this outline process. So that's what they're paying –

Tucker Max: Oh yes. Like I told you, expertise and time. We're not just – they're not just talking and we turn it into sentences. That's bullshit. You can pay a monkey $500 to do that. We are taking our expertise in knowing how to structure books and how to structure ideas – James Altucher: How to structure potentially a bestselling book.

Tucker Max: How to turn ideas into good book structure which then becomes books. Here's the thing. If your ideas are really stupid, then we can help you get a really well- structured, really beautifully-designed professional book that has stupid content. If your content is great, you're gonna have a great book. Top to bottom, it's gonna be an amazing book. Like, you have great ideas. You now have a great book with Choose Yourself. It's the same basic process.

James Altucher: Which I – just to mention, I wrote mine completely, but –

Tucker Max: Of course you did.

James Altucher: I just have to _____.

Tucker Max: No, you didn't use this process. You are the last person that it would make sense to use this process 'cause you're such a prolific writer. Our process is not for people who enjoy writing or are good at writing or like writing. It's for people who have ideas that they wanna turn into books but don't have the time or ability to sit through the writing process or deal with the publishing process.

James Altucher: But then I did use your designers and editors.

Tucker Max: Yes, you did, and they were amazing.

James Altucher: They were great. And I still use Erin Tyler.

Tucker Max: She's amazing.

James Altucher: She just did the Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth for us, and she just did Becoming an Idea Machine in 180 Days for Claudia.

Tucker Max: I saw that. It's an amazing cover.

James Altucher: That's a great one.

Tucker Max: It's a beautiful cover.

James Altucher: It's – we're gonna frame it. It's a work of art. Tucker Max: It really is. It's great. She did the – she does – she doesn't do all – we have kinda two packages, $15,000 and $25,000, and so $15,000's relatively basic. It's for someone who has a great idea, they know exactly what they want, they just want us to do all the work. $25,000 is a lot more guidance, more content editing, things like that. Like, it's just more time, right. And then we do some marketing at the end, basic stuff, nothing really sophisticated. But yeah, like, I basically – I'm taking all the people – all the things I know that you have to do to do a great book and I'm creating a process where almost anyone can walk through it and do it as a process.

James Altucher: And then you bring it – so then you do, obviously, the design. Do you do audiobooks for them?

Tucker Max: We – that's a separate thing. It's a separate service. It's an add-on. Not many people care about audiobooks, though.

James Altucher: But, you know, for self-help, audiobook is important.

Tucker Max: Yes.

James Altucher: And it adds to – on Amazon, on the Amazon page, it adds a level of professionalism when you see three lines – Kindle, paperback, audio.

Tucker Max: Mm-hmm. We do hardcover as well as an add-on.

James Altucher: Who does your hardcover?

Tucker Max: We use Bang Publishing as our printer. Bang in Minnesota. I shouldn't give all my secrets away, but I don't care. It's fine.

James Altucher: I'm gonna totally use them.

Tucker Max: You should. Like, of course I'm gonna tell you it. No, there's a bunch of different printers. Most of them charge way too much. A lot of people use Chinese printers. They're fuckin' terrible. Don't ever use Chinese printers. Even though they're cheap, they'll fuck you 90 percent of the time. Their idea of quality control in China is not American idea of quality control. Bang Printing in Minnesota, they are really cheap and they are actually the best quality, or among – they're in the top tier of quality. They're amazing, they're easy to work with, they're great.

James Altucher: And then – so you put it on Amazon and how many books have you got out there so far?

Tucker Max: Well, we don't use Bang – Bang is commercial offset. I think we use Lightning Source for POD hardcover 'cause they – I think they now have POD hardcover.

James Altucher: Okay.

Tucker Max: See, things change so fast in self-publishing, I don't even –

James Altucher: And Lightning Source will get you on Amazon, will get you in Barnes – BN.com. Do they get you in bookstores?

Tucker Max: No, it's available to purchase, to order in bookstores. We can't put anyone in bookstores 'cause we don't have – I have a distribution deal with Simon and Schuster, so an author who has a great book that I actually think is really good, I can push that to Simon and ask them if they want it, but no one can guarantee you in bookstores except publishers 'cause publishers are the only ones that have relationships with bookstores. But honestly, being in a bookstore doesn't really matter that much anymore. I mean, unless – if you're doing big fiction, it matters. If you're doing a few big public releases, it matters. The reality is the book landscape is totally changed.

James Altucher: What percentage is Amazon right now for everything? Kindle, paperback and –

Tucker Max: You mean digital or just Amazon?

James Altucher: Everything for books.

Tucker Max: It's hard to know 'cause Amazon doesn't release their numbers, right. But from what most people can tell, it's anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of book sales, depending on the book.

James Altucher: And for, like, what categories would you say it reaches, like, 80 or 90 percent? Tucker Max: Oh, genre fiction. It's huge.

James Altucher: So if you're writing a genre novel, who cares about bookstores?

Tucker Max: If you're writing genre fiction, unless you're one of the big, big names in genre fiction, you basically are selling everything on Kindle or iBooks. Like, the vampire novels, like – you know Sean Platt. He's a good buddy of mine. So Sean, I don't think he's –

James Altucher: He ____ self-publishing.

Tucker Max: I don't think any of his books are – yeah, write, publish, repeat, but it's more about novelist stuff, and it's much more, like, his polemic on – if you care about the politics of publishing, it's a great book. If you're just someone who wants a book, it's not what you should read at all. It's a very different sort of thing. All genre fiction almost is – it's – Amazon is dominating it because most people – genre fiction, for the most part, is disposable. Like, it's, like, pulpy, you know. I don't mean that as an insult; it's just people – if you read, like, romance novels, you read 60 a year. You don't read two a year, right. Women – and –

James Altucher: Right. So you're not going to the bookstore, and also with the Kindle, nobody knows on the subway what you're reading.

Tucker Max: Well, right. So, listen, genre fiction still sells in physical copies, make no mistake about it, especially urban genre fiction. So, like, stuff written for, like, black people sells huge, huge.

James Altucher: In bookstores.

Tucker Max: Yes. Bookstores and, like, bodegas. You walk around New York City, you can see, you know, like – I mean, those actually still sell really, really well, but there's a big – basically the younger the genre fiction aims towards, the sort of the more dominant Kindle is, but even things like romance fiction – romance novels are becoming dominant on digital because they're so much cheaper, it's so much easier to deal with, they're disposable, it's so much more – it's like it is just a better experience top to bottom, especially if you use fiction as sort of a primary form of entertainment, and there aren't a lot of people in America that do it, at least compared to TV, but there's still tens of millions. It's not like some little tiny niche, you know.

James Altucher: Yeah, like just some numbers, I don’t know them. Like, how many books were published in the last year?

Tucker Max: So no one really knows.

James Altucher: How many ISBN numbers were issued?

Tucker Max: Oh, that's a whole separate thing. That's actually a really good question. I'm not exactly – if you told me this, I could have looked it up and found it before the podcast. I know, like, three years ago or something like that, there were basically, like, 50,000 books that came out of major publishers, like the big – at the time, big six or whatever. There are about 50 – those and then, like, Perseus and some of the other really big ones. There were about 50,000 that would come out of what we would call a major publisher. There were about 500,000 that were self-published, and that includes, you know, the goofy computer-generated books and all the other nonsense. So it was about a 10X difference. I think both numbers have gone up substantially in the last three years. I think – like, it depends what your definition of mainstream publishers are, but that number is almost certainly in the six figures now. I think it might even be, like, substantially in the six figures, and the self-publishing is almost certainly in the millions now. But you have to remember, like, 80 percent of the self-published stuff, like, sells less than five copies or something. You know, it's not – it's, like, just either kooky person stuff or there's a lot of companies that do, like, these computer-generated books and, like, they sell 20 copies and they don't care or whatever. It's, like, those numbers are juiced in a way that's sorta weird.

James Altucher: Yeah, it's kinda funny, actually. Like, I'm starting to see – like, I saw this with Choose Yourself and The Power of No that Claudia and I wrote together –

Tucker Max: Summaries.

James Altucher: Right away, somebody will come out with – yeah, a summary, a weird summary that has nothing to do with anything. Tucker Max: No. Right. Because if they can sell, you know, ten – whatever, 20 copies a month of people mistakenly buying that instead of Choose Yourself, that's, like, whatever, $100 for them. And if they can have 100 of those, then they're making, whatever, $10,000 a month, and then they're gonna write some scammy blog post. I mean, these are basically scammers. They're trying to scam the system, and I think Amazon – if you bet against Amazon in the long run, you're almost certainly gonna lose. The scammers are betting against Amazon.

James Altucher: No, I visited Amazon, and they're very –

Tucker Max: They have their shit together.

James Altucher: They're on top of it, yeah.

Tucker Max: Right. So you can make short-term money doing that. It's not a good long-term strategy. I don't pay any attention to it. I don't think it's gonna work. There are some publishers, like I know I talked to this one publisher, brand new, they're – I probably shouldn't even talk about where they are, but they are not algorithmically publishing books. What he's done is he's almost done the Book in a Box model, like what I have, except the reverse. Like, we charge only for services and expertise and time, right. We – you know, if you come to us, you – it's your book. You own it, you get all the royalties, if it becomes a Hollywood movie, it's yours. Like, it's your thing. We're just doing you a service, right. He goes the other way around. He pays content – like, writers to create content for him. He has basically a team of dudes that algorithmically figure out, okay, what's really hot in cookbooks. Okay, paleo and gluten free and these – so let's turn out, like, six different cookbooks that are in these little mini verticals, and he actually does pretty good content. Like, he hires real photographers, real writers, they do good stuff, and those things – but it's not like an author. It's like the publishing company.

James Altucher: But that motto works too. Like, you know, Steve Scott.

Tucker Max: Of course. He was on your podcast.

James Altucher: Yeah, yeah. He's kinda made a specialty of the habit space. He writes a book every three weeks, and the guy makes, like, a decent living. Tucker Max: Yeah. He does pretty well. This guy's company's doing really well. He wants us to do – he wants to get in the celebrity memoir space and help build sort of empires around celebrities and sort of disposable content, and I think we're gonna start doing books – we may start doing books with his company. We're gonna do the actual book with the celebrity 'cause he doesn't want a dog shit book. He wants a real book with a real memoir with a celeb.

James Altucher: I see. So he'll find the celebrity, he'll, like, buy the rights to the celebrity's book story and then hire you.

Tucker Max: Right, right. The celebrity will commit to 40 hours on the phone. We will – it'll be our process, our sort of our ____.

James Altucher: That's a smart idea for both sides – for all three sides, it's a smart idea.

Tucker Max: Yeah, it's smart for all three sides. That's exactly right. I think it can work really well.

James Altucher: So how will you do it with fiction? Like, will you kinda take a very stand – like, let's say it's genre fiction. Will you take a very standard story structure and then apply it to someone's ideas or life or –

Tucker Max: So the long-term – not long – it's not really that long-term.

James Altucher: Reminds me a little, by the way, of James Frey's strategy from a couple years ago. He was kind of –

Tucker Max: He's still doing it.

James Altucher: Yeah, yeah.

Tucker Max: He's pumping out – he's basically taking James – James Patterson, James Frey both basically have content studios, right. And they're essentially trying to – almost like what movie studios are to movies, they are trying to do to books and to fiction, right. And that can – like, the sort of genius working with a team of copywriters, essentially is what they are, that can absolutely work. We're doing the opposite, right. We are providing an algorithm – a structure – a platform so that anyone can essentially write a book without having to go through all the unnecessary pain points. So all you – my goal is to create a platform so that all you have to do is have great ideas and you can turn them into books without having – you don't have to learn to write. You don’t have to find time to write. You don't have to deal with the publishing process. You don't have to, like, you know, design the cover. You don't have to deal with Amazon. We do all the shitty stuff. All you have to do is have great ideas, whether they're story ideas for fiction or whether they're – whatever, self-help ideas for nonfiction or whatever nonfiction you do. Anything like that, we are sort of – it's books as a process, you know.

James Altucher: So let's say someone wants to come to you prepared. So they – you know, let's say they have some skills as a writer, but they're running a business so they need the book out but they just don't have the time 'cause it takes a long time and dedication.

Tucker Max: But the book is a legion for their business, which is very popular. We have a ton of those clients.

James Altucher: So what kind of skills – even skills as a writer – should someone ideally bring to the table _____?

Tucker Max: None. They don't need any.

James Altucher: So they don't need any of those. Even outline abilities.

Tucker Max: No. No. Because, I mean, like, if you have it, great. It'll probably make the process faster. You don't need it. That's the whole point of our process. I mean, think about – like, think about how ridiculous it would be if Uber made you drive the car. It's like, why the hell call Uber, right. It's ridiculous if we make people do part of the work. Like, that doesn't make sense. That's why you're paying us, right. And so –

James Altucher: I wonder how you can apply it to other things too 'cause, like, you figure – so there's books, there's nonfiction books and you divide it out into three categories. And there's fiction, screenplays – Tucker Max: You're getting – you're killing me, dude. You're gonna give away our business model. Right, no, that's exactly – you're totally right. Obviously, like, you're too smart to – for you not to understand this. Once we nail nonfiction, we wanna do fiction. Once we do fiction, we wanna try and see what other things this works for. I think it can work for screenplays. I think it can work for TV shows. I think it can work for speeches. I think it can work for pitch decks, you know, like Excel-type, you know, presentations, startup pitch decks. Anything like that, I think it can absolutely work for. In fact, I think it can work for – this is a little bit crazy, but I think it can work for essentially any creative endeavor – painting, music, whatever because if you think about it, creating – like, becoming a painter involves, like, this fuckin' difficult process of learning all the skills involved, right. And, like, what if you could somehow eliminate all of the – all of the pain points of learning those skills and you could just transfer sort of your – the image in your head to the page somehow, right. Like, how does that work? What does that look like? And clearly that's years away from what we're doing.

James Altucher: You know, it's funny. It reminds me, actually, I ran into someone who was doing something slightly different, but this person was a professional forger, so she would – they would take a photograph, like a nice photograph, they would blow it up and then put it on a canvas and – or print it onto a canvas and then use oil paints to paint over the photograph and then people would sell – would buy the paintings for, like, tens of thousands of dollars because no one would think to scrape the paint off to see that there was a photograph underneath.

Tucker Max: Yeah, right. Exactly. No, no, no, exactly.

James Altucher: So it wouldn't be quite like that, but it just reminds me of that.

Tucker Max: Yeah, it's something like that. Like, I'm not sure what that would look like, right, because I'm focused on books right now, but my real mission is I think it can be way easier for people to create all sorts of different, whatever you wanna call it, art, creative products. Even if you don't wanna call a nonfiction book a piece of art, at the very least, it's a creative product, right. And I think that it would be really cool if people could put their – take their ideas and effectuate them. If you can reduce the obstacles to that, then that adds a lot of value to the world. James Altucher: See, what I like about this business is – and this is typical of businesses that I like – is that you actually should never raise money, for instance, for this business.

Tucker Max: We're not.

James Altucher: Because why be obligated –

Tucker Max: We're already super _____.

James Altucher: Yeah, yeah. And also there's nothing you need to spend the money on. Like, you're just gonna grow – you could hire as you grow and fire as you not grow or whatever.

Tucker Max: WE have no employees right now. It's me and Zach, cofounders. We're about to hire our first employee. He's gonna be a project manager.

James Altucher: Yeah, 'cause you need someone to – when you have enough projects – when you have more than ten, you need logistics.

Tucker Max: So we're – I think we just signed a client somewhere between 20 and 30. I can't keep up. So we definitely need a project manager 'cause Zach's doing all that now. We're gonna pass to the project manager, and then everyone else we use is a freelancer, you know, and so, like, we can – obviously we could hire a lot of these people internally, but that doesn't make any sense. We could probably pay them less and hire them internally. I would actually much rather them be freelancers because I think they'll work harder. I think they'll do a better job. I think they can make more money and we can get better product.

James Altucher: Well, it's almost better – we're moving toward this employee-less society where it's better for everybody not to get fired and hired and you don't have to deal with the paperwork, and it becomes – what essentially you are is you're becoming the Uber of book making. So that's what's happening.

Tucker Max: We're a platform, yeah. James Altucher: There's you and – there's you with a body of people who need work and then there's, on the other side, there's a body of people who need to make books, and in the middle, there's logistics of how it's getting all done, the process of how it's getting done.

Tucker Max: Can I tell you what's really exciting about this?

James Altucher: Yes.

Tucker Max: I don't wanna talk about this on podcast 'cause I'm afraid someone's gonna steal the idea, but –

James Altucher: No one's gonna steal the idea. No one's listening.

Tucker Max: 'Cause no one's gonna ____. People will steal the idea, but no one will execute it.

James Altucher: Right. That's actually an important thing. You can share any idea and nobody executes.

Tucker Max: Right. Unless it's super – unless they just have to do one thing or something.

James Altucher: And also, don't forget, there's expertise. You're one of three – so maybe Malcolm Gladwell will steal the idea. Like, you're one of three people who were, like, three times on the same time on the New York Times bestselling list.

Tucker Max: Yeah, so here's what I really wanna do. So right now, our service is, you know, is very expensive, right. And like I said, I mean, I just outlined the basics of exactly what we do. Anyone can do this. This is – this process requires no – like, there's no special proprietary algorithm that you can't figure out or whatever, right? You can do this. You know what I really wanna do is I wanna keep the high-end service, no doubt, because there will always be a big market for people who have money but no time and want us to do the work for them. All they have to do is talk. There's always gonna be a big market for that. We're always gonna be there for that. But I wanna extend our service to people who have a lot of time but no money, and the way we can do – the way we can make this Book in a Box process work for people who can't afford $15,000; who maybe can only afford, let's say $500 or $1,000, is we make it software as a service.

James Altucher: Oh my God, I totally figured it out. So you could have people call into a phone number where the phone call comes in –

Tucker Max: No, why call? They can do it through their computer.

James Altucher: Okay, yeah.

Tucker Max: Yeah, it's a – Skype, essentially.

James Altucher: So it's asking – like, there's – the questions are all planned, and then you have, like, kind of a CreateSpace-type thing where you can design the book cover and beginning to end.

Tucker Max: Right. And then what I think is really cool – so we can have it where it's, like, you know, maybe –

James Altucher: Yeah, outsourced to India where take out the ums and the ahs.

Tucker Max: Exactly. ____ transcription whenever. I think we have it all different price tiers. So it's maybe, like, $100 and you have to do everything yourself, but it's step-by-step instructions, right. And then maybe, like, let's say you wanna do everything yourself except the book cover. You just don't wanna design that, and you've got $500. You wanna get a nice book cover. So then you can buy a $500 book cover. Like, we handle paying the designer, we handle finding them, et cetera, et cetera. It's sorta like 99 Designs except you don't have to go to 99 Designs. You just – we just do it. You're, like, here's my budget. I want the best one possible for it. You know you're gonna get a good cover. They know they're gonna – the designer knows they're gonna get paid. You can upgrade – you can essentially level up at any part of the process you want. You get stuck somewhere, for $10.00 an hour, you can have – or $10.00 a call, you can have a professional editor come on and read through and help you, you know, whatever. Like, there's a million ways to do it, but it's essentially software as a service with an opportunity to level up at every single spot. So some people will spend $5,000; some people will spend $50.00; but everyone now is essentially on an even playing field to get their ideas out there. James Altucher: Okay, so then Part 2, which I forget if we talked about it offline or online, but Part 2, which is book marketing. So a lot of people don't care about book marketing because the book becomes their business card and they send it out to all the clients and whatever. But other people, particularly fiction, when you get into that, other people are gonna wanna sell, you know, lots of books. So how do you – how will you deal with and make it as service-oriented as possible? How do you standardize the book marketing process?

Tucker Max: That's a tough question. So right now, with Book in a Box, we have a marketing package, sort of like a mini-launch with the $25,000 package. We do, like, sort of like ten different things, and it's not like a major, like, James Altucher or Tim Ferriss book launch, but it's, you know, something good for most people, right. There's – it gives a lot of good social proof for their books.

James Altucher: You schedule a ____ at AMA. You could make a Facebook fan page.

Tucker Max: Right, you know, like press release, put people on a couple podcasts, things like that. Really basic things, right. Give them a couple guest posts. Things that, like, for the vast majority of people, that's more than enough social proof and they're, like, really happy, and it gives their book the social proof they need for their book to accomplish their goal, right. A CEO to put on his resume or, you know, business owner to generate leads or a speaker to charge more or a consultant to get new clients, things like that, right. Yes, that's a good question. What about the people that really wanna, like – that don't have another use for the book. The book is the end in itself. That's a very difficult thing because now you're getting into discovery, which is a totally different business than content creation, right. I know some people, one person specifically, who's working on this, and we're working with him to try and help him develop sort of, for lack of a better term, book marketing in a box-type process, but the thing is, I don't know if there's an algorithmic process where you can do this. The best you can do –

James Altucher: A lot of it is there's a magic in there. Like, how did 50 Shades of Gray out of the blue, you know, sell tens of millions of copies? Like, nobody really knows the answer. Tucker Max: That's its own podcast, yeah. Right. I think the best you can do with book marketing is you can ask people a bunch of questions and then, based on their answers, you can recommend a couple strategies and then give them guides on how to effectuate those strategies.

James Altucher: 'Cause they need to do stuff. The author needs to do stuff.

Tucker Max: Right, exactly.

James Altucher: Like, the author need – it seems like the author needs to already be engaged in the conversation with their community. Like, take your books. You had a huge community already when Book 1 came out.

Tucker Max: Right.

James Altucher: So those people automatically went to the bookstore and bought the books.

Tucker Max: Right. Right. So if you don't have – like, you have, you know, $30,000 to hire Ryan Holliday or Charlie Hoehn to promote your book, right. And so they do all this stuff. But if you don't have that money, what do you do? I think a book marketing in a box-type, like, algorithmic program could work really well, but what it's gotta do is teach people, like, tell them, okay, here's ten possible things. Figure out what makes the most sense with you, and then here's a guide on how to do each thing. Like, here's how to set up a Reddit AMA. Here's how to pitch bloggers. Here's how to – whatever, things like that, right. I think that could work really well because right now, there's really not a lot of great information on how to book market, and it's all over the place. Fiction's totally different than nonfiction. Certain types of nonfiction or whatever, and what this could do is sort of essentially be like a choose-your-own-adventure type thing where you – depending on what your goals are, what your resources are, how much work you wanna put in, et cetera, et cetera, it's a different answer for what you should do for book marketing for everybody, right. So a process like that that kind of algorithmically help people figure out what's the right answer and then how do I do that, people would pay, you know, a few hundred bucks for that and be extremely valuable for them, and I think that would be a really good sort of process, but I think that's a different thing than Book in a Box. It's just that book discovery and book marketing is just such a different thing than creating a book.

James Altucher: Yeah, 'cause there's a little bit of art there as well as science, and mystery in the middle.

Tucker Max: Exactly.

James Altucher: But still there's, like, the basic things. Like you said, like scheduling the Reddit AMA, setting up the introductions to podcasts, stuff like that. So how's it going with your podcast?

Tucker Max: Podcast is doing good, man. It chugs along and we –

James Altucher: The Mating Grounds.

Tucker Max: We're gonna pass, I think, a million downloads before – or by the end of the year.

James Altucher: That's great. And, you know, Jeff Miller, of course, was on this podcast. He did very well. Very interesting. Evolutionary psychologist on how to meet women or men or whatever. And then you guys are writing a book together.

Tucker Max: Yeah. It should be out December of next year, I think.

James Altucher: Yeah, that's good. So I'm looking forward to that one as well.

Tucker Max: It should be pretty good.

James Altucher: Man, we're gonna have, like, nonstop repeat – we have to have you on when your kid's 15 years old. We have to have you on when you start doing fiction and then when The Mating Grounds comes out, we'll have you on.

Tucker Max: Well, have Jeff on for that. He'll probably be better for it than me.

James Altucher: Yeah, no, we'll have both on. Now we've got this table here.

Tucker Max: Right, you've got this setup here. It's pretty sweet. James Altucher: So yeah. And Jeff was a good guest, though. He was fun. And then he answered separately a separate question we had. So Claudia and I were in Miami, and we were wondering why everybody had blonde hair. So typically women who are in their 40s or 50s don't have blond hair.

Tucker Max: Neoteny is what it – what'd he say?

James Altucher: So he said that, because women – so I wrote him, Jeff, you know, Dr. Miller, why do all these women dye their hair blonde? And he said, well, it's, you know, because women don't tend to have blonde hair when they're older, when they're younger and because men are seeking who are fertile, so they do this to, you know, send out the signal that they're fertile, even if they're not, to men.

Tucker Max: Right. Well, send out the signal that they're young, which is a secondary signal that they're fertile. Blonde hair, that's why breast implants are so popular. That's why men care about big breasts because large voluptuous breasts are an indice of youth. It's like an honest signal of youth. Biologically it's an honest signal of youth. Yeah, it's because humans are neotenized. I can go deep into the biology, but it's exactly right.

James Altucher: So from Book in a Box to boobs. So all good stuff.

Tucker Max: You know what's funny? Everyone thinks I named it Book in a Box because of the Saturday Night Live skit, dick in a box, right. And I didn't even think about that. No, I was, like, the point is supposed to be it's like everything you need for a book, just, like, in a box, like really simple, right, and it floated off the tongue. But now it's like, everyone's like, oh, Tucker, you're making a fuckin' joke about dick in a box. I'm, like, no I'm not really.

James Altucher: Well, you had the – the rough draft of the book I saw, Bookstrapper, you didn't like that name?

Tucker Max: Well, no, no. So – well, that was a different book. That was about book marketing, and so it's funny. Book in a Box emerged out of – I had a publishing sort of company. We did, like, consulting and some publishing work, and then a little bit – we did some book marketing and then, like, I had all these other things, and once Book in a Box took off, I actually – I shut all those things down. James Altucher: And you love it. Like, you feel it.

Tucker Max: Yes. Yes, it's like –

James Altucher: You don't wanna sell it ever.

Tucker Max: I'm not gonna say never.

James Altucher: Like, if it has $10 million of revenues, Amazon offers you $70 million, you might take it.

Tucker Max: I'm probably gonna take it, right. Like, let's not be ridiculous. I'm not stupid. Right. 'Cause I'm not gonna fight with Amazon. If they come in with a check, all right, Amazon, there you go.

James Altucher: Right because they could do it, not – I mean, people always say, oh Google can do this or Amazon can do this. The reality is, big companies usually don't do entrepreneurial ventures. They buy them.

Tucker Max: They buy them, right. Yeah, so no, like, I mean, it's not – I do love the company, but it's more like one of the things I learned, man, is I gotta focus. Like, I was doing way too many things, so the only shit I do now businesswise, Book in a Box and Mating Grounds. That's it. That's all I do.

James Altucher: I think that's really smart because this is also – these are the things you love doing, yet you can only do stuff that you feel it in your chest. Like, this is what puts you on fire. And then you're going to do good at it because you'll know exactly what to do in every decision.

Tucker Max: Well, and you just have time to dedicate, man. You only have so many hours in the – I mean, I have a family now, so they get a huge block of time, and then I have to, like, spend a little time, like, you know, on myself. So I only have, whatever, let's call it eight hours a day of real work time that I can dedicate to stuff. And if I'm splitting that across three or four or five things, then everything gets shit. It's like the –

James Altucher: It's horrible. Tucker Max: Yeah. It's like when you only have enough bread – you only have enough butter for one slice of bread. You try and put it on two. What do you get? You get shitty bread, right? Put all of it on one slice and just eat one slice, and that slice is amazing, and you're better off having one amazing slice than two shitty slices.

James Altucher: Well, but it's interesting, though, because there's focus and there's focus. So you're doing Book in the Box, but Book in the Box is doing 20 books. But because you've standardized and processed it out, you're able to kind of concentrate – you're able to take variety and turn it into focus, and that's the key, really.

Tucker Max: Well, my job – I explained this to Zach 'cause we're kind of like co – we're cofounders. I'm the CEO, he's the COO, but what I explained is our job as cofounders is to create stable ground for our employees and freelancers to stand on and do the actual work, right. And so once we have the process – I mean, the last three months have been hell getting this process right, tons of work, but once we get it right, it's like we can plug in any capable, smart sort of writing editing freelancer, and they're gonna do a fantastic job, and we can have one really smart, capable project manager, and those two people are gonna get 98 percent of the stuff right on their own and then we're always there when there's a problem, whatever, right. Yeah, so, like, we just have to create the stable ground and then, like, you know, we start doing software as a service, all right, then we have – that's where we focus on is creating something out of nothing and making it awesome, and then someone else comes along to run it once it's awesome, you know.

James Altucher: Yeah, no, I actually – I'm jealous. I think this is a great business idea. This is good.

Tucker Max: I think it is pretty good too. I know, that's the best part is we don't have to raise money. We're already, like – I think we realistically are gonna do about $500,000 gross in the first six months.

James Altucher: Yeah, that's great.

Tucker Max: That's – like, I mean, that's gross. Our margins are pretty good. They're not amazing. I think we can get them amazing. James Altucher: You don't have to worry about it so much yet 'cause they'll get better too.

Tucker Max: They'll get better. Yeah, as we systematize the process more and we find sort of better balance of freelancers, stuff like that. The most important thing for us now is getting the books awesome, making sure they're really awesome, and so we're, like, working with the most expensive people for the most part, so we don't have amazing margins, but they're good.

James Altucher: But imagine when the next real estate guy comes to you. You're gonna know the outline already, so it's just –

Tucker Max: Exactly. It makes things way easier.

James Altucher: …a lot of things that the more books you do, the better your margins are gonna be. They're not gonna get – 'cause you're always gonna have that really professional freelancer who's gonna cost X.

Tucker Max: Good people cost money.

James Altucher: Yeah, so – but you should be able to get up to a solid, like, you know, 30, 40 percent margins, like, done right, so –

Tucker Max: Way better. We're gonna do better than that. We're a little bit better than that now, and I think we can really optimize margins without losing – I mean, that's the key. Optimize margins without losing quality, obviously.

James Altucher: I mean, basically every CEO in the Fortune 500 should have a book.

Tucker Max: Oh yeah, every CEO, every entrepreneur, every speaker, every consultant. They should all have books.

James Altucher: You should almost take every TED talk, make a book out of it and then call the guy and say, "Hey, I've got your book ready. Do you want it or not?"

Tucker Max: Well, but if they say no, I can't sell it, so what am I gonna do when they say no? Just sit there with a book? James Altucher: You might be able to sell it.

Tucker Max: Yeah, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna sell other people's ideas. That's _____.

James Altucher: All right. Separate idea for the listeners. Go out there and make TED publishing –

Tucker Max: That actually – well TED publishes their own stuff and they might come after you. They're getting a little –

James Altucher: Just don't use the word TED. Like, okay –

Tucker Max: Call it Fred.

James Altucher: Ken Robinson on education, here's the book.

Tucker Max: Here's the summary. I heard Ken talk. Here's what he said, and it's just the – yeah, the speech. That would be pretty scammy, I think.

James Altucher: Yeah, that could be. All right. Well, Tucker, great. Congratulations Book in a Box and fatherhood. So two episodes in a row.

Tucker Max: Thanks a lot. So how are you – you're not gonna run these back-to-back, are you?

James Altucher: Yeah, I think I will. I think I'll do next Tuesday and Thursday. What do you think?

Tucker Max: It's your podcast. Yeah. RESOURCES

If this feels all like too much for you visit Tucker Max website “Book in a Box” (http://bookinabox.com) and hire them. They will help you get it done.

CreateSpace.com is the site where you start.

Acx.com for uploading your audio-book

Kindledirect.com http://bookow.com/resources.php will generate a bar code for your ISBN https://authorcentral.amazon.com/ is the page where you will create your author page. OTHER BOOKS BY JAMES ALTUCHER

Trade Like A Hedge Fund

Trade Like Warren Buffett

I Was Blind But Now I See

Choose Yourself

The Choose Yourself Stories

40 Alternatives To College

The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Altucher is a writer, entrepreneur, and chess master. He has started and run more than 20 companies, some of which failed, several of which he sold for large exits. His writing has appeared in many major national media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Yahoo Finance, The New York Observer, The Daily News, Tech Crunch, and a dozen others. His blog, The Altucher Confidential, has attracted more than 20 million readers since its launch. He is the author of 14 books, seven of which are self-published, including two WSJ best- sellers: The Power of No and Choose Yourself. James hosts two podcasts “The James Altucher Show” and “Ask Altucher” with over 10 million downloads in less than a year. Join him at JamesAltucher.com or on Twitter @Jaltucher.