Anna David's Blog, page 5

Boost Your Business by Sharing Your Story (Solo Episode)

Here's a special release for you: the keynote I recently gave at a mastermind that encompasses so much of what I know to be true about coming up with your book idea. It's short but sweet. Enjoy!

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How to Use Instagram Reels to Blow Up Your Book with Erin Lee

 

You know that kindergarten teacher we all wish we'd had?

That's Erin Lee. But part of what makes us all wish she'd been our teacher is the fact that in addition to being a teacher, she's an award-winning children's book author.

Still, as we discuss quite a bit around here, being an amazing author doesn't always guarantee book sales.

But Erin HAS sold thousands of books. So how has she done it? Well, she started dressing up as her five-year-old students to create engaging Instagram reels. These relatable and humorous videos have since fostered a thriving online community where Erin shares educational content, entertainment and promotes her books.

I was actually interviewing Erin for my other podcast when I realized the information she was sharing was such book publishing GOLD that I had to switch gears and release it on this long-neglected feed.

In this episode, she breaks her IG strategy down piece by piece. So good, so tactical. She actually makes Instagram sound fun AND useful. When have you last heard it described that way?

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The State of Publishing Today with Kevin Anderson

 

Kevin Anderson never meant to get into the publishing business after growing up in a small town in Canada before getting his PhD and graduating summa cum laude from Harvard and starting a tutoring company.

Nevertheless, that tutoring company transitioned into what is now a massive publishing company that employs 30 writers and editors that have collectively worked on over 200 New York Times bestselling books and sold over 100 million copies of books by people like Brene Brown, Simon Sinek and Jen Sincero.

How juicy was our conversation about the state of publishing today? Well, in case you hadn't noticed, I stopped releasing new episodes of this podcast! But when I stumbled into this chat with Kevin, I realized it was too good to keep to myself. So please enjoy!

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APPLY FOR OUR EMERGING AUTHOR PROGRAM HERE

Treat Amazon Like It's the Third Largest Search Engine in the World!

Amazon is the third largest search engine in the world and yet so many authors don’t treat it that way.

How can YOU treat it that way?

Your first move should be to add relevant keywords to your Author page.

What’s the easiest way to do it?

Log into Author Central, click on one of your books, Edit Book Details and, under Editorial Reviews, add every single endorsement you’ve gotten (make sure you bold the name and titles of the endorsers; readers look at WHO recommended you before they look at WHAT they said).

You can add 20,000 characters that will now appear on your book page! Do you know how many keywords that can be? Do you know how many more people will find your book now when searching? Do you know how much more credible it makes your book? Did you know you can even copy/paste some of the reviews that your readers have left? Did you know someone could ask four rhetorical questions in a row???

 

How to Get Your Book Everywhere with Annabelle Gurwitch

 

 Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress, activist, and the author of the New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort. Her other books include: Wherever You Go, There They Are, and You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up (coauthored with Jeff Kahn). 

She was the co-host of Dinner & a Movie on TBS and has appeared on NPR, The Today Show, CBS Early Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, PBS, and numerous CNN and MSNBC programs. Her essays and satire have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, AARP, Real Simple, Prevention, The Los Angeles Book Review, The Daily Beast, Time.com, Next Tribe, Lenny Letter, Hadassah and The Hollywood Reporter, among other media outlets.

She's also an extremely methodical (she might say obsessive compulsive?) person—one who starts planning her launch as she comes up with the book concept. And she works it—making lists, checking them way more than twice, reaching out to people she knows and doesn't know and ultimately making it so that her books have no option but to be successful.

If you want practical steps on how to prepare both emotionally and literally for a release, this episode is packed with tips, tactics and other t-words!

FOLLOW ANNABELLE ON TWITTER HERE!

HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY:

→ You can get my 5 steps to creating a life-changing book

→ You can apply for an Authority Experience to have us create the concept and promotion plan for your authority-building book

→ You can apply for a call to work with Legacy Launch Pad (our publishing packages range from $7k-150k)

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!!

ANNABELLE'S TOP 3 TAKEAWAYS FOR A SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH:

1) Organize your book around a topic you're so passionate about that you'll be willing to talk about it until you're blue in the face

2) Get as many people talking about your book as possible, by reaching out to specific groups, looking at media that has supported similar books and asking friends for help

3) Book live events by reaching out to organizers, telling them you'll be in the area (whether you will or not) and then, when they accept you, piggy backing other events around it.

BEST QUOTES:

“My great grandfather was what they called a peddler in the Ukraine who sold his wares off the back of a mule. Sometimes being a writer feels like that.”

"There's nobody who's going to love your book as much as you are and treat it like you do a child of yours to send out into the world with every advantage."

TIME CODES FOR KEY INTERVIEW MOMENTS:

8:18: Why to create a trail of material you didn’t include in the book that you can then pitch editors

13:06: How even an audience of 3 can change the success of your book

18:02: Why and how to tell people what you want them to say to help promote your book

21:58: Seek out editors who will want to promote your book by researching which creatives in similar genres they’ve supported already

27:59: Why Q-TIP is the most important acronym for a writer promoting a book 

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:

Anna:                           00:00                I was just saying out of all the creative people I know, you seem like one who's got a system down. Like I see you with lists, stick in my head. Before a book comes out. Or like as you're putting like, you know, proverbial pen to paper, like you've got a plan. So how do you launch?

Annabelle:                    00:24                I do have a plan. But the plan starts way before six months before the book comes out. The plan starts when I'm writing the book itself. So, for me, and this is just, you know, I'm going to, I'm really excited to listen to your podcast because I am only doing, I've developed this method just based on really my years of experience as an actress. And then I sort of took the idea that I had had as an actress about trying to find a niche for myself into book publishing. And then I, I'm not quite sure how I got this idea of this little, Oh, the way that I launched things, but this is what I do. So first of all, to me the most, there are two essential ingredients to make a project successful. For me, the idea is that first, you can't make something successful as a book. I don't know about other businesses unless you are so passionate about this subject and your relationship to this subject, that you are willing to spend the next several years making yourself the Go To person on that subject. Right? So even if it doesn't seem like it's a subject, because I'm a humorist, each of my books is organized around a principle and a message and something that I perceive to be in this social [inaudible] said, I have a specific relationship too. And for me honing exactly what that is as I'm, you know what, I might be writing a bunch of stories and then realize, Oh this is the organizing principle. So it's not necessarily that I'm writing to an idea at first, but then once I'm writing and then I get an idea of where this project is going to live in the Zeitgeists, then I have to shape all the material towards that.

                                    02:35                And I say that because you know, there's a paradigm that people often work with in the book world, which is someone told me this when I started writing that when you want to publish a book, you need to think your publisher's going to ask you the three why's, why this book, why this author, and why now, right? So those three things are going to be essential to your success because you need to have a strong argument for all of those things. So, for instance, my book, I See You Made an Effort, right? Those were stories organized around the idea that I was turning 50 and I didn't know how I was supposed to approach that, how the world was supposed to see me, and what the fuck to expect from that experience, right? So, why that, so that I, and I knew that this is a perennial subject, aging and also are changing because of our longer, more, I'm giving you the background because this is how I'm thinking when I'm thinking about how I'm going to fit this into the world. So then I'm thinking, okay, so why is this subject important? Well, our mortality is longer, so we are all living longer, which makes sense why we don't know how to have a relationship to age. Also, we're inundated with images from the media. So there's all these issues that can give me not only writing points, but talking points, and ultimately provide me avenues for which to promote this book. Then a why this author.

                                    04:18                So while I'm someone who's turning 50, I'm a humorist. I've had every experience you could possibly have in that arena from having worked as an actress and having people stare at my face, wondering how to light the bags under my eyes, to then being a mom and a person in the world who doesn't give a crap how people see me on a good day. So I felt like I had a well rounded experience of this and then, why now? So I felt that was timely. I mean, some of these things, they, they're interconnected, right? I felt the subject was timely because of the times we live in. And in the book video that I created, which is easy to Google, I also mentioned all what I did was, you know, I researched all the things that were turning 50 when I was turning 50 like Playboy magazine. Like all these things that would then give me both writing and talking points that would be historical and I could reference in my, you know, ultimate promotion and also in my writing. So then I have the why's, and I feel very passionately about this project and this idea and hopefully I have a good product, you know, good writing to go along with it. The next part of how I'm going to be successful in the launch, in my mind, is to mobilize and make 1,001 lists that have to do with the other principal that I feel is the two pronged thing. One is the passion and dedication to the project. And the second is I believe a project will be successful if I can get as many people talking about this project that aren't me as possible.

                                    06:10                And that's where the thousands of lists come in. And these lists are all informed by the first principal, which is my passion for this project and dedication to this project. So my lists have to do with why should I reinvent the wheel, right? I don't need to invent an audience for something that's in the social zeitgeist. I just need to identify where people are already talking about the thing that I'm doing. So how do I do that? You know, in this age of, you know, internet, this is where one of the great things, this is one of the tools we have is first of all, you know, just starting out in my wide circle, narrowing the circle in closer and closer. So first of all, I go wide. I mean you could go either way small and then go wide. But first I might just do simple Googling of like groups that deal with people my age or aging, you know, I mean I might have things on the top of my head of, you know, let's say women's magazines or AARP or things like that. But then I want to go wider, things I don't know. So this is how I ran. Some things come to me obviously because of having a certain profile in the public. But then this is how sometimes things like women's conference in Boston, I'll see that that's happening. And then I'll see if there, if I know anyone who's connected with it and you know, the world is really small in the world of, ultimately in the world of people who write and people who speak on issues. And so maybe I will know someone who is associated with the conference and I can contact them. But I have also cold contacted people and had that work very well because I have a passion, a real passion and dedication to this idea.

                                    08:18                And one thing I hadn't mentioned is, and in advance of publishing, I will have created a trail for myself of material which I have published on the subject. So I will be able to contact people prior to publication with not only references to the work I'm doing, but to my track record as a person who is knowledgeable, even I mean as a humorous or is writing on that subject. Right? So I will have, you know, let's say I'm contacting this, and by the way I do this even though there are people, you know, publishers or I have personally hired as publicists, sometimes outsourcing to other people is a good idea. I often find that people appreciate personal contact. It really depends on my relationship or lack of relationship to the organization. So, then I will email links or profile of myself of, you know, or some kind of demonstration of my connection to that issue or subject or group and say, Hey, I've got a book coming out. I'm going to be in your area. Whether I will be in that area or not, I will be in that area. I want to make it as easy for them as possible. If I think that I can find a way to piggyback a bunch of groups together, right? So then, let's say I get a positive response, right? I don't even know how it's all going to work out yet, but then I'm able to contact or tell the team of people I'm working with, you know, I'm going to be in Boston speaking at this women's conference at the time of the book release. Is there a book festival that's happening then?

                                    10:25                Then I've got, once I get myself, for instance, one of the things we can do in this day and age that distinguishes us, if it's possible and you feel comfortable doing this, is live events. There's still nothing like a live event when you're actually selling books, which are, you know, there is a certain incentive to sell a actual physical copy. Although you know, I love my audio book listeners all that too. But also my goal, first of all, one of the things I want to mention about this is in piggybacking events and going to do live events, the goal is not actually the live event. The goal is the email list going to people who might come to the live event. They might not come to the live event. All again, it's this idea how many people are talking about my project that aren't me. So, it's not the event, it's the surrounding press, an email lists of the people who are then they're promoting their event and in turn promoting my project. So it's this cascading domino effect of getting more and more people spreading the word. And again, like it's such a funny thing. Every author knows this. You can be a bestselling author and have an event where two people show up. One year I did South by Southwest and it was standing room only sold out, one year I did South by Southwest and there were, I think three people in the audience. One was sleeping, one was someone who wanted to publish a book, and the other was in a dragon onesie, you know, I mean come on people, you know, it was kind of hilarious. I mean, and you have to have that attitude.

                                    12:24                But ultimately it wasn't about, no, of course it's great to have a great event. And when I can, I also try to do a guaranteed book buys and then sometimes I'll do, I'll even forgo a part of my speech honorarium for a book by if I'm at pub date time. But again, like, yes, of course I want to sell books and then of course I want the most people there. Cause, you know, giving a presentation to three people, well, one who is sleeping, I think they loved it. There's always people who come and sleep at my presentations.

Anna:                           13:03                But you don't know how you're impacting their dreams!

Annabelle:                    13:06                You don't know. And the funny thing is there were three people at that event. One of them actually was a booker for other events and booked me at another event. So you never know. You absolutely never know. But also again, you have to have, your in it for the long run. And also what's called the long tail of publishing, which is you don't want to just sell a pub date. You're trying to create a very, you know, and by the way, publishers do not think about this. Publishers are really geared towards release date only if it hits grade, if not, goodbye. Call us. Never. How's never sound to you? But you as an author have to be thinking of your whole career. So you're in it for the long tail auxiliary markets of speaking, of sales to film and television film, also for setting up your next book. So you want to keep selling and selling so you're, you're in it for this longer effect. So once, so I've gone to the wide circle to try to get events or also press. Maybe what I've looked up and seen is a group isn't, you know, is a podcast, is a online magazine that I hadn't heard of. Again, I look for any commonalities of people. If not, I will either outsource that to someone else, or I will contact them cold or also one of the things, one of the ways that you, I think are successful in this business and everybody does it, everybody. From the biggest bestselling authors I know to people who are self published. Usually when I do, what I'm about to describe now I put it in the subject line. So if it, if it upsets anyone, please skip it. It's yes, this is that email from your friend with a new book coming out.

Anna:                           15:08                I have gotten it from you.

Annabelle:                    15:08                Yes. You have. Yes, you have. And, you know, it's the indignity of being an artist, but I feel that I try to tell myself this at least first. There's two things about this. One is that, I always, always promote my friends and colleagues work, a why, a rising, what is it arising?

Anna:                           15:40                We don't write in clichés.

Annabelle:                    15:44                Tides and boats go together? Right? I mean, it's, I want everyone I know to be successful because most of the people that I know, with very few exceptions are all people who feel like I do. This is a ridiculous career. And you can either make a killing or go broke doing writing books. I mean, it's crazy, but you do it because you have to do it because you believe in something, because you're convinced of an important of a message or an experience that you had. And so I want everyone I know to do well. So it's not a problem for me to get that email, but it's always nice to just know that we all get lots of these emails. And so, first of all, when I'm sending this email that I know that most likely I have promoted your work, you, the person who is getting this email and gladly so. I want to make that clear. Secondly, I tried to, I mean I'm a dedicated atheist. I do, it's hard to do this. And so I will say a little secular prayer before I send out the email, just saying, I hope that people don't get annoyed by this because I genuinely believe in the message that I am communicating here. And I do. It's just still, it's hard because some people are busy. I'm busy, you know? So some people will immediately return your email. Now that email might say, Hey, do you know someone at so-and-so organization? Or it might be, you know, the email closer to pub date saying, Hey, you know, I hope you will help me spread this word and what a lot of people do and what someone actually instructed me to do like another author said this to me. It's really helpful if you're asking your friends, and this is really a label towards pub date. But if you're asking your friends and colleagues to promote you, it really helps to give them the exact language. Don't make people work hard. Even people who love your work and who've read this latest work, you know, don't, don't make them work too hard.

                                    18:02                Tell them exactly what you want them to say. And you can couch it in. Hey, whatever you want to do is fine. If you would like, here's a shortcut, here's the link to tweet, here's the wordage, here's something that people have done. There's one thing that drives me crazy and I really recommend people not do this. Say a friend like me takes the time to tweet or Facebook or promote and doesn't use the exact language you've used. Suck it up, do not email and say, “Hey, could you change that to be the blah blah, blah, blah,” live with it people! You know what I mean? That is just, that is where it gets annoying. I have one person on my list who does that regularly and I just, I bristle at that. Otherwise I'm happy to get your email. You're going to get one from me and if I, and I feel it's a trade secret to not stay, you know who sends me these emails, but every, almost everyone I know with the exception of I think one person who wanted a Guggenheim Genius award or MacArthur and a Man Booker prize, everybody else, best sellers alike send those emails saying, “Hey, this is pub date. It's coming out.” But back to doing this is in the advance. I also have, and I think this is super important again, a community of friends who are writers who we regularly share information of like, “Hey, do you have an editor stone so and so? And do you have an editor so-and-so?” Because as this circle gets closer, smaller and smaller to my research on outreach, I am looking towards places I can publish.

                                    19:55                So, what I've done is I've typically saved stories or thought about areas I will want to write on that didn't manage to fit in the book. And then I'll look for publications that might be printing something that I could write. And if I don't know someone there, I'll sort of gauge whether or not it's going to be best coming from my publishing publicists or it's going to be best coming from me directly. I don't usually write too cold. I don't, yeah, that I don't, I don't really recommend that. Although there are some places that are deliberately looking for people to do that, but that's usually non-professionals. They want sort of real people stories. So, if you’re a professional, I think it really helps if you can find a connection. It's just a sort of a safety valve that editors use of you putting in the subject line, “So-and-so said to reach out to you.” And then I, and one of the things that I do in order to do my research, this is, as the circle gets closer and closer because I've done my research on what titles are in the same arena as me. I will go to the websites of those writers. And this is not in any way I think. I don't want to sound stalkery or also like I'm trying to like, you know, piggyback off of someone's, you know, or like write something similar. It's just if I know where there are books that are in what I consider my vein, then, and I see who liked their books or who published articles from them, then I can direct my energies towards the most likely places that would want to hear from me.

                                    21:58                Personally, that really works out and sometimes it's more tangential than other times. So, for instance, I'm going to give you an example that where I mentioned someone's name. So, when Jill Solloway who’s an acquaintance of mine who generously blurbed me before and I love her work so much. So when she launched Transparent, my book, I See You Made an Effort was coming out, I think it was close to then or one of my books. I looked at who was giving Transparent press, not because my work was related to her work. And this is another level of like this is like the opposite or maybe it is Dante's inferno front circle of hell of publishing pre publishing release. But it's the reason why I researched who was covering Jill was because Jill is also a Jewish artist. Now that is a category that I fit in. I am a secular humanist person with a Jewish background. And yes, I absolutely use any kind of personal identification because there are readers who seek out writers with my background. At the same time, and I guess people could judge for themselves whether this is exploitative, but I write about Jewish themes, but I have to write about secular themes and living life as a person of identifiable background. But it was also a secular humanist. So at the same time as I was promoting my last book, Wherever You Go, There They Are. I simultaneously went on the Jewish Book Council Tour and toured the country with secular humanist atheist groups. Because these are on, I actually was not connected to those groups, but I contacted people in those groups and I traveled with Richard Dawkins and interviewed him.

                                    24:14                I did an event at the National Mall with a big convention that was happening because that is, because one of the stories in my book was about the family of secular humanists and what draws us to that world. And so, those are two seemingly contrary groups that I write about and genuinely identify with and feel passionate about. It might seem contrary, but this is the life that I genuinely lead conversation that I genuinely engage in with myself and others. So I was on the atheist and Jewish tours at the same time.

Anna:                           24:58                Amazing. Well, life is full of contradictions. Now, okay, we have to get close to wrapping up. So let me ask you one thing that, you have been so successful at this. I mean, we should talk about how you get on Bill Maher, how you got on WTF…

Annabelle:                    25:18                I've been on Mark's show several times and Bill's show numerous times. So these are longstanding friendships that I've had with people in the industry and that just really speaks to, first of all, how old I am. That Bill Maher and I did a movie together in 1989 when I was headlining a show on HBO and he was a comedian trying to get a standup specials. I might appear to be a little misanthropic, but I value community and community building, genuine community building. There are communities I cannot, I mean I draw the line. There are people and groups, anything to do with Marianne Williamson, I always lose friends and followers this way. Have at it people, anything to do with magical thinking and new agey, secret stuff.

Anna:                           26:30                Vision boards are not hanging behind you the way white boards are.

Annabelle:                    26:34                No. They're not. But you know, longstanding friendships and communities, we all work together. And so it's because of those now then I will make…because my subjects matters often deal with things in the social, political, economic arena that allows me to branch out on various MSNBC and CNN and PR, you know, kinds of media beyond my known circle of friends. So having a community really look—identifying where your message will speak to and having the genuine passion to propel yourself past a thousand no's that you will get along the way, I think are all combined ingredients to making a project successful.

Anna:                           27:34                We will meet people. We will have, I'm particularly great at having connections with people who become huge and completely alienating myself from them by the time they're huge, and then feeling uncomfortable about ever reaching out as if they've forgotten me, even though they might have been people I was really close to.

Annabelle:                    27:59                Well, yeah. And I'm going to give you some examples. So, at one point I had a writing partner who has gone on to a fair amount of success. Let's just say Peter Spiegel, the host of and creator of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on NPR. And you know, I've never gotten booked on that show and I reached out a number of times and you know, ultimately it's someone's prerogative whether or not they feel that you or your project will add value. And there's this horrible acronym that always gives me the creeps, but it's really good. It's Q-TIP. Quit Taking It Personally. Because some people will see a value in your work and having you as part of their universe that you knew from the way back and some people will not. And you know, that's just not my business. Sadly, although I can totally spiral into “I can't believe,” you know, but, you know, it's just, it's pointless there. It's just not going to; it's just not going to get you anywhere. I mean, I enjoy obsessive compulsive thinking. This is where your obsessive compulsive nature is your friend and your enemy. My obsessive compulsive nature, my OCD, makes me just so driven to, you know, just do, to push every limit and to explore every option. It also, I can, sure I can spend an entire night thinking about someone, how I work. “I can't believe they don't” you know, whatever, pointless and yeah, they have their own reasons. Who knows? And you know, also sometimes it can switch. And again, this goes back to do I really feel I have an important message. That's ultimately what keeps you going when you get rejections.

Anna:                           30:21                And it's so, it's such an interesting point too, because I know when I was really in the traditional publishing world, there was this thinking that you had to produce a book a year. That's what my publisher told me. And that's what I did for six years. That not only makes it so that you're not as passionate about it because it was this pressure to come up with new ideas, but you just don't have the time to nurture it the way, to send out those requests as sporadically as possible, to wait two years between them. Do you know what I'm saying?

Annabelle:                    30:51                I do know, I know exactly what you're saying and it's really hard. I think the thing is most people understand, and I think, you know, it's just the nature of the business. And, you know, there are some times when I will feel like, “Okay, that person is just not interested in me. I get it already.” And I'll just cross them off my list. But, you know, even when you're producing things, I mean, you know, you have to be strategic about what you're asking. And it's not always fun. And again, one of the things you can do as to counter the asks that you make is also sometimes I'll be on it before my friends will ask. You know, I just, I really take that seriously that I must, you know, walk the walk and do the same for my friends. Also, if you have a friend and you are going to their book event.

Anna:                           32:09                Buy their book.

Annabelle:                    32:12                Buy the book! It kills me. It kills me when someone who you, I mean the hilarious thing is authors, you know, there can be like a thousand people in an audience and you will remember who didn't buy the book.

Anna:                           32:26                It's the worst because it's so, it's such a big deal to show up, especially in Los Angeles. And then you hate them for not buying the book. And yet they showed up for you. It's the worst.

Annabelle:                    32:38                It is. It's just awful. But you're trying to be entertaining or maybe your book is very serious and you're trying to service this really important message and in your brain you're also counting how many people are going to buy. “Is anyone going to buy?” Because what a civilian doesn't know is that if you don't sell a certain number of books at your event, you will not be having an event there again, it's not, Oh, next time, you know, it's so hard. Writing books is not for the faint of heart.

Anna:                           33:16                But I think that promoting them is for the even less faint of heart.

Annabelle:                    33:20                Well, writing the book, I mean is, is you know, my God, first of all, writing is hard. Selling is hard. What's so funny? It's, I think it's so fucking hard to sell a book and you know, you just, it's really, it never ceases to amaze me when someone will say, Oh, I'm going to, they are somewhat a friend of mine, whatever friend would come to, has come to a lot of my events and said, “Oh I'm going to share a copy with so and so.” You just want to, you know, you want to stab them and, but it's hilarious because the truth is they just don't know how small a margin you have as an author for being successful, and you don't want to hate people, but you are mentally Xing them off your Hanukkah list, of cards even. I'm not going to, you know, it's the most undignified piece. I feel like, you know, my great grandfather was what they called like a peddler in the Ukraine. It all comes back to Ukraine just by the way.

Anna:                           34:32                Always.

Annabelle:                    34:32                Always. But so they were a peddler and Ukraine but sold like their wears off this like the back of a mule. And I think I’m like that sometimes.

Anna:                           34:40                That's how it feels.

Annabelle:                    34:44                How sad he would be to see me like I've got, I've got books right now, you know.

Anna:                           34:49                In your trunk.

Annabelle:                    34:50                In the trunk. And the other day. Okay. The other day I'm with a very good friend and their mother and she says, “Do you have a copy of your book, my mom should read your book. Do you have one in your car?” I'm like, “Well of course I do.” I'm ready to sell her mom a copy of my book in the trunk of my car. She takes a look at it and it has like a tiny spot of coffee on it and just, “Oh no, I want a fresh copy.”

Anna:                           35:18                I know. I will say that's why self publishing rules because you've only paid like $3 for a copy and you know what I'm saying? And you're fine giving them away.

Annabelle:                    35:31                Well, self-publishing to me I feel like is a great option if you know you have an audience. I'm still hooked into traditional publishing because I don't know that I could publish and not have at least some of that machine behind me. But I mean, if you can make that work, it's fantastic. I totally see how the advantages. I haven't gone there, but yeah.

Anna:                           36:02                I'll convert you. The machine never did anything for me, but that's like even what you're describing, you did it.

Annabelle:                    36:08                Yeah. Well, but see what I did was, I mean, and look, there's a lot of different ways to cut this thing. What I did was I am capitalizing on the fact that a large publishing machine is, I can use their name. Right. But I mean, you know, there are some, there are so many downsides to the big publishing machine because if they're not in your corner, your book doesn't have a shot unless you are, I shouldn't say that's true because it's not totally true. But you have to really know that. I've had the experience. I've had great experiences with a big publishing machine, but then I've also had the experience where I thought they were really going to push something and they didn't, which is why there's, you know, there's just nobody, there's nobody who's going to love your book as much as you are and treat it like you do a child of yours to send out into the world with every advantage. You know you are really, you know that that book is your, is your offspring and to launch your kid or a book into the world, it's going to take more love and chutzpah then you would ever think is possible.

Anna:                           37:31                Okay. We are so over time, so let me just wrap up. This has been fantastic. I would say the three main points when it comes to a launch according to Annabelle Gurwitch, be passionate, make sure you are so passionate about this topic that you can talk about it forever or at least until your next book. Get as many people talking about it as possible who are not you. Reach the F out and then piggyback events around this potential, like, Oh, I'll be in town. Even if you weren't planning on being in town. Those I feel and Q-tip, quit taking it personally if it doesn't work.

Annabelle:                    38:11                Yeah. That's it.

Anna:                           38:14                I'm so glad I took notes. Annabelle, thank you, you’re a goddess. Thank you for doing this. Thank you everybody for listening. If you would like to find out more about Annabelle, what is the best way to find you?

Annabelle:                    38:24                Go to my, go to my website. AnnabelleGurwitch.com and if you don't spell it right, you'll probably get there anyway.

Anna:                           38:30                Yeah, it's like so dissimilar from any other person's name out there. Okay. Delightful. Thank you so much.

Annabelle:                    38:38                Thanks.

 

Make Sure Your Readers Can Afford You with Scott Duffy

 

Scott Duffy is an entrepreneur and business strategist who's listed as a “Top 10 Speaker” by Entrepreneur and has been named one of the “Top Influential People To Follow” by Yahoo! Finance.

But that's not why I brought him on the pod. I brought him on because he's also the author of three different business books on three different topics, from three different publishers and launched in three entirely different ways. When I was at his mastermind a few weeks ago, he articulated why entrepreneurs should launch books in a way that was clearer than I'd ever heard. That's why I wanted him on the show but what I actually got out of our talk was so much more.

In this episode, we got into the importance of subtitles, why authors should be featured on their book covers and how his most recent book launch was a disaster.

RELEVANT LINKS:  

Scott's site

Scott's books

Scott speaking information

HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY:

→ You can get my 5 steps to creating a life-changing book

→ You can apply for an Authority Experience to have us create the concept and promotion plan for your authority-building book

→ You can apply for a call to work with Legacy Launch Pad (our publishing packages range from $7k-150k)

RELATED EPISODES:  

What I Learned From the Party Girl Re-Launch

What Book Would Help Build This Entrepreneur's Business?

Approaching Your Book Like It's a Business with Bonnie Habyan

TRANSCRIPT:

Anna David: Thanks for being here, Scott.

Scott Duffy: Hi. Great to be here.

Anna David: So you are a genius and author. And also, as I was just telling you, someone who articulated what I have been trying to articulate for many years, and you just did it off the cuff. Well, let’s talk about what you said that I loved so much.

Scott Duffy: So what happened was you and I were having this conversation in Park City. So, I was throwing an event we had, say, 50 entrepreneurs, small business owners there, and a whole bunch of them wanted to write books. But the challenge that I saw, which is a challenge I’ve seen since the last 30 plus years they’ve been around this industry, is that most people don’t know why they’re writing a book. So, when we start a business, we write a plan, I always like to say start with the end in mind, right? Think about where it is that you want to be, what you’re doing this for, and then back out a strategy. So what we were talking about was this, you know, I always ask people, are you writing a book, because you want to be a New York Times number one best seller, and you’re willing to invest the time and the money in this project, because you believe it’ll bring you a tremendous amount of business, whether that’s in speaking fees, or in other ways that help you and your company to grow? Are you writing a book number two, because you want to have a business card, that you’re able to hand out to everybody?

And this is like your introduction to them. And the strategy for doing that is much different, it costs a lot less to do, you’re going to have to your cost per book is going to have to be super low. So, you’re going to be able to give away a lot of these books, right? Are you writing a book number three, because you want to, for example, build a list. So what you want to do is you want to have a book online, people enter an email address, or they enter a phone number, and then they’re able to download your book in exchange for you being able to send them marketing messages. So, what is your strategy? What is the reason that you that you’re doing this? And what you and I were talking about is like your client, that you primarily is writing because they want to hit? You know, they want to be that New York Times bestseller.

Anna David: Well, this is actually the way I remembered what you said, it’s slightly different. When entrepreneurs write books it’s for three reasons. One is the free plus shipping, or give away for free, basically, they want your email address is that it’s my business card, but I kind of hope you don’t read it. Like it’s there. And you know that I did it but there’s probably tons of typos and stuff like that. And then the third is the legacy book. And I don’t look at that as like the number one New York Times bestseller. You know, I don’t believe in shooting for things that .00001% of the population can get the don’t make a difference. Take it from someone who is a New York Times bestselling author and was borrowing money to pay my rent after I hit that list. So, to me, a legacy book is it does those things, those other two ideas too, but it’s something you’re proud of. I think it’s the way you feel about your book for entrepreneurs, maybe you feel that way about all three of your books. I don’t I don’t know, you tell me. Are they legacy books?

Scott Duffy: No, one of them is one of them. Maybe two. So, the first book that I wrote was called How to Invest in Self Storage. And the reason I wrote that book is I’ve been in the tech industry, I’d had a series of kind of wins financial wins in the tech industry. I decided I wanted to invest in real estate, and create passive income. This is a long time ago. And it’s back before there was a self storage, you know, like a Public Self Storage where you put your stuff and you keep it. Like before those were on every corner. And before I’m a real data driven person. And so before I invested anything, I wanted information, I wanted to learn about what I was going to potentially invest in. And the challenges the self storage industry didn’t have a lot of that. So in the just for perspective, in the self storage industry, there’s like 50,000 self storage facilities in the United States. And the biggest owner of self storage facilities only owns 3% of the market.

So, the majority of the industry is people that just own a one or two, so it’s a lot of mom-and-pop businesses, meaning you don’t have big companies that are aggregating public data in order to share it, they don’t have to do. So what I did is I went out there to talk to everybody, I could assemble all of my notes. And I’m like, if I want this, I’ll bet there’s somebody else that wants it too. So, I went to the biggest publisher in the industry called Mini Co. and I said, “What do you think?” And so they said, “We think that’s a great job that doesn’t exist out there.” So, they helped me to hire an editor and we put the notes together and we launched it. I think to this day, it’s the bestselling book about self storage in the industry, which is kind of ironic. So I wrote that. I wrote that entirely because I was trying to aggregate research so I could decide if this is a good decision to invest it in. Crazy. My second book was called Launch and that was a whole different process.

So, I wanted Launch to be a legacy book. And my goal was to make that a number one New York Times bestseller. And so I ended up getting an agent, she was amazing. We ended up selling that, that book to portfolio, which is a division of Penguin Publishing, and we were scheduled to be the number one big release for Thanksgiving weekend for the holidays that year, in business books. So here’s the thing, I had never written a book like this and I wanted the book to be written about how to scale a company. That was the goal. Okay, and this will come back, it’ll be important. So because it was the first book I’d ever done for a publisher like that, they required that I have an editor and they were very hands on in helping me determine who that editor was. The editor was the head of entrepreneurship, and did those kinds of articles for one of the two biggest business publications in the world. So, we’re thinking to ourselves, this is going to be a home run.

Well, here’s what happened, we had one year to write this book. So we started to work on it. And number one, he started to get all of these covers for that magazine. He had three while we were working together, so he would disappear. So, it just never really worked. It never really gelled. I kept going back to the publisher saying, I need more time, or I need different help. And they kept saying no, no, no, just every entrepreneur goes through this, every writer goes through this, just put your head down. It didn’t work. Until one day, the book, it just was so bad. It was so bad. And nobody would listen. I wrote a text-actually I wrote an email to the head of Penguin Portfolio. And the subject was in all caps: THIS BOOK FUCKING SUCKS. Okay, I wrote this book fucking sucks. Because I had to get somebody’s attention. Yeah, he was on vacation in Mexico. He called me right away. He said, “This book does suck. You’re right, we need to make a change.”

And he said, “The change starts with you.” And it’s really important for authors for writers, that change starts with you. He said, “We’ll do our part, we’re going to help find you another editor. But what do you really know about what you’re writing about?” You see, my core competency had always been launching companies taking ideas from idea to market. And he said, “What would naturally just kind of pour out of you? And it would be those stories versus the stories about growth and scale?” So, what it is I sat down, I was so by the way, depressed after that call, I’m like, shit, now I got to change the book. I got to change the title. I got to figure this out. We don’t have much time. And what happened in a is I went home that night, and I was talking to my ex wife was looking at my kids. And she said, “Well, what if the book wasn’t about like, you weren’t doing it for yourself? Who would you do it for?” And I said, “You know what, I would use this book to tell my kids who their dad was. That’s what I would do.” That became the purpose.

And then over the next six weeks, I started from scratch. And I wrote every word of the book from front to back.

Wow, in the book was called Launch and it was all about doing what I really knew. And so for me, that was a big lesson. And I think that, you know, when you’re writing a book, it’s really important not to focus on what you think is going to make money or what you think is going to do something you’ve got to focus on what it is that you know, it naturally comes to you. Because those are the stories. And those are the lessons that will truly connect with an audience. And so, I think, you know, that’s kind of what kind of what happened.

Anna David: But don’t you think it’s where what you know, meets what you know your audience wants? Don’t you think?

Scott Duffy: I think that if you’re writing about seeing this is the mistake I made, I was trying to write. Okay, I have to answer your question. I have share the story. The day the book was published, and I got my first copy, got my first hardcopy, I drove up to one of my mentors’ houses. And he was going to be the person first person I gave it to. He was like ADA, an iconic venture capitalist. I walked up to him and said, “I got the book I’ve been telling you about, you get the first copy.” He asked if I’d sign it and I signed it. And he looked at the cover. He said, “Your book is called Launch?” I said yes. He said, “You’re going to be broke.” That’s what he said to me. And I said, “Why would you say that? He said, “Scott, you have to make a decision before you do anything in business: do you want to have a rich customer or a poor customer?” And he said, “If you’re talking to people that are launching companies, they’re probably broke, or at least they don’t have a lot of free cash, because they’re investing everything they can into this business.”

He said, “So you can be the very best in the world writing this book or doing what you do. But if you’re going to have a poor customer, you’ll be broke because they can’t afford to pay you.” He said, “Where would you rather have a rich customer?” And I said, “Well, these are the stories I know how to tell.” He said, “If you told them just a little bit differently, what you know, they would appeal to that person too.” So that was a really big shift. I wouldn’t try and invent. First of all, I would get really clear on who my target is and can they afford to pay me what I want them to pay me? Number one. And number two, I would focus on the content that they really know and understand. And if I have to tweak that a little bit, to make it relevant for a different market, I would do that. But I wouldn’t start from scratch. I wouldn’t try and lie, or not stretch the truth about what I was really good at.

Anna David: Did you rewrite it after he said that? Or you just said, fine. You leave it?

Scott Duffy: I said, “Fuck, are you serious?” And by the way, it was really awful. For me, my stomach, like I love this man. And so to my feet, and I was so embarrassed, you know, but it was the right lesson for me at the right time. I actually, it was the right lesson for me. It would have been great if the timing was a little different.

Anna David: It was the right lesson at the wrong time. But also, the Jeff Walker book Launch was already out or?

Scott Duffy: No, so Jeff and I were talking. So, Jeff was working on Launch while I was working on Launch and a mutual friend Travis Euston put us together because Travis was in the product launcher world. And so Jeff and I talked by the way, our books came out like the same month. In there’s two things I learned from that experience. Number one, you can’t trademark the title of a book. So a lot of people will seek see that they can stay claim to a title, you can’t trademark that right. What I learned is the most valuable part of selling a book is the subtitle. And that was just what Jeff and I talked about. He said, “We can both have the same title. It can look the same way it can be identical. But your subtitle has to talk to your market. And my subtitle has to talk to my market.” And that was a really big lesson for me.

Anna David: That’s so interesting. I don’t want to interrupt you but I do think it depends on the book. I think there are subtitles where you don’t the reader doesn’t even notice what the subtitle is. A short title, absolutely. And especially like your subtitle is no pun intended, critical. But I don’t think that’s always the case. I think it is true in this case. Okay, so keep going.

Scott Duffy: I think that the subtitle really has, because if you’re in a bookstore, I mean, I don’t know how many people are still going to bookstores but when Launch came out, if you’re in a bookstore and then your target customer is looking at a shelf and they’re skimming, you only have a few seconds for them to know if that’s the book, right? So what attracts the verse? It’s going to be the color and the font, the positioning on the shelf, who you’re around or who you next to. By the way, when I wanted to sell more. I went into every bookstore I could wherever I was. I moved my book next to Gary Anarchic. I moved in next to whoever was hot at that time. You have to do that. You got to have a little bit of Sara Blakely from Spanx in you.

Anna David: And nobody stopped you. Right? You’re like an affable big dude. Nobody’s going to be like, ah, that guy stopped the guy moving the books. You just did it, right?

Scott Duffy: No, I did. And here’s the thing, the people in the bookstore couldn’t care less, because they just want to sell books. Right? So, I did, I would take pictures. So I learned about the importance of a subtitle learn about the importance of the impact that your cover, and that needs to have in a very short period of time. So that if two people are looking at books, the subtitle for Launch was: the critical 90 days from idea to market. And the reason was, our publisher had research showing that in the next year, having a number in the subtitle was going to be like the thing. So they actually did that.

Anna David: I mean, the publisher research…you don’t even want to hear my rants about traditional publishing. So it sounds like that was a great learning experience, but not necessarily a wonderful publishing experience.

Scott Duffy: It was a terrible publishing experience. It was awful. It was incredibly stressful. The book fizzled, because by the time it came out, I was so burned out from the project. I just I had no energy or desire to go out into to promote it the way the way that you should do, you know.

Anna David: Me too. And so, the next one, you said, “This is going to be different.” Right? Is that what you said for your most recent book?

Scott Duffy: Well, I actually said, “I’m never going to do this again,” first. That’s what I said, I’ll never do this again. And then what happened was, I had a video series called Business and Burgers. I would travel across the country, Alan Taylor, and I, and we would go the awesome burger places. And we would interview entrepreneurs like Daymond John, and people like that, over burgers and sides, and it was a blast. We ran about 45 episodes of that show. While that show was airing, I was contacted by Entrepreneur Magazine, and they said, you know, the publishing group, Entrepreneur Books, really enjoyed the first book and didn’t understand why it didn’t get bigger pickup. They said, “What if we went in and we updated the book, and we updated the stories, and we added some more connective tissue, would you be open to that?” So, that’s what we did. Now, the problem that I ran into in this circumstance was a disagreement about the title and the subtitle.

So, here’s the thing. If you read the breakthrough book, the title and subtitle don’t tell you what’s in it. So you don’t know what you’re buying. That was a big disconnect and that hurt. I’m just sharing. I mean, I’m committed to sharing the good and bad of everything, you know. And so what I learned is I was much happier with the book itself, but I think that the title and subtitle got in the way of it, and so we’re actually in the process of redoing that with new stories. And I can’t show the title yet, but it’s very descriptive to come out next year.

Anna David: Okay, wait, stop. Breakthrough is your brand. So I would think that that’s the perfect title for you?

Scott Duffy: Well, here’s what I learned. Breakthrough is a brand. But if you are a personal brand, your name has got to be your brand and that was a lesson for me. It was a lesson for me because my brand was Launch. Oh, no, no, no, it’s not. My brand is Breakthrough. Oh, no, no, it’s not. I’m in education, technology. I’m working on a book right now. Education right, is that my brand? No, my brand is Scott Duffy. And so, for me, that was a real big lesson. And I think it’s interesting, because if I used to be back in the day, you’re too young for this, but it used to be when I was starting in the industry. The way you got to know somebody and see who they were, was there was a one inch by one inch picture on the back cover of the book. Yeah. So like when I worked for Tony Robbins back in 1990, right. The way anyone got to see him before the infomercial was he had a book and on the back there was the picture. That was it. I think that as it relates to books, and today when personal branding is so important, I am an advocate of putting your picture on it somewhere on the cover. Yeah, because you are the brand. And I’d be curious to see to hear what you have to say about that.

Anna David: You know, it’s very interesting that you say that. I’m a narcissist, and I’m very vain. So, I think I should not just be on the cover of all my books, but on every book, and yet I’ve never done it.

Scott Duffy: Why not?

Anna David: Out of fear of being judged as vain. And also I really vacillate between, is it my experience? You know, it’s sort of like that idea about marketing, change all your eyes to use, make your stories. I don’t know the answers. I do this. Because every book, I learned more. I mean, I think I approach it a lot like you do, but I also have to so that I can stay on the cutting edge for my clients. So I mean, I’m kind of excited. I’m like feeling something inside, like, ooh, could I go on the cover my next book, but I don’t know. So you didn’t do that. So, this is how you feel now, you didn’t do it before?

Scott Duffy: That’s how I feel now. And like in terms of change, you know, a change in approach, one thing that I did really learn what was the Breakthrough that I really loved versus the way I wrote Launch. The way I wrote Launch is I literally sat behind a computer all day, and just wrote, and then what I would do is I would write a chapter, I would send it to an editor. The next day, the editor would send it back, I make corrections. And then we move to the next. Now, I’d like to say that I wrote a chapter every day that in practice, it doesn’t work that way, you know, some take longer than others. But that was kind of like what the flow was, with Breakthrough the flow changed. So, with Breakthrough, what I started to do is I love to move and I love to be active. So I downloaded an app called Rev. And I actually wrote a lot in the book while I was walking. So I would be walking, or I would be in the gym or whatever and I’d record on Rev and then what we would do is I hit play, and then when I was done, I would have that transcribed. By the time I was back from the gym, or my walk, or my run, or whatever it was, it would be in my inbox, I would send that to an editor. The editor would then organize it and compile the thoughts in there was my chapter. What was really cool about that also is, once that was done, I can take that I could turn that into a blog, quote boards, a million other things. So I highly recommend if you’re not the kind of person that wants to sit behind a computer all day, leverage a tool like Rev. If you’re a blogger, and you’re in the car, just talk about what you’re thinking, and boom, you’re done.

Anna David: Here’s what I want to say about that. Yeah, and I’m this is not like, this is not sucking up, you speak the way a lot of people try to write you just are naturally like that, I do not think that works for everybody. And I say that because we’ve had clients who have said, oh, I’m just going to send over my like brain dumps. Tt is very hard for us to make that into written material, it is far more effective for us to interview them, I think somebody interviewing you is going to be more effective. However, if you’re like Scott, and you’ve got the gift of the gab, then I do think that can work more effectively. But sometimes you are making an editor’s job hard if you do it like that.

Scott Duffy: Okay, so a couple thoughts on that, because you’re right. I think an interview is like the gold standard. If you can get interviewed, I mean, like that’s freakin awesome. I think, if you’re a speaker, a professional speaker, it can really be a challenge. And you got to learn to get better when you’re dictating. The reason is, a speaker can just talk forever, and say nothing. They’re really awesome at it. Right? So, it’s almost like you got to get that inner TikTok voice working in you where you got like, eight seconds to a minute, or whatever it is. Yeah, you got to learn how to talk in shorter in shorter sound bites. I think I’ve seen that with speakers. When I wrote Launch, the way I would tell a lot of the stories because the way I teach is story based; the way I would tell a lot of the stories was almost like dictating a speech. And this is really important for right for people who want to be authors. The way you speak at people, right when you’re onstage, is different than the way people read. It’s really important.

If you just gave them a speech, they’re not going to get through if you give them something like should be written about. Totally different. The other thing is if you’re hiring an editor, this is a lesson I learned in Launch. The person that we used was a magazine editor. Okay. So think about this. They were exceptional at writing things that were really short and it stood on their own. So if you’re writing a book, and you need an editor for a book, you need somebody that understands basically how to craft a story that builds as it goes, right? And where there’s connective tissue from one thing to the next. So, when I wrote Launch, and I was dealing with that first editor, the reason the book didn’t work is everything was totally disjointed, like a bunch of articles. So, it’s really important to know the perfect target avatar of who your writer or your editor is, in order to have a book be as successful as you want it to be.

Anna David: The good news is that most magazines have gone under. So most magazine editors have transitioned into being book editors. I came up as a magazine editor and then I learned to edit books, because you know, necessity is the mother of invention, you just learn, right? But that’s great. That’s a great tip. So let me ask you what have and we got to get close to wrapping up? Tell me what these books have done for your career?

Scott Duffy: Well, I mean, they done a number of things, I think that the one thing they did is they helped me to, actually, I’ll tell you what the most important thing is, the most important thing that they’ve done is they’ve helped me to develop a business philosophy that became like, I was successful doing things. And I didn’t necessarily know how I was doing them. I thought I did. But what I did is I was able to codify my superhero power. I think that that’s incredibly powerful. And if you want to be a great speaker, you want to be great at growing an audience on social media, you want to be great at building a personal brand, I think you really unmeet to understand who you are, what you stand for, and how you get to the results that you get to. And so, this really helped me to learn that, and it helped me to find where there were holes in what I did, where I really needed to, like grow myself.

And I really worked on those areas when writing the book. In fact, on the book breakthrough, I added a section on growth and scale. But instead of doing it myself, I went to a friend of mine named Rolan Frasier, who is exceptional at scaling a company, and almost made those chapters more like interviews, where we talk back and forth. And the way we positioned it is here’s how we work with this company. Here’s how we work with that company. So the content was organic, it was authentic, but I couldn’t have done it on my own. But when I was done with it, I’m like, I understand that now I can really help a company in that area now. So, in addition to a branding tool, it was like a growth hack for me as well.

Anna David: I love that because it’s kind of like I think a lot of successful people. They can’t teach what they do because they don’t know how they did it. It was so organic. It was when I started teaching that I’m like, oh, I got to figure out how did I write a book? I don’t know, I just did it. So, I think that I’ve never heard someone say that, the book is the opportunity for you to drill down and articulate. How did you do this? How can your reader do this? And so, and in terms of business, in terms of speaking, I mean, you were already killing it on the speaking circuit, but what difference has it made in your business?

Scott Duffy: You know, I think the book, it enabled me to market myself in the bigger companies was one of those things. So it’s one thing to have a personal brand, it’s one thing to have success with companies that you’re a part of. And for me, many of those were big media companies, big media brands, but having your codified philosophy, how you did it. I think, you know, that really helped me to open to open more doors. You know, I feel today that the book is like it’s a learning tool for us as authors. But I think that as a door opener, it’s incredible. It’s just you need to get clear as to which doors you want to open. Do you want to open the door of somebody hiring a speaker in a fortune 500 company? Or do you want to open the door of an entrepreneur that wants to learn how to create sales funnels?

So, if I were to share with anybody, like if somebody said to me, “where do I start?” And so, we’ll start by getting clear on what you want the end result to be and my second step would be create the perfect avatar of who it is that you want to speak to. And the more narrow you go, the more successful you’re going to be because if you try to talk to everybody, you’re not going to connect with anybody. The riches are really in the niches and when it comes to writing and when it comes to author when it comes to putting out a book, if you nail who your target audience is, I mean from the beginning. You’re going to be on fire.

Anna David: Yeah. You are fantastic Mr. Duffy; how can people find you?

Scott Duffy: Go to scottduffy.com. There, or you can you can find me on social media @scottduffymedia across all the platforms.

Anna David: I love it. Thank you, Scott. Thanks, you guys for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

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Use Your Book to Build Your Brand with Katie DePaola

 

Katie DePaola is an author, speaker, entrepreneur and the founder of Inner Glow Circle, a company dedicated to helping women entrepreneurs find their glow and live purpose-driven lives.

But most relevantly for our show, she is the author of At Least You Look Good: How to Glow Through What You Go Through, the latest release from Launch Pad Publishing. The book is part memoir, part self-help and all love; it's Katie's story about surviving Lyme disease and her brother's death by overdose while building her multi-million dollar business. 

HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY:

→ You can get my 5 steps to creating a life-changing book

→ You can apply for an Authority Experience to have us create the concept and promotion plan for your authority-building book

→ You can apply for a call to work with Legacy Launch Pad (our publishing packages range from $7k-150k)

  

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Anna David:                  00:01                Katie. This is so fun. I'm having fun already. Are you?

Katie:                           00:05                Of course, I'm having fun. I always have fun with you, Anna.

Anna David:                  00:08                This is our second interview. You may be the very first guest that I've interviewed twice.

Katie:                           00:17                Wow. I feel really honored.

Anna David:                  00:20                Well, the thing is, and it's because you're a podcast listener, you know how many times this podcast has changed focus. So, you're now on for a completely different reason.

Katie:                           00:31                I went back and looked and I really listened to our podcast because it was so good. And it was two titles ago.

Anna David:                  00:39                Yes. Well, yes, you're absolutely right. And it was so good that fans of yours reviewed it on iTunes, which takes a lot. Imagine hearing a guest and liking it so much, that one episode that you would go and review it. That's a very giving, supportive person. All you reviewers we're talking to you. So now what we're talking about is your book launch. It will be out tomorrow. It's the map is confusing for me because we're recording it early, but it's out this week. You guys go grab it. It's called At Least You Look Good, and it is published by none other than Launchpad Publishing. So, so Katie let's talk well, let's talk about your decision to write a book because it has been a long time coming. This one. When did you first decide you wanted to write a book and why?

Katie:                           01:37                I mean, I do feel like I'm one of those people who similar to you, like always wanted to be a writer, almost like writing books when I was like seven or whatever. But I sort of had forgotten about the dream a little bit as I think so many of us do. And then truly, and I talk about this a little bit in my book and certainly in the acknowledgements, but two things happened. One, I met Erica Jong at a women's writing retreat and she like looked me square in the eye and said, you have a book in you. And that was after reading some of my writing out loud to her, which I was in my early twenties. I was like, you know, about to pee my pants, maybe did as that was happening. And I remember I was the youngest person at the retreat and you know, I went home and I like tore through Fear of Flying and like, really, I just felt so connected. And I was like, Oh, I'm, I'm like this woman I'm like these women and yet didn't know exactly how that would play out. And then I had separately, had a psychic tell me a few years later, I remember she said, Oh, honey, you have so many books in you.

                                    02:49                And that sort of reignited it again. And so, there were things that I had written at that retreat. And after that retreat, I feel like we're always writing. And I remember something Erica said to me, she was like, you know, you have these characters inside of you. And your kind of always like hearing them. And then eventually it becomes really clear. And, you know, I think this is really relevant for people who are listening, but like, I'm me. And I also have this like character inside of me. Right. And so, I ended up writing a memoir. That's the book that I'm publishing with your team, Anna, but it's also like a, it's a character, right? Like I started to learn who Katie was and who Katie needed to be to the world in a way to be able to show up as a teacher. So, it's been a long time coming, like you said.

Anna David:                  03:44                So what did you learn about Katie that you didn't know, how did you, how did do writing this book change you also? Sorry, it's kind of separate.

Katie:                           03:55                Well, I think that the book changed me in that writing for me was extremely therapeutic editing was really difficult. Like it was also therapeutic, but it pulled a lot out of me. And I think what I learned the most about myself was and is my resilience and like my capacity to do hard things. So, for those who are listening and don't know my personal story, I lost my brother within a very short span of time. I got diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease that they said I had, you know, to the tune of you have brain damage and damage to your organs. And then I lost my little brother to an accidental overdose. He was 20 years old. He died in my parents' home. It was, you know, obviously we knew he was struggling, but you don't expect that ever I think, and that was, you know, the worst experience of my life. And I hope it will never get worse than that, but it was, you know, it was earth shattering.

                                    05:03                And then I was in a really, really, really bad relationship that I didn't realize how bad it was because I was dealing with all these other traumas, but I ended up sort of dealing with this, this trifecta of trauma. And that ended with my ex who I was engaged to who had given me I guess I won't tell you guys you'll have to read the book, but a blank carat ring and really had shown up as this like Knight in shining Armor, but was the exact opposite that ended with him calling and breaking up with me after committing himself to the psych ward. So, it was a lot, it was a lot. And I knew for me, writing had always been the therapeutic thing. I never felt like people understood me. I never felt like my parents understood me. And so, I would go to my room and I would write, and that's how I dealt with my life, and all the crazy things happening in my brain. So, it was certainly a coping that I think is also a gift.

Anna David:                  06:02                This is so interesting because the book and I should mention the subtitle is How to Glow Through What You Go Through and Katie's company, as you heard in the intro is called Inner Glow. Back when she did come on the podcast two incarnations ago, I think I even had glow in my title, struggle to success something, and we really bonded over glowing. So, this is your journey. How do you, or did you glow through what you went through and how do you tell readers to?

Katie:                           06:38                Yeah, so I talk about this in the book pretty extensively, but you know, glow was a word that had kind of been in my life and in my orbit. And my very first company quote company that I started when I was like, I don't know, 14 with a friend that was never actually, you know, never left my parents' basement, but it was called Live So That You Glow, like too long of a business, but that was like, you know, what we wrote on our business cards. And then when I started my first company, which was a spray tanning business, I called it Whole Glow and, you know, then I added coaching and I was like, okay, there's the outer glow. And then there's the inner glow. I was trying to find a way to tie all these things together, to tie all these parts of me together. And I think when you have a business that is a personal brand or has an aspect of a personal brand.

                                    07:30                You know, you're trying to figure out who you are while you're also figuring out what the business is. And I always say to like our students, like you are your ideal client. Like the thing that you struggle with typically is the thing that your ideal clients will struggle with in some capacity. And so, a lot of the people that we serve are people who, you know, are looking for their glow. And for us, that's defined as greatest level of want. That's what we call it. Greatest level of want as in glow, as an acronym. And I never knew that that was what it meant. But one day I was like on a run and it finally came to me cause, I always felt, you know, maybe it had a deeper meaning. And to me, the greatest happiness in life is finding, getting clear on what you really want and then going after it.

Anna David:                  08:21                Right, right. Now let's talk about the company because what Katie didn't explain is, while all these traumas were going on. She was starting in her Glow. So, talk about that please.

Katie:                           08:36                So what's so crazy is that I started IGC and then exactly 100 days later to the day I got the call that my little brother had died. Like I literally woke up one day. My other brother, I was traveling, my other brother called me and he said, you need to come home now, Bo's dead. And you know, I mean, you never quite recover from, from hearing those words, but I had to keep going. I felt I had to keep going because I had just started this company. And to be completely honest, having a business and having people to show up for, in my case, it was women to show up for my team. And also, people I was serving clients was the thing that kept me alive. Like getting that call and experiencing the death of a sibling for me was completely earth-shattering.

                                    09:39                It also brought up a lot of my own struggles with mental health and took me on a an intense journey that I'm still on of understanding myself in that way. And so, yeah, I mean, it's like, wow, I can't believe I, that was all the same time. And also thank God. It was all the same time because, you know, I don't know what I wouldn't would have done Anna if I didn't have something really positive to throw myself into, because I didn't feel positive at all. I felt like I was deep, deep, deep in the dark trenches.

Anna David:                  10:14                Well, and to speak to your point about you were building what you needed, you know, what you tell your students.

Katie:                           10:21                Yeah. We say create the thing you wish existed. And I think there's a line in the book. I forget exactly what it says, but it's something like create the thing that you wish existed when you were stuck in the dark and create it before you're ready. Like, I think that's so important. We have this whole thing and I don't know if it's like largely women or just people in general. I think it's just people, but we never feel like we're ready. I think this is one of the things I love so much about you, Anna in particular is like, I do feel like you just get an idea.

Anna David:                  10:56                I do it before like, I'm ready. Always. Yes.

Katie:                           10:58                Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, that inspires the people around you too, because you definitely have a high bar, but you also are like, let's just try, let's just try, let's see what happens. And you know, I, a little bit come from that mindset of like, let's, you know, let's throw pasta at the wall and see what sticks, maybe it's the Italian in me, but you don't know sometimes. And I hear this from like super, super successful people all the time. Like sometimes the thing that you really hoped, like musicians say this a lot, like the song that was a hit was like the one that they just kind of like spit out and they were like, nah, but then the one that they're like, Oh, I really think this is going to be a hit, like falls flat. And that's why it's important to create from wherever you are. Like, you know, we want to be in like a really great place, but sometimes our most beautiful creations can come from our shitiest places. So like, I think if you're an artist, meaning a writer or a musician or, you know, a business person, I think business is a form of art, then I think you should be challenging yourself to create from wherever you are.

Anna David:                  12:14                Yeah. That's so interesting. I mean, if I could count the number of things I desperately wanted, that I'm so grateful I didn't get now. And the things that just, you know, when I was building Launchpad, I was desperately trying to make online courses work. And I spent, meanwhile, people are coming to me and saying, Hey, I'd love to pay you a lot of money to write and publish my book. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm trying to sell these $17 courses to people who think they're too expensive. And it took me, so it took several people coming to me and being like, I need you to do this. And I will tell you to figure out how for me to get it through my skull. That that was the path. It wasn't my idea of what the path was going to be. So, okay. So how does the book play into it all? So it came from just this, like, you know, try older adolescent kind of escaping into a room to write, but how does it play into the business? The brand, all of it?

Katie:                           13:14                Yeah. It's funny. I was telling like my godmother this today, but when I was really young, I mean probably like 14 or something. I remember telling my grandfather who I talk about a lot in the book. He said, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, I want to be a writer. And he was like, you can't be a writer. You won't make any money. Right. And that was like, you know, he was kind of like first-generation wealth or some sort of wealth and had started a company. And probably was learning that it was better to live with some money than not with money and wanted his grandkids to learn how to work and be in business. Right. And it's funny cause you know, you always say similar stuff, like the message is delivered differently, but it's funny because you say similar things, Anna, that like it's not building wealth is not about the book necessarily. It's about what opportunities come from it. And so it's interesting because I look back and I'm like, wow, I really did take my grandfather's advice.

                                    14:22                I built a company before I wrote a book, but I was always writing, you know? And I think that's really important. Like the people are always writing in the backgrounds of their lives, the way it played out for me, like very literally is I really spent the last two years not to scare people, but spent the last two years, a lot of nights and weekends writing because I was running my company and, you know, and dealing with everything else that was going on. And so, you know, I think that like the business aspect is so interesting. And like for me, it was about, I wanted to get my business established and settled before I went to publish a book because I didn't fully know who I was yet. I don't think it has to happen one way or another. But I do think that writing a book can very much be and is often tied to having a business. And that like this overarching thing is your brand. You know, who you are, how you serve the world, what your purpose is, what you're here to offer, and all of those things.

                                    15:36                And so I don't know for me, like they go super hand in hand. I know the book is not a lot about my business. It's not, I don't think it's very much about the business. It's about what was happening in the background with my business, but you know, but it's so integral in like who I am. And I know that the book is going to open up so many other doors. I mean, even just like putting it on Amazon, like Amazon is a total search engine in and of itself. Like as a business owner, you're always looking for people to find you. And I know that people are going to find me and I think books have like legs, right. They have this viral sort of ability. And so for me, that's like the most exciting part of it is just seeing, I don't know, but seeing what other doors it could and will open.

Anna David:                  16:28                Oh my God, that's you just said so many things I want to unpack. You know, first of all, I was raised by the same people I was told, you know, no, you can't be a writer. You have to go to law school. Like they were mystified by my desire. And I really, they didn't say it in the nicest way and I was really defiant about it. And so I think that I was so determined to prove them wrong. I mean, my grandmother would send me articles about how no writers make it. And you know, and I always wanted to be from the kind of family that, you know, that says like, you can do it yet. I'll tell you the most successful people I know are from the families who said you can't do it. And the ones who were just told how amazing they are, the sort of gold ribbon society.

Katie:                           17:16                Totally.

Anna David:                  17:17                Yeah. Are just like, don't understand why things are so hard. And so I was so determined to prove them wrong, that I crank out six books in six years for Harper Collins. Like I've made it. And I remember calling my dad and being like, I just sold by six book and he goes, well, you would've made more money as a lawyer. And because the family value was so about money. I think that I really went in the opposite direction. And so I was a broke writer. And then I just sort of woke up and said, there's nothing admirable about being broke, working this hard. And being broke. Writers may be undervalued, but writing skills are highly valued. So how can I take my skill set and do and make money? And then setting up this company was the way I'm able to do that. And I think that that's why I preach it all the time, because a lot of people say, well, I'm going to write a book. I'm going to make all this money. Like, we all think it's going to be different for us, when you go into it without this mindset. And it took me so long to learn it, but I always say you won't make money from a book, but you can make a shitload of money from having a book.

Katie:                           18:37                I love that. It's so true. Yeah. I mean, I don't know yet I'll find out in two weeks or a week, but, you know, I really do hear you with that. And I think it's people it's important for people to know that and to be aware of that, just that they're not like going in with, you know, missed expectations, like, yeah, it's an incredible vehicle, you know, and you know that, and you've seen that. I was sort of the opposite though. Like I went, like build the business route and then my creativity was sort of cut off. Like I said, I was always writing in the background and writing things down and hearing these little threads of things. I mean, truly, there's like certain lines that I wrote probably five or six years ago, just journaling that are made it into the book. And that's really cool for me. Like I loved scrapbooking growing up and like, to me it felt like that. Yeah. So you and I are so kindred.

Anna David:                  19:32                We really are, I was obsessed with scrapbooks, go on.

Katie:                           19:35                Yes. But that's what it felt like to me is like pulling all these pieces together of myself from the past, from the present, even from the future, you know, and I talk about like connecting with your future self in the book, but my creativity had really gone flat and I will say Anna, and I think I said this a little bit in the book, at least in my acknowledgements, and I don't want to get too emotional, but you know, really going through the process of writing this book and you've been such a huge part of that. Like, it really did bring me back to life. I mean, I, my faith, my outlook on the world, like I had lost so much of that vibrancy that I had. And you know, I always said to myself, or really to God more, at least for me is like, if I'm going to go through all of this, like you better make it worth it, both to myself. And, you know, to, to the powers that be, and, you know, there's, I am in no way saying that, like losing my brother or any of those things are worth it because I've now written a book, like no way, no, how, not, what I'm here to preach. But I will say that being able to literally glow through what I go through, but take my pain and make it something that is pretty and funny and touching. And I'm getting so many, like incredible messages from people who have pre-ordered and, you know, like, not that it's worth it, but it makes it like, make a little more sense in my brain.

Anna David:                  21:15                Totally. And I mean, in 12 step that's the whole thing is we go through this in order to be able to help someone else through this. And, you know, cause otherwise it can be really hard to make sense of these things that happen to us and totally you get to help. And that's why books are so important because there's only so much work we can do one-on-one with people, by putting it in a book you're able to help hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. I mean, I've never gotten to that many people, but let's just be optimistic. And I love that it was so healing for you because I think that's another part of it. I don't know of anything more therapeutic than, well therapy and 12 step are quite therapeutic, but the next on the list is writing for me.

Katie:                           22:08                Yeah. And like, you know, like to the level of like my brother gets to live on, you know, and my family had started a foundation in his name and you know, it still exists. We're still working at it and people write and say like, Oh, because of how openly you guys are talking about mental health and addiction. Like, you know, my sister is like doing so much better, just like random stories. And like, I know that Bo is like so proud of himself. Like I talk a lot in the book about building a relationship with someone who's quote unquote on the other side or his past. And I know a lot of people will think that's super weird, but for me it like literally again, like saved my brain because I was like, Oh, there's a whole chapter that's called. He's not dead. And after getting the call, like Bo's dad, you need to come home to write that and to decide to use that as the title was like, so ballsy for me. And also, so like, I'm going to establish what happened here, you know? And my whole family really believes that Bose energy is still available.

                                    23:17                I don't know if this is too out there, but and I shared this on Instagram the other day, but I was doing like a card reading. I don't know if you're like into that kind of stuff at all. So I have this taro deck or this like deck of cards. That's like, I don't know about connecting with dead people. Right. Cause like, that's one of my hobbies. And I literally pulled a card the other day when I was like anxious about the book stuff and blah, blah, blah. And it's their messages from people who have passed, you know, quote unquote and it says I'm not dead. And I'm like, this is after like, you know, I mean, this was wow the other day. And I'm like, Bo you little sucker, you know, it's just funny. Like, and I say too, in the book, my greatest level of want, I thought that it was for my brother to stay alive. But what it really was for my brother to fulfill his purpose and like he's doing that and I'm helping him do that. And so it's like, it's not that it's like, Oh yeah, happy story, the end. But it's like hard story. Let's figure out what ending we'd rather have here. Or I guess we're in the middle of it. But you know, you get to write your life. And for me, writing was part of how I rewrote my life.

Anna David:                  24:29                Yeah. I mean, I always say this, it's like, you get to rewrite the story with you as the hero or heroine. Yeah. It didn't happen to us. It happened for us. And here, let me tell you the story. And like you said, it's the middle of it. We get to retell the stories all the time. So, okay. And so in terms of the brand and the possibilities, like what are your dream possibilities? Sure, more people are going Amazon is the third largest search engine in the world. So people are going to find you, but is it speaking? Like what would you most want this book to do for you?

Katie:                           25:07                Oh my God. I don't know. I mean, I feel like it could be like a movie, like I'm so open and I don't want to like pigeonhole the universe. So like I'm really open and certainly I want to be speaking and you know, I see myself on like big stages whenever we're able to do that again. And I don't know how long it will take me or I don't even know if that's what I'm going to want in three years. I mean, you really don't know, but I would say that my greatest level of want for the book, my highest level intention is for it to be a vehicle of change. Like I think it can save people's lives to be honest. And I, maybe that sounds like a ego, but I don't know. I wrote parts of the book for sure, but like God had a hand in it as well. And I know my brother was guiding me too, so I don't really know if it's like for me to say, but I think it could go a lot of places and I'm super down for that ride. Yeah.

Anna David:                  26:14                Yeah. I love it. And I will say this too, that though it was a struggle to get out. Like once you knew where it was. Well, first of all, I loved how open you were to suggestions because I knew you'd worked really hard and I kept wanting to dig in there and be like, okay, now let's do this. Now let's do this. I even tried to change the title. You would not have it. And it's good. It's good. But it's, I think once we know where we're going, I think a lot of writers get super off track because they're just, they're going to writing workshops and they're getting advice from this person and then they're writing and then they, you know, and that's why I'm always sort of hammering home structure and have a plan because if you try to write a book on your own without help or by Googling editors, like you could be doing this for years, decades.

Katie:                           27:05                Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think like you have so much experience, your team has so much experience. Like I wouldn't, I certainly wouldn't have been able to, I wouldn't have been able to publish this book without you and without our partnerships. So I am extremely grateful.

Anna David:                  27:23                I wasn't trying to get you to say that, but I will say so we met listeners when Katie was on the podcast. This is like the only, you know, I made a list recently of all our clients and how they all came to me. And you were the only one where it's like, we, we, I was just like, who is this girl? It wasn't even over zoom. So I never even saw your face. No, maybe was over zoom. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I just said, I want to hang out. And you said, well, I happened to be coming to LA next week. Let's have brunch. We have like nine hour brunch where we talked about Lisso and then, and then we just kept chatting. And then I was, I was really surprised actually, when you reached out to me, you were like, I want to talk to you about a book because I knew you already had plans and it had been gone anyway, I was thrilled. And I've been really thrilled with this experience.

Katie:                           28:17                Well, I found myself like really reading all of your emails and then like saving them like a weirdo. And like, I don't do that with a lot of people. I don't like people's emails. My favorite thing is unsubscribing. So like I, and, you know, you had just been like very reliable, like when I had a little question about anything, you know, you were just it's hard to find people that you can like count on, you know? And so I sound like I'm doing commercial now, but really from my heart. I was like, I think I actually called you one day in like a panic and was like, I'm freaking out. And you're like, you just need to have fun. And I was like, what in the world is she talking about? But I was really, look, my book meant a lot to me. It still means a lot to me. Right. So there's like this careful balance between like holding your baby and like, like setting her free. And I just like, you can't do that with anybody. Like I just was nervous and that's okay. Like, and I remember I was like, Katie, just because you're nervous to work with Anna doesn't mean it's wrong just because you're nervous.

Anna David:                  29:25                Cause your just nervous. If it had gone awry, you know, then it, cause we have a personal relationship. I, yeah, I was yeah, it's funny. Cause I remember exactly where I was walking when you called me. And I because we relate so much, I could hear the anxiety in your voice. And I've had, you know, six miserable book releases with Harper Collins and two glorious ones with myself. And I was like, I want you to have a glorious experience. And then we decided to work together.

Katie:                           29:57                I think there was this part of me that had disbelief that it was even possible for me to enjoy the process because let's be real. I've had a lot of crazy . And like, I'm not, I'm not one of those people. That's used to things being easy. I'm used to things being hard. So when you were like, you can enjoy this. This can be fun. We can take a lot of the work off your plate. I was like, I thought there was no way in hell, but now being on the other side, it's been incredible experience. I've gotten to know myself even more. I feel really, really, really great about what I'm putting out into the world. And I'm somebody who 100% once my face or my name and in this case, my face and my name next to something, I feel really proud of. I'm like a total perfectionist. And yeah, like I said, I just feel really grateful.

Anna David:                  30:49                I'm so psyched. I'm and I feel grateful for you. So, so as we wrap up, tell people how they can find your book. And do you want to give like a couple sentence summary?

Katie:                           31:00                Yeah. So you can go to amazon.com and type in, At Least You Look Good or my name, right? I don't know?

Anna David:                  31:08                Yeah. But you also have a site right? For the book.

Katie:                           31:11                Yeah. Go to innerglowcircle.com/book, easy to remember. And the book is about what I've been talking about. It's how I learned to Glow AKA survive through everything I was going through when I got Lyme lost my little brother and was, was trying to leave a toxic, toxic, abusive relationship. And it's about the ups and the downs, my, what I've been hearing. And what I also know from experience is that it's the kind of book that will make you laugh out loud and also cry. So it's funny when people are like texting me and they're like also reading while they're working out or something, or they're like in a public place, which you can't go a ton of public places right now, but they're like, I'm in a coffee shop, reading your book. And you know, I'm crying. And I don't know, it's just cool to have people have that experience. But I think the book is incredibly healing and there are some self-helpy kind of exercises, but you know what someone said to me, she said I've read so many self-help books, but after reading your book, I feel like I've never read a self-help book because yours was actually so helpful. And it's just very authentic. I'm very honest. And I talk about love and loss and how we can use the experience of loss to really get back to love very quickly. It's really a book about resilience.

Anna David:                  32:43                Well, this has been delightful, Katie, thank you so much for being my guest and y'all listeners. Thank you so much for listening. Go grab Katie's book ASAP. You will not regret it and I'll see you next time slash hear you. I won't hear you. You'll hear me.

Katie:                           32:59                Thanks Anna.

LINKS:

At Least You Look Good

At Least You Look Good bonus swag

Inner Glow Circle

Katie on the podcast when it was called Struggle to Success

RELATED EPISODES:

Matt George

Nancy Levin 

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!

QUOTE OF THE POD:

"Create from wherever you are. Sometimes our most beautiful creations can come from our shitiest places."

Raising Money for Your Book with Craig Stanland

 

Boy, does Craig Stanland have a story to tell.

It starts with the FBI knocking on his door, followed by two years in prison.

But that's not really what we delve into here. Instead we talk about the book he wrote on his experience—and the one major mistake he made.

Now that he's at work on book number two (title TBD—we get into that in the conversation), he's approaching everything differently.

Find out about that, as well as how he's planning to use videos to launch his next book, in this episode.

RELEVANT LINKS:  

Craig's website

Craig's book on Amazon

HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY:

→ You can get my 5 steps to creating a life-changing book

→ You can apply for an Authority Experience to have us create the concept and promotion plan for your authority-building book

→ You can apply for a call to work with Legacy Launch Pad (our publishing packages range from $7k-150k)

RELATED EPISODES:  

The 7 Biggest Mistakes First-Time Authors Make

How to Set Up an Author Podcast Tour with Alex Sanfilippo

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE OR
 CLICK HERE TO GET THE POD ON ANY PLATFORM 

Getting Press for Your Book with Peter Shankman

 

Peter Shankman is many things, among them a five-time best selling author, entrepreneur and corporate in-person and virtual keynote speaker who focuses on customer service. But in this episode I got him speaking about something so many of you ask me about: HARO, or Help a Reporter Out...the website he started (and sold to Cision many years ago) that helps so many authors get featured in mainstream media.

In this conversation, which happened in rapid fire while he was in the throws of salmonella, Peter shared with me how he started HARO accidentally, the best way to get a journalist's attention and why someone stealing a Yoo Hoo truck ended up being the best PR Yoo Hoo could get, among many other topics.

HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY:

→ You can get my 5 steps to creating a life-changing book

→ You can apply for an Authority Experience to have us create the concept and promotion plan for your authority-building book

→ You can apply for a call to work with Legacy Launch Pad (our publishing packages range from $7k-150k)

RELATED EPISODES:  

Talking About Your Book on TV and Podcasts with Media Coach Susan Harrow

Cameron Herold on Generating Free PR and Creating a Vivid Vision for Your Book

How Do I Use My Book to Get on Podcasts?

TRANSCRIPT:

Anna David: Hi, Peter, thank you so much for being here. 

Peter Shankman: Glad to be here. 

Anna David: So in addition to being an author, you many times over, I consider you someone who has helped authors get coverage more than anyone else out there because the first thing I do, as anyone who listens to this podcast knows, is I say go to HARO when you're writing your book, because you are writing a book on this topic, therefore, you are an expert on this topic. So I say thank you on behalf of all authors, Peter. 

Peter Shankman: You're welcome. It's nice to see something I created almost 15 years ago now. It's still very popular. So that's makes me happy every time I hear it.

Anna David: More popular than ever, it seems like. 

Peter Shankman: Yeah, people tend to keep using it. There's always a part of me that wants to buy it back. But they can't go back again. 

Anna David: Well, and also there are these poor imitations that I have tried, and I'm just saying, they just they suck in comparison. I'm not naming names. So tell me about the inspiration to start HARO. How did that happen?

Peter Shankman: So I talked to everyone I have massive ADHD. And when you imagine ADHD, you talk to everyone and if I'm on a plane, and you're next to me, unless you fake your death, I'm gonna know everything about you by the time we land. And so over time, you know, just growing up and living in New York City and Boston and California, I created this massive Rolodex. If anyone listening to you is under 30, a Rolodex like Outlook that has cards, and you turn it. And I came with this massive Rolodex of 1000s and 1000s of people and journalists. I ran a PR firm at one point in my life and journalists knew me and they knew. Peter, you know, I'm doing a story on whatever, who do you know, who does? I tell them, ya call this guy or call that guy.

And over time, more and more journalists are calling me asking me hey, I'm doing this or whatever. And the straw that broke the camel's back was I'm calling for the Wall Street Journal, a friend of mine at the Times said that, you know, a lot of you I'm doing a story on African farming. And my friend said, you have a lot of friends that are subsaharan soil experts. And 12 hours later, I found a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend at USC who knew someone, right? So it's alright, this is getting a little ridiculous, maybe if I, what if I put all the queries together and send them out automatically. And you know, that led to what is now Help A Reporter Out.

Anna David: That is amazing. So my personal experience with harrow is the very first time I used it, I wrote a two line thing. And suddenly, next, I'm quoted in Fortune magazine, I ended up being quoted millions, you know, dozens of times by that writer, then I have written elaborate, amazing things like blogs that are super random, and I never hear back. So what is the secret? Is it just a numbers game?

Peter Shankman: I think it partially is a numbers game. But more and more across the field. I think it's about an early response game, you know, think about this when the Herald was at 545. In the morning, by six o'clock, there are at least 100 people that have sent in a response to every single query. And so if you're smart enough to know your answer, you need to do a couple of things, you need to make sure that your response is quick and to the point, and is easy. You need to make sure that you can write in such a way that the reporters are willing to use the answers to all the questions they have without wasting their time. Most importantly, that you haven't done it quickly. So I mean, the best recommendation I can give, create a mock write up of what you would send with some key parts left blank. And those key parts are usually with reporters going to ask. And so you know, my name is Peter, I recently found a company called blah, we do blah, based on your query about blank. I think I'd be the perfect person to answer the question of what is blank, because our company, blank, and you know, that gives you that much more to work with and you can really read the Harrow, fill it out and send it within three minutes. The speed game, a lot of the speed,

Anna David: It goes up at 5:45 East Coast time, right.

Peter Shankman: 5:45 am East Coast, 12:45 pm East Coast and then 5:45 pm East Coast. Yeah, I have a friend of mine on the West Coast who paid me a compliment when she goes, I know I've been awake too long on the West Coast when I get Peter's morning HARO before I go to bed.

Anna David: I know that's my recommendation to you in California. It's just staying up all night. You'll be the first.

Peter Shankman: Well there are people who set their mailing program on their phone to have the Harrow act as an alarm. And so they wake up at 5:45 when it comes out so they can review it and answer it. Yeah, there are some junkies out there.

Anna David: What I think is really genius about it is, you know, I started in journalism back when we would never have conceived of taking emailed answers as a quote and tie and it just changed. Did you understand that that was changing? Or was that just a lucky break?

Peter Shankman: I started my career. I mean, I was a journalism major in the early 90s. And then when I'm starting my career, my first job in a school was I helped found the Newsroom in America Online. And I watched digital news be born. And I watched the birth of digital news between the US and MSNBC. People don't realize that MSNBC actually served from Microsoft NBC, and it was a Microsoft NBC joint venture. And we launched a newsroom in the height of the dot com boom, well, not the height of the dot com boom, but back when the dot com boom was first gaining its legs in the mid 19, early mid 90s. And some of the time the.com boom came around. I mean, do you remember something called Point cast? When cast? Was this this screensaver that would turn on and bring you information? Right? bring you news to your screen while your screen is off, right? 

While your screensaver was on. So you know, all I saw was where it was going. And I saw more importantly, that for every new bit of technology that was impacting journalists negatively, journalists are consistently having to do 10 times more with five times less or bite or scratch that reverse. And so for me, I'm like, Well, what can I do? I always had my job as a PR person back when I did PR isn't to make a client happy to make a reporter happy, they make the reporter happy, the clients I'm having by default. So what can I do to make that client happy? And for me, that was always offering them information, I didn't necessarily need to pitch them. And that was really the foundation of HARO. So the concept of being able to help a journalist do more with less, is really what sort of blew it up.

Anna David: And you also have a book about how to, one of your earlier books was really about how to, you know, kind of awesome PR sort of stunts, would you say?

Peter Shankman: Yeah, my first one was called, Can We Do That? It was all about outrageous PR stunts and how they can benefit your company.

Anna David: So how has it changed now? Do you have to be more outrageous today than when you wrote the book?

Peter Shankman: You know, it's funny. I'm talking about on CNN and MSNBC, and a lot of what they call me for back eight, nine years ago, they used to call me when when companies or people did stupid shit, when they took a PR stunt too far, when a celebrity said something stupid. With the invention of Twitter, and the dumbing down of America, and you know, our previous president, things like that, the bar for what stupid things actually are, has dropped, or has raised I guess, depending on how you look at it. And I don't get caught about that anymore, I get called about other things. But you know, a company making a stupid statement might gather two seconds of screen time when 10 years ago gather 10 minutes worth. So you have to ask yourself, you know, where is the bar? You know, it's the same thing with customer experience, the customer service bar is so damn low, that I don't need you to be awesome anymore. 

I need you to suck slightly less than everyone else. And the same thing sort of applies from a PR standpoint, there are so many bad pitches going out every single day in the media, that I don't need you to be awesome. I need you to just get the facts right, get them to the right journalist and get their name right. I will, you know, my two favorite stories, one which happened a couple days ago. And quickly is my new favorite story, as I was in the Omni Hotel in Florida two days ago about to give a keynote. Yesterday actually, I was about to give a keynote. Ming you, I was doing this with salmonella, so I wasn't happy to begin with. And I couldn't get online and I called the front desk. I'm like, “Yeah, my like, well did you enter your last name, and your room number in the bottom. I'm like, “yeah.” “Are you sure you are spelling your last name right?” “Well, it's been my last name for almost 50 years. So I'm pretty sure I got that part down, thanks.”

You know, and then the other one my favorite is, you know, last Mother's Day, I got a pitch. I still get tons of pitches all the time from the media. And I got one last Mother's Day. Dear Peter, we know that working moms like you have it tough. So you know that if that's where the bar is, I don't need you to be awesome. I need your walk crossfire. That shifts hard. I don't need to do any of that. I just need you to [inaudible]. 

Anna David:  I mean, you're preaching to the choir, this thing with hotels, like basically the companies that used COVID as an excuse to suck and never come back from sucking. Because they're just like, oh, no, we don't clean rooms anymore because of COVID. Sorry, sorry, what does that even mean? 

Peter Shankman:: Yeah, I got the same thing. Yeah. 

Anna David: So but in terms of a stunt that would work, you know, what kinds of things would you recommend? I mean, I'm looking at some of the things you talked about in that book. A small yarn shop that got people to eat their sweaters? 

Peter  Shankman: No, no, the small yarns shop, the best one for that. Well, yeah, that was made with a handsome Martha Stewart sweater, but the best one for the yarn shop was that we created. You know, the problem with the yarn store, they were just outside New York City, and when you’re just outside New York City, no one wants to visit you because you're outside of New York City, you might as well be in Wisconsin. And so what we did was we created a bus and we put two giant needles on the two giant needles and two giant balls of yarn made out of like, you know, plastic on the roof of the bus and drove around New York City picking people up taking them to the yarn store and bringing them Back called the Yarn Bus. And it was everywhere saying the show it was on Martha Stewart was all over the world. And they made a fortune. Because you know, they were the average spend, I think for every customer is like 200 bucks. And they're bringing like, you know, 300 customers a day, it was crazy. 

Anna David: And so, so these PR stunts that you wrote about in the book, were they all once you engineered? 

Peter Shankman: Yes.

Anna David: Okay, another one. You got CEOs to jump out of a plane in the name of brand visibility? Who is that for?

Peter Shankman: So that was actually for my PR firm. During the dotcom boom, everyone had a PR firm and it was trying to do better. And I'm like, Well, how can we get press that you know, what can we do to invite reporters and potential clients to do? Oh, a softball game, boring, picnic, boring, dance party, boring. Let's go skydiving, someone said. I don’t remember who. One of them. I mean, so 150 of us jumped on a plane. We called it a web dive 2000. We got a front page, tons and tons of press. My lawyer had a heart attack. When I told him what we're doing. It was incredible. And the best part about it was that the 150 people, 149 of them you know, jumped and had a great time. And I left it at that. Now I've wound up getting my skydiving license and I have over 500 jumps now. I've jumped over the Pyramids of Giza and all over the world. So yeah, it's pretty crazy.

Anna David: That was your first time though?

Peter Shankman: Yeah.

Anna David: And okay, another one: a stolen Yoo Hoo truck became a financial and media relations. Can you tell me about that one?

Peter Shankman: Yeah, we had a client. I was repping Yoo Hoo at the time. And we had a garbage truck that traveled around the country to go to the Warped Tour concerts in summer 2002. And they were followed by a truck with all the supplies, all the Yoo Hoo and everything like that. And that truck was stolen. And so we put in an APB offering a free lifetime supply of Yoo Hoo if someone found the truck, it was found in like 45 minutes.

Anna David: Oh, my God. So your brain, which as you've discussed many times, works really fast, just automatically thinks of these things. What do you think of something like that, that's going to be a stunt?

Peter Shankman: A lot of times, it's just understanding that, hey, this could be worth you know, I asked myself what I want to read about this, right? And that's really doing you should ask yourself, Is this something, if I didn't know, this company, if I wasn't attached to this brand, would I want to read this, but I want to take a look at what's going on with this interest me? And if the answer is yes, you know, why not give it a shot and see what happens?

Anna David: I mean, I think that that is the major problem. And I used to come at it this way. Like we think of our books as news. Our books are not news to anyone, no one cares about your book.

Peter Shankman: There is very little stuff that we do that could be considered news, very little. A lot of it is going to be the question of what is interesting enough to be worth the time of the journalist, because so few things are. So the question is, what can you find that becomes interesting to the journalist? What can you take a story that would otherwise be boring as shit? Repainting your conference room is not a story. Right? So what can you find that you can then take to the journalist? It's okay, this has some interest because it's not just about me.

Anna David: Right.  So how have you used this for your books? Did you do stunts? So how did you promote your books? 

Peter Shankman: Well, I mean, faster than normal. My most recent book, which is about ADHD, is the premise that ADHD is a gift, not a curse. And every media outlet I talked to, you know, thought of what they've been told, which is that ADHD is obviously a curse, it's a terrible thing to have. It's the worst thing in the world. But I cannot have a lot to say, actually, no, there's some benefit here. If you understand how to use your brain, and a better way, you can actually do pretty well. And you know, saying that, Oh, wow. Okay, never thought of it that way. Give me some examples at four or five examples ready to go at any given time, that changes things. So it really, it's a way of, can you make people think, a little different.

Anna David: And so it's not like you wrote that book with the concept like, Oh, this is gonna be really needed for journalists, this is what you know for books.

 

Peter Shankman:  I wrote the book based on how I can help people channel their iterative gene and how they can use it to their advantage, but I understood how to pitch it because of what I do for a living. 

Anna David: So somebody who doesn't have your contacts and doesn't, you know, but has a very creative brain and can think of saying, what would you recommend? Let's say they're like, I want to be on the mainstream media, and they've got a book about, you know, let's try to think of some kind of boring, I have no idea. Nothing is boring, adopting a kid. And they're like, this is my memoir. It's a really heartwarming story. How did they get media attention?

Peter Shankman: Well it's the human interest angle, right? You talk about, you know, I wasn't able to have children. And this was my journey towards eventually finding the child of my life, finding that child who changed my life is my journey of saving a child from abuse in Russia, whatever it is. You know, it's not just about her duplicate, where's the better part of that story? Where's the part that would make you go oh, wow, I want to read that. Where's that? You know, we have a very short attention span of 2.77 second attention span this country. So what can you do to make the reporter or the person or the reader stop and say, Okay, I'll give you more time? 

Anna David: Yeah, yeah. And do you, I had a previous guest who said, "Oh, you've got to call journalists" because others never call a journalist.

Peter Shankman: No, you never do not. If someone called me right now and I wasn't expecting the call, I'd have them killed. No. There is nothing good about making a phone call. I mean, I can't believe I used to answer those things without knowing who was calling. I grew up in the 80s. The phone rang. Hello? No, no, do not email, text anything with the report. First of all, find out who the reporter likes to get their information. The best way to do that is to ask them how they like to get their information, they'll tell you and you use that way.

Anna David: So how do you ask them how you look on Twitter? What do you say?

 Peter Shankman: Hey, curious, I got your email from the station or from wherever I'll have an idea for a story. What's the best way to pitch? They will respond and they will say "Oh, thanks for asking. Do it this way."

Anna David: Okay, so it's better to do that than just to go in for the pitch.

Peter Shankman: Oh, god. Yeah, make that first connection. Or follow them online. Hey, I saw this piece you wrote on XYZ. I loved it. I'd love to pitch you something similar. What's the best way to do that? Read their bios, a lot of time they'll write out what their bios are.

Anna David: Right. Right. And so you do occasionally, like you have a webinar coming up by the time this takes place, it's passed, on how to pitch journalists newspaper, TV, online, all of that. How often do you do these webinars? Can people just go to them?

 

Peter Shankman: Yeah, and actually, you know what you can actually even though it's, it'll be past when you run this, people can still buy the audio recording. So I'm happy to give you the link. So Shank.com/press. 

Anna David: Yeah, I mean, even though the hotel doesn't know that Peter knows how to spell his last name. He does. He just proved it. So I'm just, I'm just looking at some of the things you're covering in that. What guarantees you'll never get a response from a journalist.

Peter Shankman: Pitching them the wrong way, pitching them off topic or complaining that they wrote a piece and you weren't in it, they're obviously mistaken. 

Anna David: But you could write and say, I've actually done this effectively before, you can write and say I absolutely loved your piece. I'm going to not so humbly say, Hey, I also have a podcast about this topic or whatever.

Peter Shankman: Yeah, next time, if you ever do this again, once again, feel free to file this. If you ever do this again next time. Yeah.

Anna David: How To piggyback back off a great media hit. What's the secret? 

Peter Shankman: Yeah, the secret is to grab that great media hit, figure out why it went, why it was a success and alternate it, and pitch it in different ways. There are different brands out there, if you got a great TV hit, how can you turn that into press, how do you turn it into written word, you know, blog format, maybe some want to follow that up with a podcast, whatever it is.

Anna David: I remember I had a publicist on this podcast who said to me, you could never get on a mainstream show first time out, you got to work your way up through local TV.

Peter Shankman: You have really stupid guests.

Anna David: I mean, that's weird, because my first TV thing was CNN. And so is that just someone who doesn't get how to play the game?

Peter Shankman: Yeah, first of all, anyone who says anything like, you'll never. I had a great teacher in school who told me that on a true or false test, if there's not a multiple choice test if the answer if one of the choices are at are usually never or always those usually wrong. Great piece of advice. So yeah, there are tons of ways to do better than that.

Anna David: Yeah, you can absolutely get on CNN or Today Show your first time out, if you want the right thing. I'm related to that, something I used to say, to like, you know, when your thought is always or never, it's not a true thought. A no, it's gonna be like, whatever it is. So that can be applied in many, many places. What are the best email subject lines to get responses?

Peter Shankman: It varies, but you know, for me, and I'm not giving away everything for the webinar, but I would say that I've had a lot of success with just being straight up a pitch on XYZ. You get, you should follow the NY Times pitch bot, it's pretty funny. They come up with some of the worst pitches possible to be sent in here at times. But you know, anything that you can do that's out there, you know, just figure it out. Again, don't waste a journalist's time.

Anna David: Yeah. I'll tell you in pitching you because I was just looking at the email. And this is how I pitch people I really want on the podcasts, I'll go podcast requests 950,000 Plus downloads, not a bad thing. You said yes, quickly. 

Peter Shankman: I think at the end of the day, for me I don't mind doing things like this because it's good karma and [inaudible]. Yeah, I’m happy to help where I can, I think more people in the world should help.

Anna David: Great. Well, thank you so much for doing this while you don't feel well. If you could leave authors with one piece of advice, your final advice for them when they want to get media attention for their book or for themselves, what would you recommend?

Peter Shankman: One piece of advice. Don't focus so much on crafting a story about you, focus on what crafting a story that other people would find interesting that includes yourself. 

Anna David: Great. I love it. Well, Peter, thank you so much, the best place for people to find you. 

Peter Shankman: Yeah, my entire world is Petershankman.com. My social name everywhere is @PeterShankman, including Peloton. And yeah, reach out. I'm Peter Shankman. When it comes to my email, I'm always happy to chat.

Anna David: Okay, I'm going to find you on Peloton later today. Thank you so much. Thanks guys for listening. 

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE OR
 CLICK HERE TO GET THE POD ON ANY PLATFORM   

 

How a Book Could Make You $5 Million with Rich Goldstein

 

Rich Goldstein is a patent attorney, speaker, host of the Innovations and Breakthroughs podcast and, most relevantly for this show, the author of the bestselling book The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent, which was published by the American Bar Association.

He's someone who understands through and through what a book can do for someone's business and in this episode, we got into all that as well as how writing a book changed Rich's career, why he sends a copy of the book to anyone who requests it and how writing a book could, theoretically, make an entrepreneur a cool five million.

RELEVANT LINKS: 

Rich's podcast

Rich's book

Rich's site

HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY:

→ You can get my 5 steps to creating a life-changing book

→ You can apply for an Authority Experience to have us create the concept and promotion plan for your authority-building book

→ You can apply for a call to work with Legacy Launch Pad (our publishing packages range from $7k-150k)

RELATED EPISODES:  

How to Write a Book Everyone Recommends with Rob Fitzpatrick

What Book Would Help Build This Entrepreneur's Business?

Approaching Your Book Like It's a Business with Bonnie Habyan

TRANSCRIPT:

Anna David: Rich, thank you so much for being here. 

Rich Goldstein: Oh, it's my pleasure, Anna.

Anna David: So, as you know, I find you to be a delightful human being. And I don't mean to always preface it with this, but just, I don't mean for a patent attorney, but I just sort of mean, you're so much cooler and goofier and more fun than one might expect. Upon knowing the things. 

Rich Goldstein: Right, and I've come to accept that, too. It's like, I have another friend who's like, always described me like, he's the coolest attorney ever. I'm like, what about the coolest guy ever? But she's like, yeah, but you just wouldn't expect that from an attorney as well. So, I've just come to like, yeah, I'm gonna call me like, cool attorney, then that's cool. I've made my peace with that.

Anna David: I like it. I mean, being the coolest guy in the world, is it's just impossible to say. But the coolest attorney like I literally think that might be true. And one of my favorite things is, we were just in Utah, this mastermind didn't, it was a little bit of like a woo-woo meets mastermind. And there was this game, you could call it that we played where you had to go around the room and say your favorite thing about yourself? And do you remember what you said about yourself?

Rich Goldstein: Oh, I actually don't.

Anna David: You said, "I'm a goofball."

Rich Goldstein: Oh, awesome.

Anna David: He got that answer right.

Rich Goldstein: Well, yeah, it's true.

Anna David: So, but we are not talking about that. What we are talking about is, is the fact that you wrote this book, and your situation was different, because the ABA came to you and said, Will you please write this? But will you tell me about that? The American Bar Association for those of you who aren't familiar with that?

Rich Goldstein: I mean, I've been a I've been a patent attorney for at this point. 28 years. And I've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs throughout my career, but there are many other patent attorneys out there, like there are over 10,000 patent attorneys, let's say in this country. So, I got a call from the American Bar Association from an editor at the American Bar Association, saying that, well, we want to do a consumer guide on patents. And we were wondering if you'd be willing to write the book. And I talked to them more about it. And like, it sounded very interesting, and, of course, an amazing opportunity. But I asked, well, kind of why me, you know? And the answer I got was, well, we look and we see that you're out there in the world, you're not just sitting behind the desk. Like on your website, you should you mentioned 28 different places that you'd been to last year, different events and conferences where you've spoken at or attended. And that's what we want in an author, someone who's really out there in the world. And it's kind of funny, because when I was out there in the world, going to all those events, a lot of times people would ask me, okay, I get that you're here, and I get that you're an attorney. And this is what the subject is. Kind of like what they're asked me is like, what's the endgame? How you gonna monetize this? How are you gonna make money from being here at this event? How it was gonna be worth your while? I didn't quite know, until I got that phone call from the American Bar Association, that it, you know, essentially, was the fact that I was out there in the world that really led towards being invited to write the ABA consumer guide to obtaining a patent, which having written that book is the best credibility ever. And it came from kind of following this path of getting out there and relating to other people, meeting people, creating relationship. Well, I didn't quite know where it was gonna go. But I guess I kind of trusted that in some way would just come back around and it did.

Anna David: And then once you had the book, did fewer people ask you what you were doing at events? Did they get like, Oh, he's the guy?

Rich Goldstein: Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, I mean, things people introduce me as that then people that know me would introduce me. Okay, this is Rich Goldstein, and he wrote the book on patents for the American Bar Association.

Anna David: That's fascinating. Because when you said there's over 10,000, well, I only know of one and I hear about all the time and I am. So that book, you got blurbed by Barbara Corcoran, Frank Kern...how did you get those blurbs?

Rich Goldstein: It's all about relationship like reaching out through my network. And it's interesting, the Barbara Corcoran one because I didn't quite know. Well, first of all my research on her showed that she kind of had some negative things to say about patent attorneys. Like she had said, it's something like, for a lot of a lot of inventors The only one who gets rich is the patent attorney. And so, you would think like, maybe that's a bad person to ask to blurb your book. But then, when I reached out to her assistant and assistant said, well, what would you want her to say about your book? I kind of came up with the fact that like, like, yeah, like, you know, the quote is here on the back of the book, it's not always wise for entrepreneurs to rush to get a patent, but they should rush to get this book to learn about patents. Learn the process, spend your money wisely, and apply for a patent that the right time and for the right reasons. So that fit exactly within have thoughts of it. And, you know, and so after having given some ideas like that, that's what came back. And again, it was great, because it came from her. And also, it fits very well and how she feels about the role that patents play that people ought to learn about the process, and not just go give money to a patent attorney. Because that might be a mistake.

Anna David: And was that just literally a cold email? Or did you know someone who connected you?

Rich Goldstein: Yeah, it was, it was a warm handoff, it was an introduction of someone that knew her assistant. 

Anna David: So what we talked about in Utah was how when people read the book, they often then say to you, well, you wrote the book on it, what should I do next? How does it quote convert?

Rich Goldstein: Well, yeah, I mean, I think the when someone reads your book, you're immediately the expert. And I think like, if they found the book helpful, and they learned from the book, most of the time, it's not going to tell them, well, now I know everything there is to know. They know that they they've learned enough to know that there is a next level of understanding that there's a next level of looking at a situation and knowing well, which of these principles should I apply to my situation? And so, someone's read your book, they naturally look to you as you're the expert. And I would love to have you involved helping me with my situation, I'd love to have your take on my situation. But probably, I'd love to hire you to, to handle it.

Anna David: And so I mean, I saw on your website, it's apply for a complimentary calls, do the calls or just somebody on your team do them?

Rich Goldstein: I have someone on my team doing the call. I mean, I really, we get a lot of inquiries, and I couldn't possibly talk to everyone who was just thinking, Oh, maybe a patent would be useful. A lot of times, they need to be directed towards some type of educational resource, such as the book or videos that I've done that's on my website. But something to learn more about the process first. I would say there's a pretty high ratio of people that are potentially interested in patent to the numbers that the number that actually do something. And I know that from friends that contact me, so like just from them or friends or like, "Hey, I was thinking of patenting something, can we get on a call?" And I don't do those anymore. I refer those to my team, because it really is like 20 to one. 

Anna David: I hate that personal connection where you hand it off. I have no idea how you deal with that. But it's the bane of my existence.

Rich Goldstein: Oh no, it’s taken me a long time to be okay with that. And then I just kind of realized that I'm bitter about it, when I do it totally. I'm like, I'm getting on this call. And I know this is going to be a waste of time. So, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, so I just realized, like, it's not going to serve my relationship by getting on that call. It's better if I direct them to my team, and they, you know, they've got the right attitude, they've got a better attitude than me about having someone possibly, quote unquote, waste their time. Like, they're equipped for it. They're ready for answering the questions and not leading somewhere and, you know, like, so it's actually better. But yeah, I'm totally with you on that. I've always felt obligated. When like someone comes as a personal friend or someone who came referred by a friend, and they're talking you up and saying, like, oh, yeah, you got to talk to rich, he's the rock star in this and I feel obligated. Even though all the inquiries that come through regular channels through the website through advertisements or whatever, they all go to the team they don't go to me, but somehow it felt like those personal ones I need to handle myself. I’ve learned not to.

Anna David: Okay, you should coach me because I got one this morning. And I'm like, I don't want to do this, but I should. That being said, you lovely listeners, it's so wonderful. If you're interested in hiring us, my team, this one, I always say my team is smarter than me. They're better at this than I am. So talk to them.

Rich Goldstein: And they know how to grease the chute to getting you on boarded as a client, like, I'm kind of fumbling my way through, it seems like I want to do a patent evaluation like, okay, well, let me see what information I need to get from you? Okay, I got your credit card info, oh, you know, I'm sorry, I got to call them back because I didn't get the three digit code or something like just the professionals handle it. When it comes to onboarding a new client, I am not a professional. And you know, I think that's the guiding principle.

Anna David: So this book, so because you were approached, you didn't probably even know what a good marketing tool the book was going to end up being. Or did you?

Rich Goldstein: I did. I mean, you know, like, I thought it was a little bit too good to be true, right? Like that. I'm going to be writing this book for the American Bar Association. And yeah, I mean, I've always loved marketing. And marketing has always been a big part of my business. Since I started, like, I started out in the 90s, with Yellow Page ads.

Anna David: And then I was listening to a podcast, I think it was even one of yours, where you said you had a magazine?

Rich Goldstein: I did. And it's so funny. I have it on the desk here, because it was anyway, I recently found this magazine that I was that I co published back in the 90s. It was a magazine for inventors that had articles on how you pursue the patent process and articles about like prototyping and things like that. So yeah.

Anna David: So did you go from Yellow Pages to magazine to book or and you do a lot of videos and you have your podcasts? How does it all play into itself? 

Rich Goldstein: Yeah, well, let me, I'm looking for something here in this magazine. I'm just looking for the ad, there's got to be an ad for me, hang on one second. Because the thing that's interesting about the magazine is essentially, I was doing content marketing, in print form in the 90s. So I had a magazine, lots of info, the info that people are looking for, people that are my target customer. And then ultimately, they also got to see me in the magazine and call my law firm. So this was content marketing in print form in 1994.

Anna David: Ahead of his time. 

Rich Goldstein: So then that evolved over time. And just to answer your question, I guess what evolved is the audience and where the audience was hanging out and what the audience was looking for. And so it was kind of like, what ties it all together. And then the book like has, I'd say, it's kind of like a dual role, where it's got its role as a content marketing piece. Like most content where people find the content that are interested in learning about it, they read up about it, gets the more interested, brings them to more with a cool middle of the funnel. And then ultimately, maybe they become a customer. But its values also just for the fact that it exists. People that never even read your book, never even possess it. Or going to recognize that you're the author of this. So there's the content marketing aspect, there's also just a straight out credibility of it. 

Anna David: It's interesting, because at this mastermind, what came up was there are three reasons entrepreneurs do books. One is the sort of free plus shipping simply to get somebody on a newsletter list. One is the book. Yeah, hope nobody reads but you just get credibility as the author, and then one I call the legacy book, and it looks at it, you know, yours is more of the third, wouldn't you say? Of course.

Rich Goldstein: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's part of my personal brand is another way of say legacy, I guess. Legacy as like what they think of later on.

Anna David: Well, I mean, not to be morbid, but later on, you know, that's why I don't see any point to the first two kinds really, ever first kind, I understand. But the second kind, it's like, if you're going to put it out there, have it be the highest quality you can. That's what I said. 

Rich Goldstein: No, absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm a stickler for writing. Like I'm very particular by writing and I don't want anything with my name on it that's not well written.

Anna David: Do you do all of it yourself? All of it? All your writing: the magazine, the book, the blogs, everything?

Rich Goldstein: Oh, no, not all of that. But all of the book, yes. I 100% wrote the book. And the magazine was a, there was different people contributing back then. In terms of like blog and web pages, there are other people that write articles for me. And some of them, I'll be honest, some of its a little bit cringe worthy. And some of it I don't really like, and I've had to accept the fact that it's not going to be written the way that I want it to be written. And most of those pages don't even get read, they just increase the rank of my overall site. They are just part of the system that that increases the, you know, the overall positioning of the website. So I'm okay with it being kind of like, I wouldn't write it like that. I wouldn't say it for certain stuff, for other stuff, yeah. But that's been a little bit of a hurdle for me to get over is because I want everything under my name to be perfect.

Anna David: That's came up for me this morning. My podcast guests said, Well, I was looking at the transcript, and I saw that there was this error, it was the tiniest error. And I've heard it back and I go, Look, nobody reads the transcript. I'm okay with a little error being there. You can still share it. Because it's there for SEO and it works. So I remember you saying, back when you were the king of Clubhouse, we were all on Clubhouse, it would come up that you give the book to for free to anybody who wanted it. Tell me a little bit about that.

Rich Goldstein: Oh, yeah. So basically, I you know, previous to that, I had a few places where I had offered a free copy of the book. And there I would get maybe on average about 10 requests for a copy of the book that we'd fulfill per month. But then, you know, December of 2020 When I got deep into Clubhouse, and really like it was quite a ride. And he's on clubhouse like 20 hours a day. Exaggerating a little bit, but not by much. And so like just kind of like really was involved with Clubhouse. And then on my profile, I created a landing page where people could request a copy of the book. January of 2021, I got over 100 requests for a free copy of my book. And I know in that month, I think I got at least five clients from Clubhouse. 

Anna David: That's a decent amount. What was I going to say? So we have to get close to wrapping up, do you think every entrepreneur should do a bug?

Rich Goldstein: I think it depends on what your sales funnel looks like. If you're doing high ticket, then absolutely, then absolutely, you should do a book. I mean, if you're I guess you have to think in terms of intended audience, maybe even if you've got something where you're building a platform, it's going to be a platform with a digital tool. And that you sell for $5.99 a month monthly recurring revenue. So maybe like it's not going to help that audience. But maybe it's going to give you credibility when you go for round the funding. Or when you go to exit your company. Whereas like, you know, the fact that you wrote the book will suddenly be the difference between maybe a $20 million exit and $25 million exit, in which case, that's $5 million for the, you know, like so there are subtle ways that it could help every entrepreneur. But I would say certainly, if you are, if you've got high ticket offers, then you absolutely should write a book.

Anna David: Well, Rich Goldstein, you're fantastic. How can people find you if they'd like to reach you? 

Rich Goldstein: If you want to find out more about me, I mean, one thing you can do, I mean, if you want to learn more about patents, first of all, you can go to my website, which is Goldsteinpatentlaw.com. There are great videos there and other resources. And if you want to find out if it's a match to work together with us, then there's a way for you to set up an appointment to talk with my team. You can also check out the book is the American Bar Association consumer guide to obtaining a patent by Richard Goldstein. You can find it on Amazon. And I also have a podcast, which is Innovations and Breakthroughs, where I feature top leaders and the path they took to create change. 

Anna David: I love it. Well, Rich thank you so much. And you guys thank you for listening Nate I will talk to you next week.

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