Anna David's Blog, page 6

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

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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.

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

Use Social Media to Sell Books with Zara Barrie and Dayna Troisi

 

I literally don't have the words to describe the experience of recording this episode but suffice it to say that it was the most fun interview I've ever done.

Back story: Zara Barrie and I knew each other online (I find her incredibly glam and we're mutual fans of one another to the point that I recommended her book, Girl Stop Passing Out in Your Makeup, on KATU). She told me that she and her podcast co-host slash work wife Dayna Troisi were going to be in LA (they're NYC ladies, natch). We decided to do a podcast swap, they rented a studio and the rest is history. If history involved me becoming obsessed with these two hilarious and brilliant lesbians who, in addition to co-hosting their podcast GirlZ Interrupted, also, between them, regularly write articles that go viral, are university professors (one of them, anyway), produce an audio series (the other of them) and do so many other things that it would be impossible to summarize.

We recorded this right after they recorded their interview with me so were already BFFs by the time this particular recording started. This means that, in addition to covering our main topic—how to turn an online audience, once you've gone viral, into an audience that buys and reads your book—we had many delightful diversions (swag, whether or not your friends support your book, if you should be on your book cover and more).

Listen and you'll become as obsessed with them as I am. Speaking of, you'll want to stalk them in all the following places:

Socials:

Zara on IG

Dayna on IG

Zara on Facebook

Podcasts:

GirlZ Interrupted

Girls on Jane

Websites:

GirlZInterrupted

Dayna Troisi

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 

Should I Create Swag for My Book?

What Makes a Great Book Cover?

What I Learned From the Party Girl Re-Launch

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

How to Sell 100,000 Books with Paul Angone

Paul Angone had an extremely unusual journey to success as an author.

First, he tried to sell a book. For eight years. Nary a bite.

Then a blog post he dashed off went viral. Very viral. From there, he was able to sell a book based on that blog post to a publisher. The problem was that he had to finish it in a month.

Well that book and the next have sold over 100,000 copies and launched a massive speaking career.

Listen in on this mega inspiring conversation about how your reality may end up being even bigger than your dreams. 

RELATED EPISODES:

Making a Newsletter Into a Book with Jeff Kober

What Are the Exact Steps to Publishing a Book?

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:  Paul, thank you so much for being here.

Paul Angone:  Thanks for having me.

Anna David: Okay, as I told you, I stumbled across you, because I was trying to find people who had successfully taken courses and made them into books. Somebody did a blog post about you, I reached out. Turns out your story is infinitely more interesting than that. And you have so much to share with my listeners. So tell me about your journey.

Paul Angone:  Yes, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on, it is an honor being here. And I started as a 21, 22 year old thinking I was gonna write a best selling book. And then I quickly realized how difficult that is and how long of a journey it is. And I wanted to write a book about helping confused, broken hurting 20 somethings, because I was a broken hurting confused 20 somethings. So it was built out of this own passion of mine, but then I began that long, arduous journey of how do you get published. So I was working on this book, working on this book. I had every publisher around, turn me down. And this is over the course of seven, eight years. So there's a lot that goes into being unemployed, of working random jobs, of going back to school, getting married, you know, doing life, but always kind of keeping this dream of, “I really want to write a book someday. And I really want to help 20 somethings, and there's really not that many books to do that. And I think this is important. So I'm going to keep leaning into this.” So the long and shortened story of it is, I ended up ending the contract with my literary agent, because typically, you need the literary agent to get you in the game, they're one of those gatekeepers that still plays an important role. Yeah, but I just saw the writing on the wall, because every publisher would say, “we like your book, we like your voice. But we can't publish an unknown. Yeah, you're you're you're nobody, you got to build a platform.” So that's when I started hearing about platforms. So I started my website called allgrownup.com.

Anna David:    Grown spelled G R O W N.

Paul Angone: That's right, growing, like you're growing pains. And started blogging. You know, this is when blogging was a big deal. 

Anna David:    What year was this?

Paul Angone:  Gosh, that is a great, great question. Let's see, I started 3/8/2011, because I thought it was really funny that three and eight added up to equal 11. So that's how I know.

Anna David: You know, Paul has got an interesting sense of humor. You find that funny.

Paul Angone:  I made postcards too. Literally, we just had our first child, and I have memories of my wife and I making little postcards to mail out to our friends for a website launch. This is us trying to do the best we can. So I blogged for a while and realized that blogging is harder. And finding an audience online is not just easy. After about a year of doing the blog, and again, I've been working about eight years on this. Making very little money, working a full time job in marketing now. And just doing all this at six in the morning, or at lunch or late at night. I wrote an article called 21 Secrets for Your 20s. I just threw this article list up. And before I did that my wife and I had a very serious discussion of, “when is enough enough?” “When do you need to quit?” “When are you beyond being stubborn and beyond being passionate? And now you just got to see the writing on the wall.” Yeah, that's not going to happen. And she was right. And I was like, Yeah, I'll give it a few more months. I was at my deadline. Back against the wall,l type experience. I just threw up this article, this list 21 Secrets for Your 20s not thinking much about it. And then it went crazy viral. And mainly through the social media platform of Pinterest, which I wasn't on, really.

Anna David:    So somebody saw it, some confused 20 something, and posted it on Pinterest. And it just went crazy.

Paul Angone:  Crazy. They posted the 21 Secrets for Your 20s blog image that I created within like three minutes just threw it up. Yeah, they posted that image. And I was literally having that moment, which I never experienced before, one where I was refreshing my screen. And you could see this share totals, like jumping by 50. By 100. I mean, it was happening right in front of my eyes. But then also my website started crashing, which I didn't know that could be a problem. I've never had that issue. So I'm in the back room of my marketing office pleading with my server to, “please put me, this is the time that I've been hoping for for eight years.” Where publishers were continually telling me, “prove it, prove it, prove it.” And now it was happening. Yeah. So long story short, an author friend was excited and put me in contact with their publisher. So a blogger, author friend, who I had been networking with for years, was like, “Hey, I've signed a deal with these guys. I think they would love you. Let me introduce you two.” And I pitched them the book I'd been working on all along, because I've been working on the same book for years. They said, “No, we don't want to publish that.” “But do you have something else? Because you got so much momentum going on right now?” So I really fell into the idea. I actually remember talking to Jenny Blake, who a lot of people know, great author, friend of mine. And we were even brainstorming, and it was like, in that conversation, we were like, “Well, how about you do like 101 Secrets for Your 20s?” It's got its own kind of brand and momentum. Yep, turn that into a book. And the publisher loved the idea. They gave me a month's deadline to turn that blog post into a book. And I'm not over exaggerating,

Anna David:    That's so rare, but they just capitalize on the momentum.

Paul Angone:  And that I mean, they were an old school publisher, but they were thinking, Yeah, especially my acquisitions editor, and if you can find an acquisitions editor, and there's a whole other story that is aligned with you, that's thinking the same way you are, I mean, it's like magic. Yeah. And so I just, you know, basically it was 9, 10 years of waiting and struggling and building a foundation. Yeah. So that when a viral moment happened for me, there was a lot to land on for readers. It's that whole kind of like, creating an overnight success and 10 years. Yeah. And it wasn't like I was an overnight success. It wasn't like everybody knew who Pauling Dhoni was all of a sudden, but I finally had that foot in the door type moment where I got paid a whopping $5,000 for my book. That was my advance for my book.

Anna David:    How much did you earn in royalties?

Paul Angone:  Well, so since then, so that's why I also encourage people,  who cares about your advance? It's great to have guaranteed upfront money, don't get me wrong. But to be able to pay back your advance quickly, especially for your first book, to not have that pressure. I feel like yeah, and then and then also, so 101 Secrets for Your 20’s comes out, and it had marginal success. It wasn't, it wasn't a New York Times bestseller. It wasn't blazing through 10 20,000 copies within the first two weeks. It was a long game, became a perennial seller. Then I just kept putting in more work into doing interviews where I can, speaking engagements, just building it as much as I could. And I think within the first year, it sold 10,000 copies, which was great, which I was over the top. I mean, because again, people that aren't in this world, they don't realize how hard and how unusual that can even be, you know, everybody just thinks like 10,000, who cares? But since then, it just kept slowly building, it found its home on Amazon, which was a huge help. With other books that were coming out at the same time, like, The Defining Decade and Adulting, similar type books in the same space. 

Anna David:    I keep thinking about Adulting. I remember I read that. 

Paul Angone:  Yeah, and none of us knew each other. But it was that moment in time where all of us were feeling the same thing in different ways. And they are in New York, with big New York budgets. We're helping my smaller publisher budget. Yeah, because I was wearing coattails. We're all on the coattails of each other really. 

Anna David:    It’s the customers who bought also.

Paul Angone: Yeah, exactly. So we were linked up quite a bit. And especially defining decade because she had just done NPR [inaudible] and then she had a TED talk. So she really went crazy with sales. So then you have my little 101 Secrets for Your 20s getting saddling, you know, saddle up right next to her and being buddy buddies. And that was a huge help to me. So long story short, it was like five, six years after that book came out, that I then got into Target, got into Sam's clubs and airport bookstores, I didn't really have any retail placement for five, six years, that is really unusual. It's really unusual. And I totally get that. But what it did start with that, you know, turning a blog post in the book. And that's how it started. 

Anna David:    And to be clear, now it's over 120,000 copies, and there's over 1700 reviews on Amazon.

Paul Angone: Yeah,  it's so wild. You know, and that's when you say like, your dream, you know, obviously, your expectations like they can get dashed and crashed and sped up so many times when you're pursuing something that's important to you. Yeah. But then there's also these rare occasions where it will go far beyond where you ever would have expected, you know, to where, like, even a small little anecdote like I have, you know, foreign translations, which is always wild to me. I have bootleg copies of a couple of my books in Iran. And I probably have my most passionate fans in Iran, and they've done a documentary about me. I mean, it's just, I mean, they've come to my house. I mean, it's because there was a filmmaker that he felt like his life got changed by reading about Buchan, Iran, he came to the states and now he's a filmmaker. So he wanted to make a documentary. But it was just so wild. Like , how much hubris would I have to say, “Well, I want to write a book that's going to impact people in Iran, who are 10 year young years younger than me. And I know nothing really about their culture, or what it's like to be there. But I really want to do that.” That would be so unfounded and so foolish to think I could do that. And yet, that's been one trickle effect, of sticking with it, of being stubborn and being passionate about what I was writing about. And then just running full speed once that momentum started going, just trying to leverage Yeah, every little bit of success I had, because it took me so long to get any of it at least it felt like that to me, that I just was like, I'm gonna leverage every little thing I can possible.

Anna David:    That's so you said so many things that are interesting. I mean, I think there's so much to the surrender, the conversation with your wife, where you're like, you're right. And I believe this is a spiritual thing. The universe is like, okay, you've learned your lesson. And what a testament to the non overnight success because you had the skills to back it up. You had the experience, you had  all of the things. I'm still waiting for my breakout success. My career is a testament to just consistent BS, I haven't had the A plus. And you know, and so I think also, this is such a thing about writers, it's so easy to look at someone else, and go,” oh, I want that.” Like, we're so all of us are so lucky to have any piece of the pie. Like I used to kind of go, “Oh, I didn't get what I deserve.” What if I got more than I deserve? What about that? So you have, you know, Iranian documentary, you have your books. And I want to see a lot of the people that I talked to say, Oh, I really want to do traditional publishing because I want my book in an airport bookstore. Somehow, airport bookstores have gotten fetishized. And Hudson will take money. You know, I think it's 10 grand. So get your book. And by the way, I bought Adulting in an airport bookstore. There you go. I know I never buy books in airport bookstores, what’s the big deal? People think it is a big deal.

Paul Angone: Fun full circle. Getting into Target, I never dreamed I would get in to Target. It's really hard to get into Target. And my publisher is a smaller publisher. So it was like one of two books, or three books that they probably have ever gotten in a Target, you know, so I'm a real it was a real rare occasion. But then people would discover you in Target, which was fun. I mean, because books are phased out. They're not just shelved. And so I have people like finding me for the first time Instagramming me while they're still in the aisle of Target and showing me their shopping cart and like, I'm loving this book, so it was a real surreal experience. But again, it didn't start like that at all for me. Yeah, I mean that was literally like 15 years from, I'm going to write a best selling book, and then seeing that first book in Target was a 15 year journey. And there was a ton of surrender. I love how you said that. I mean, over the course of time, there were so many seasons of complete surrender. And really figuring out okay, what am I really in this for? Which I think all authors, I think, if we're gonna keep doing it, we all come to that place where we really fully understand. It's not about that, that sexy dream that we maybe once had. 

But when we get down to the heart of it, that's what's continuing us to keep. So I always asked, you know, 20 somethings especially, or anybody struggling to figure out what they want to do you know, what is something you cannot not do? You have to do it. It's so meaningful to you, because it's so ingrained in your story, and in your failures, and your own pain and your passion. And it's all coming together for something really special. And you're going to be willing to go through way more obstacles and way more rejection and no’s than anybody else. That's maybe trying to tackle the same thing. And then I've had other books, I've done four books now. And each one has its own story. And I'm working on number five. But not all my books have been commercially successful. I still had some that didn't sell as much as I hoped. Even with one book that has been successful, each book has been its own story really.

Anna David:    Yeah. Well, so then let's talk about turning so you turn the second book into a course or how did that work?

Paul Angone:  Yeah. So long story. I ended up publishing the book I'd been working on all along, it was my second book. And it was called All Grown Up Searching for Self Faith and a Freaking Job. It's like my memoir, and the publisher that rejected me three times. yours before, ended up publishing that book and not realizing they had rejected me because it was all different people. And I did not tell them that they had rejected me until after the contract was signed. Then I said, By the way, you've rejected this book tons of times before, but none of you realized that so the joke's on you. 

Anna David:    It just shows that rejection is not personal. It was just platform.

Paul Angone:  And it wasn't even permanent. I mean, they literally rejected me three separate times, only to be the publisher that published me. And then my third book, we decided, well, let's make it a series with my first book. And we'll do 101 Secrets for Your 20s. Let's do 101 questions you need to ask in your 20s. And again, I kind of follow the same model, in the sense that that was a blog post, where I wrote 11 questions you need to ask in your 20s. And it did really well. And so I mean, that's the beauty of, you know, what I call market testing, to put it in a big business sense, your business terms, your market testing your ideas. So you're seeing what the audience is resonating with? And I really took that information and said, Well, gosh, people seem to really dig this idea of questions as well, what questions do I need to be asking? So let me make that my next book and become a series. And then that is how my first book got into Target was I had the new book that was tied into my first book, again, leveraging the craft, and everything that I can. And then they pitch both books together. And they meant they brought both books in. And so then I had two books in Target, and had success. And then that third book, I also then turned it into a course. And a lot of the material the questions were in my course and vice versa, it was kind of all inner interweaved together. 

Anna David:    And so how did you actually convert the book into a course? You have 101 questions, yes. And so how is that a course? 

Paul Angone:  Yeah, so then my course became signature sauce calm.  And my whole metaphor was, is that we're all chefs in the kitchen, in a sense, and we're all bringing these ingredients together that are unique to us, where we live our story, our values, our strengths, our skills. And we're putting together this flavor that the world needs that the world is hungry for, that is unique to you that hopefully, people are gonna be lining up at the door to have. And so within my course, I have 10 ingredients that I feel like go into your signature sauce. So I was basically trying to take my books, and go one step further. So there was more of a deeper interaction and engagement level. So where I could take it, I was basically doing it as a group cohort. And so smaller, where I would take like, 40 to 50 people. And we would go through it together. And I would jump on a one once a week call. 

Anna David:    Yeah, I was checking out your course, it looks like you still do that, you still do a weekly call?

Paul Angone:  Yeah, so I have done it. It's ebbed and flowed, you know, there's been some seasons where I've been more heavily involved in the course. And then some seasons where people can self select to join, and just go through it at their own pace. So it's always open. So sometimes they do that. 

Anna David: And it becomes worth it, if you have 10 students, it's not worth your time, even though you really want to help people. At what point does it become, quote, worth your time? How many students do you need?

Paul Angone:  We can price our courses all differently. And that's the beauty of courses. I've heard of Steve Harrison, a guy who helps authors a lot. And I've heard him talk about, you know, people know what to pay for your book. People don't know what to pay for your course. It's more subjective. And so there is a beauty in the sense that you can have different price points for those different levels of engagement. And they might think, you know, $500 is a steal or $1,000, or $100. And even at $100, well, that's like 10 times more than they probably are paying for your book. Yeah, so that's cool. So for me, it was like 25, 30 people. If I had that amount, it would be totally worthwhile to me.

Anna David: And it is kind of more research, hearing what they have to say.

Paul Angone:  Exactly. And to hear that real life discovery, where they're not just maybe even emailing me reactively to something I've written, but I'm experiencing it with them. It's almost a little bit like a speaking engagement, which is another part of, you know, how the business gets leveraged into engagements. Is that real time interaction, which we just don't have, for the most part as authors, when we're writing our book, when we have our head down, and we're just working on the book. So to have that real time kind of engagement is really helpful to see. Okay, what is actually working? What is meaningful? And what is something I need to dive into deeper, maybe even later on, that's your next book or your next speaking engagement.

Anna David:    And so what advice would you give people who want to either turn a course into a book or turn a book into a course? 

Paul Angone:  Oh, that's a great question. I think at the core at the heart, it's got to be something that’s obviously extremely meaningful to you like you. I think a lot of times you've had to have personally gone through the frustration, the hardship, the obstacles you've overcome, in a sense, you haven't had that you haven't even had to completely overcome, I don't think any of us have ever completely overcome. But it's got to be so meaningful to you that you're going to be willing to go through the time and energy and hardships to create something really of value, and that's meaningful. And then I think all along the way, whether it's a book into a course, or course into a book, it's really getting that feedback, tapping into those feedback mechanisms that you can to just like a comedian would, right to, they're going to try to work on their our content, you know, they're our talk. And they're constantly whittling it down with every engagement with everything to get to the real heart of okay, what is my strongest hour? Yeah, you know, I think we're doing that as course creators, as authors. As bloggers and podcasters. Whatever medium you're taking on, you're getting that feedback mechanism, your market testing your ideas, to figure out okay, A, what am I most passionate about giving my time to? And B, what’s seemingly resonating the most with my audience? And do those two align? Or how do I make them align? If I can't see how they align right off the bat?

Anna David:    So if you're going from course to book, it's easier if you're doing cohorts, and you're having, you know, live experience with people so you can see their reactions. But otherwise, do you think it's taking the modules and converting them into chapters? Do you have any advice for that?

Paul Angone:  Yeah, I think it could work that way. And mine is not super straightforward either, where the name of my books, 101 Questions You Need to Ask in your 20s. And let's be honest, Your 30s too, was my subtitle. And then my course is called Signature Sauce. So for that one, I didn't even carry over the same name. I felt like within the course format, I can wrap my mind around like 10 ingredients. Here's the 10 things we're going to work on. And then these questions infused into those ingredients. So I retailer it, yeah, in a way that I felt fit a course. The best. And for the course, too, I did get help. So I had a great couple, Heath and Alyssa Pageant, who they're our viewers, and they have RV books. And RV campgrounds are great. They're entrepreneurs, podcasters, and great people to check out. But they helped me. They lived with me for like five days. And we just filmed and they helped me with. Okay, what is this? You know, process? What do we need to make into our course? Is this working? So I did even have real time feedback from other creatives and professionals. So I was not trying to do it in a silo. Yeah. Which was helpful, because that was my first foray into building a course. I didn't know what I was really doing. 

Anna David:    Yeah. And they were friends of yours, or they moved in to help you? 

Paul Angone:  I paid them, you know, so I paid them. Yeah. So I paid them to come film. And to come edits and graphics. I mean, they were a one stop shop as a couple. And I don't think they're don't don't hit them up now, because I don't think they're doing this as much now. But finding those people, I think, was to make that investment. Yeah. And it was like, well, in one course, you know, if I launch, you know, 3040 people, you know, figuring your breakeven points, and it makes complete sense. It's like, if I launch one cord, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pay all the expenses, you know, right off the bat. Yeah. And then from then on, it's gravy. So it only made sense for me to invest my own finances into the building of the course to make it as good as I could.

Anna David:    And that's what we always tell people about books. You can find people, you know, who will write and publish a book for $5,000. You can find people who will do it for $500,000. But invest in that, you know, if you're going to write your book yourself and you can't get a publisher, invest, don't just go throw it up onto Amazon. This has been so great. So if people want to find out more about you, reach you, where's the main place they should go?

Paul Angone:  Yeah, allgrownup.com is still my home base. And again, GROWN allgrownup.com. And you can snag free chapters from all my books. If any of these books sound interesting, you can get free chapters.

Anna David:    And you have a free course?

Paul Angone:  Yeah, so you can take a taste test of the Signature Sauce course, where you can do three modules, three lessons. I think, though, that's called Getting Unstuck. And so you can sign up for that through signaturesauce.com. Or just find me at Paul Angone. And if you can spell Angone, good luck, with that you're better than most people because it's a hard Italian name to spell.

Anna David: I’m glad you pronounced it for me so I can do the intros.

Paul Angone:  My middle name is Anthony, so I could be Tony Angone, if I wanted to be a true Italian.

Anna David:    Mobster alert. Okay, well, Paul, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. And you guys, thank you so much for listening.

 

Build a Twitter Following Using Your Book Material with Jesse J. Anderson

 

 Jesse J. Anderson's journey to bookdom is unlike any other guest I've had on the show.

 

For one, he's not launching a book to help build his business.

 

Also, that book—Refocus: A Practical Guide to Adult ADHD—hasn't launched yet. In fact, he hasn't even finished writing it.

 

Why, then, you may ask, would I have him on the show?

 

Well, Jesse has also built up an impressive Twitter following by releasing Twitter threads of book chapters—a topic he dove into in detail.

 

When he's not writing books in public, Jesse is a designer and developer who has made it his mission to help others better understand what ADHD really is. 

→ 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)

USEFUL LINKS: 

Jesse's site

Jesse on Twitter

Jesse's book-in-progress

TRANSCRIPT:

Anna David:    Thank you, Jesse for being here.

Jesse Anderson:  Absolutely. Thank you for having me. This is great.

Anna David: The reason I reached out to you originally is I am fascinated by this idea of writing a book in public. When I reached out, I didn't know that you were in Rob Fitzpatrick's community. And it happened. So basically, you and I communicated on Twitter, maybe 20 minutes later, I had Rob on my show, just, “Oh, you're in touch with Jesse.” It all happened very fast.

Jesse Anderson:  Yeah. Yeah, I found Rob's book, I guess, almost a year ago, it was in the summer when I actually don't remember when it came out. But this past summer was right around the time I announced that I was writing a book, and I found his book kind of at the same time, and it's been a great guide. Really great book, you got to get it. Write Useful Books is the name of the book. And yeah, I got the book, and I joined his community. And it's been awesome. Yeah, just sort of getting that accountability. And I heard that he was gonna be on your show. And I was, “Hey, I just talked to you. Just talk to her on Twitter.” So yeah, that's funny how that all kind of came together right at that last moment there. 

Anna David:  I know. I was like, Rob, does he think I just literally asked everyone around him anyway, I got it. But you know, you guys have already heard me recommend Rob's book and you've heard that episode. And if you haven't, oh, my God go back. It was like a masterclass in the book. So I am in the process. And I hope my listeners are too, to consider writing a book in public after learning about this process. So walk us through the steps. You read Rob's book, and you go, “Oh, my God, I had no idea. I should be getting a lot of feedback from people.” Is that what happened?

Jesse Anderson:  Kind of, yeah, so I first heard of the idea of writing and public from Arvid Cole, he writes, like technical books. And he had done that writing and public. So I'd heard of it from that. And I kind of thought, well, that really makes sense for what I'm doing. So I'm writing a book on ADHD. I was diagnosed five years ago. And I’m hyper focused on learning all about it. And I kind of acquired all this knowledge. And I didn't really do anything with it, other than learning how to run my own life. But I actually another connection you had Nicolas Cole on here a while ago. 

Anna David:   I know, I saw that you did Ship 30.

Jesse Anderson:   Yeah, so that really kind of sparked all this for me, I don't even remember why. But I joined the Ship 30 for 30 challenge about a year ago. And I didn't know what to write about. I'm a designer. And so I thought maybe I'd write some stuff on design, I didn't end up doing any of that. So the challenge is writing something, an essay every single day for 30 days, which is wild. But I ended up writing several things about ADHD because I had acquired all this knowledge. And it really started to kind of resonate with people. And because I was writing and shipping every day in public, I was getting all these little bits of feedback. And I was hearing from people. And then I was hearing from other stories of people that had ADHD and kind of learning. Oh, you know, when I'm reading, learning about this stuff, I think, oh, everyone that has ADHD is like this. And then I'm learning Oh, no, it's not the same way for everybody. There's kind of all this variability within having ADHD. And so when Arvid Cole, when he was writing in public, I really thought that makes a lot of sense for me, because I know a lot about it, because I've been acquiring this knowledge. But I don't know everybody's situation with living with ADHD. And so by writing in public, it really allows me to get all this feedback, while I'm doing it, just like writing on Twitter and creating threads and getting people replying to that. And then yeah, back to Rob's book. So I read his book, and then that just sort of cemented the idea, Oh, this is perfect. And he has, you know, they have the software to help this book, which makes it really easy to get lots of feedback directly in the book that you're writing. And that's sort of how it's been kind of this wild process over the last year. But yeah, it's been great.

Anna David:    Yeah. And Nicolas or Cole, he's a friend of mine. He's amazing. And he didn't have that program then. I mean, he had his about three businesses ago, that's just sort of how he operates. And we just caught up recently, and he was telling me about Chip 30. I didn't really know but yeah, I mean, what he always talks about is somebody who comes at being a writer cool, you're competing against people like him who put out material every single day. So this idea that alas, we all have, oh, I'm just so like, great and by the way listener, you are great, but like it's probably not just gonna go viral. It's day in day out work which not only gets us better at our craft, but also helps us build an audience. So I'm curious because I was thinking of getting Rob’s software. But for right now it's bundled with the community, right? And I sort of have an ego and I'm like, I'm not going to join a writer, I run a writer's community, are you kidding me? But I really want that software. Because really what he talked about is it encourages people to kind of give you negative feedback, because inevitably, people sort of feel badly and they want to be supportive. And so, I saw you have basically a table of contents out there. Is that all you've gotten feedback on so far? 

Jesse Anderson:    What do you mean all I've gotten feedback?

Anna David:      Well, so when I went to your site, it was like, Okay, so I'm doing this in public. And here's my TOC. And then there was feedback on that, but have you so that's all that I saw, but I would have to join your group in order to see more material? Correct?

Jesse Anderson:    Right. So the way I'm doing it, I'm kind of doing releases, kind of, I will get a draft, you know, because when you're first writing, I've never written a book before. So this is all kind of new to me. And I'm figuring it out. My first draft, I made the promise myself, like, I'm never going to show people this very first, the crappy first draft or whatever you want to call it. I don't want to show that to people, because then it's going to stop me from writing it. So I had to make that promise myself. And then kind of once I got through, I probably was like, 50% of the way through that. And then I really want to show this to people and really start getting this out there because I want this out in public. And that's sort of when basically I spent like a week of like, I'm gonna frantically get it ready this week, to help this book so I can get people to look at it. So separate from that I was doing the thing, you're talking about a table of contents. So at my initial announcement of the book, I said, “Hey, I'm gonna write this book, here's some of the topics I want to cover, please suggest your own.” And that table of contents basically tripled, or maybe even quadrupled, from what I originally listed.

And so at that point, it was yeah, it was just people seeing what I wanted to cover, and then sort of submitting suggestions for additional things. And there's some emails back and forth, like people would say something, and then I would interact through them. And so that part of it wasn't entirely in public. So I was talking with people to understand what they thought was important for the book. And then now that I've done two separate releases on the helpless book. And then the other thing I know, it's kind of chaotic. That's kind of how my whole process is a bit chaotic. So I'm kind of jumping around a little bit. But another thing I'm doing is I'm taking chapters for the book. And I'm like, I'm not really announcing that these are from the book, but I'm just releasing those as a thread. So the chapters of my book are really short. They're kind of like a Derek Severs book where they're probably like two or three pages. So that's kind of a very, very similar model that I'm taking in my book, because my audience has ADHD, and they don't want to read, I know, myself, when, when a chapter is like, 12 pages long. I'm counting the pages I have left to get to the end of that chapter. I need that marker. So for me, like the dark servers, books were really easy to read. Because I was like, “Oh, I can read this chapter. Oh, I can read another chapter.” And so that I have that kind of same focus for my book. But yeah, so I've taken some of those chapters and just released them as a Twitter thread, like, wrote it up, divided it into tweets, and just posted it without saying, Hey, this is from my book, because it's sort of like a rough, early version. And then I get a ton of feedback from that, which has been really great.

Anna David:    So interesting. We should mention, so you went from 1200 followers on Twitter to like over 12,000? How many do you have now?

Jesse Anderson:   Yeah, I'm at like, 37,000 now I think 7000?

Anna David:    And when did the mammoth transformation take place? And how did you do it?

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah, so it was kind of a slow, steady growth, being in a Ship 30 for 30 community, I did that for three or four months in a row. And you get sort of each, each month or each session, whatever, when they add new people, a lot of those people follow you through. So through that I probably gained, I don't know, 2000 to 3000 followers over kind of a six month span. And then around December, I was at around 12,000. So it kind of has been the slow steady growth throughout the year. And then this New Year is really when it's just sort of like exploded, and part of that has been this year has been when I've been releasing those kinds of chapters as threads a little bit. And then I've had a few of them that just you know, kind of go viral and have, I don't know, like 50,000 likes and then when that happens, because it's not just like a clip kind of tweet that went viral. It's actually like, Hey, this is good content. I think I get a lot more people that follow when that goes viral because if someone's interested in that, it makes sense for them to follow me. So yeah, it's really sort of exploded in the last like three or four months. Yeah.

Anna David:   When something goes viral do you go well, I should write more about that in my book, then?

Jesse Anderson:  Sort of, I kind of have the tricky balance. LikeI said, I don't want to have a 20 page chapter. The whole goal of the book is to be like, I don't know what it will be. But I want it to be like around 120 pages. Because I know for me, so many nonfiction books are 250-300 pages, and I read 30% of them. And then I hit that wall where I'm like,” woof, I don't know if I can finish this whole book.” So my goal is very much to kind of hit that 120 page range. So when I get feedback from people, like when, yeah, when those tweets go viral, there's lots of comments. I think a lot of the secret to the success of the growth I've had is, it really does feel more like a community than an audience. Like it's not, “Oh, hey, all about Jessie. It's more like, hey, Jesse's sharing this thing about ADHD.” And then a lot of people comment and reply about that thing. So it kind of becomes almost like this. It's like this conversation. It's like a forum within Twitter when these tweet threads go viral. And so because of that, I'm learning through what people are posting on there. And then I try to find the bits, is this conversation really important here? How can I find the small version that's really helpful to get in the book? So I think that a lot of what I tried to do is try to take a complex thing and shrink it down to, how can I communicate this? Well, and you know, a couple paragraphs versus a couple of pages or whatever.

Anna David:    Oh, cool. I was just in contact with Derek Sivers, not to brag. I heard him speak at an event. And then he sort of said, anybody from this event can contact me, such an amazing guy.

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah, he's replied to a couple of my emails too, very cool guy. 

Anna David:   Yeah, he loves emailing strangers. He said that during it, I was like, fantastic. So the way it works, I think you mentioned two times, you've sort of delivered it as a manuscript to your team. Is that right? 

Jesse Anderson:   Yeah. So it's, I mean, it's not even really a team, I kind of have an email list of just I just sort of asked publicly, “hey, who would want to read my book early?” And so because I have a pretty large audience, like a lot of people responded. And so I've been able to, which is great. And I feel really lucky and privileged that I have that, that I have a bunch of people interested in the book. Because of that, I've kind of segmented it. So I took 50 people and sent them the first draft. And then and then for the second draft, I picked another 50 people. And I told them about it. And I also told that first 50 People like, “Hey, I know you already read it, but if you want to read the newest version, it's available now too. And so some of those people kind of came back to see the changes and add additional feedback. And yeah, so I kind of have a big list of other people. I think what I'm going to do is one problem I had in the past is like people get it and they're really excited. 

And then they don't do anything, which I know you've talked about before, you're like, “oh, they really said they wanted to do something, and then they're not actually taking action.” So I think what I'm going to do is send out sort of email to all the people that have shown interest, and sort of ask for another opt in of, “Hey, I'm gonna release this draft, and I need feedback within a week. So if you're able to do it, like this isn't disqualifying you from future ones. But if you can do it this week, then press this button.” And I use ConvertKit. So I'll add a tag to them or whatever. And then I can send them a specific email. I don't know if that'll work. But that's sort of my plan for the next draft of, maybe I can get people to be more likely to jump in, if I can get them to opt in and then immediately send them that link. Yeah.

Anna David:   Yeah. Because it's human nature. Yeah, I'd love to help. And then right, yeah, we're all busy. 

Jesse Anderson: But I've done the same thing. So I told her that I don't blame them at all. But it is, you just don't know who's going to be able to do it. And you that feedback is so valuable. I want to make sure I get the people that are able to do it within a reasonable timeframe.

Anna David:   What's interesting about it is it almost is, remember Nielsen Families, like they give a box to a family and my mom was picked at one point, which was crazy, because she didn't really watch TV. And I'm just like, that's crazy. Well, it's like any study there, you're using one person to represent, you know, 1000s or hundreds of 1000s. Because the logical brain goes, Okay, so you're gonna ask 50 people, but how many people have ADD and how many people do you want to read your book? Do you know what I'm saying?  You're just sort of hoping for the best feedback from the people who are interested in that topic.

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah. So kind of like you said, the Help Helpless book really does help get good feedback, because it really cues people I found, because right now the software is only on desktop and not on a phone. A lot of people read the book just on the phone. And I said, if they did that, too, like that was great. Just email me the feedback. And the feedback I got via email was much less helpful. Like some of it was great, but it was just very, this is great. I love the book. This is awesome. It's gonna be amazing. That's great. I love the encouragement, but I need to know how to fix things. So the people that were giving the more concrete feedback throughout the chapters, there's almost nothing that someone said, where I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to implement that exactly.” But there were clues. So I would see that multiple people would say this part was confusing. And so it wasn't like they gave me a solution. But if I'm sending it to, you know, only 50 people have read it. And multiple people are saying this part is confusing, there's probably a better way to say that. And that's kind of how I've treated it. It's not like having a development, developmental editor, or someone that I'm sending, please help me fix this book. It's just like, what are the little problems you have with it? So I can, I can try to go in and fix those and be more clear with what I'm communicating.

Anna David:    Right. Right. So does it require the feedback givers to have the software?

Jesse Anderson: |No, so it's just a web app. So, it's very similar to giving someone a Google Docs link, but with a few extra features. 

Anna David:   Right, right. And one thing that I read that you had said, at one point, you know, you have this newsletter, you have a 50% open rate, which is amazing. We have the same size newsletter. So I got committed, I was like, Whoa, so do you attribute that to you having firmly established, this is what I write about, and they are interested in that? What do you attribute that to?

Jesse Anderson:    I mean, part of it is I'm very intentionally short. So my newsletters it's a weekly newsletter, and it's very short. I basically have, I'll include a couple of resource links, and then like, like, 200 words, or something that most people can read in just like a couple minutes. So it's a very quick read, and I think that is a big part of it. And I'm very consistent that way. I don't know my newsletter, open rate definitely didn't start like that. Early on a lot of my newsletter subscribers came from Tik Tok because I had some Tik Toks that did really well. And my open rate was much lower than, but since I've sort of grown a lot more on Twitter, which I kind of treat as my main platform. Even though I'm on Instagram, and I'm on Tik Tok. Twitter's definitely kind of where I mostly do content. And since my growth has happened through there, that's when kind of the open rate Shut up. And I don't totally know, I feel like I've been lucky and have a lot of success. And I don't necessarily know how it is, I don't know, I'm the lucky Twitter Person of the day or whatever. And what's that?

Anna David:   I don't think it's that, because it's piecemeal. You know, you're not just like a guy who got lucky one day and went viral, like you're doing it. And that's what I think is a really interesting message. You're being strategic and you're being intentional, that it may not happen overnight, but it's happening. And it's only going to grow. 

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah, and I think a lot of it does have to do with just being really, I try really hard to be really authentic and vulnerable. I talk about stuff that, you know, for most of my life, I was embarrassed of. Different ways that act in the way my brain works and things that other people would see and say like, oh, man, you're kind of a stubborn jerk, or whatever. And then just explaining how my brain, like how it feels, to me, it's like, I don't feel like I'm a summer, stubborn jerk or whatever. But I feel like this is what's happening in my brain. And by talking about that, I think other people that also have been hiding those feelings, or that way that they felt, connect with it. And that's, I don't know, it's kind of weird to talk about a stubborn jerk like that. That just happened. I happen to think of a recent tweet that was about that. But it's, yeah, I think just like exposing the kind of those vulnerabilities that a lot of people also have hidden it really kind of helps people connect when you have ADHD, especially if you're undiagnosed, like you just you just feel so alone for most of your life. Because you're like, I know my brain works differently and I don't know why. And I don't know how to explain it either. And so I think now that more and more people are discovering that they have ADHD, it's like 90% of adults that have ADHD are undiagnosed, so it's pretty rampant. And now that more and more people are discovering that and then hearing somebody, you know, bring words to a way they've always felt they really connect with that. And I feel like that's really what I've been able to do well this last year is just sort of bring words to that feeling that a lot of people have had. 

Anna David:   Well, and on that note, you know, I saw that you did this annual review, and I'm sure I know, this is like something I've heard about people doing, but yours was the first I read. Is that something that you've done for a while? Where'd you get that idea? I mean, you're being really vulnerable and honest in that?

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah. Yeah. So I haven't done one before. Because I mean, basically, it didn't have any audience before. I've had a blog for, you know, years and years. But no one really ever read it, which is I know the thing Cole talks about, you write a blog, and no one ever comes to it, what's the point of humans doing it? Whereas writing in public really, like that's where people start to see it. And so I had seen several people that had done an annual. They're like, annual report or whatever. I'm blanking on his name. Do you edit this?

Anna David:    We love to be real there. I feel like there's someone who's known for that. Who cares? Somebody google it? Not you. You guys can Google, it doesn't matter. We're talking about Jesse's. So you decided...

Jesse Anderson:    Okay, I just looked it up, it’s Nathan Berry. So he does. ConvertKit. Yeah. So he had done an annual report. And I'd seen a few other ones. And that sort of inspired me, I was like, I should do this. This will be fun to sort of recap the year and recap. It's helpful for me to look back on this next year and kind of see what worked last year, what didn't work, what do I want to focus on? And so, yeah.

Anna David:    And so in it, I think it was that's where I read that, you know, you've done a little bit of speaking and you've been going on podcast and sort of emphasizing that is that stuff you want to emphasize once your book is out?

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah, so I, I'm, I think so, I've loved being a guest on different podcasts. Like I love being able to just sort of talk about specifically ADHD but also sort of this process of what I've been going through the last year, because I'm not a writer, prior to this year. My career is in design and development. And I've been doing that for, you know, 15 years or something, and not been a writer. And so all of this is kind of new to me. And I'm just sort of figuring it out. And it's a blast, my ADHD brain loves it. It's all this brand new dopamine that I didn't know was available out here yet, and I don't know what it means long term. People have asked me before that, what does this mean going forward? What are you going to do? And I don't know, like, I'm really enjoying this writing process. And like I think a lot of authors, like I'm writing this book, and I'm like, Oh, this is another book idea, I want to do, oh, this would be another one too. So I have all these other ideas that would be really fun to do. And I'm also launching a podcast called ADHD Nerds, which is just going to be like a 30 minute interview show with other people that have ADHD. So I'm gonna be doing that soon.

And I kind of don't know, there's no end game in mind. Other than, I love what I'm doing. And I love being able to teach people about ADHD because it was so impactful for me, finding out at 35, oh, this is why my brain does things this way or this different way. Where I have this unique take on things. And I love being able to help other people like being part of that story for other people of realizing like, Hey, I'm not just broken. I'm not just, you know, selfish, or lazy, or spacey, or whatever it might be like, there's actually something neurological happening. And when you know about it, you can really change things for the better for you. So I'm enjoying being an advocate for that. And I just kind of just sort of follow wherever this goes and enjoy it a long way. Yeah.

Anna David:   Yeah, that's interesting, because most of the people almost always, it's about like that I talked to you here. It’s usually, how is this book going to play into your business? How is it going to help you get clients? How's it going to help you get, you know, and it sounds like you're open to it, you're certainly open to being hired as someone to go speak about ADHD?

Jesse Anderson:   Yeah, I've done. So I did a talk. I've done some tech talks in the past, like I said, as a designer developer, and I did speak at a couple of virtual conferences last year about ADHD, and I love that. So that's definitely something that, like speaking, is something I'm interested in doing. Eventually, like I said, we'll see kind of where all this goes. But that's definitely something I am interested in chasing down and seeing if that may be a future for me.

Anna David:   But you don't want to coach people?

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, speaking of coaching, I took some training courses for ADHD coaching, it's something that I think I enjoy Speaking more broadly to people in less on a one on one basis. I think there's so much value in that for sure. But I don't know if that's me. And I haven't shut the door on that. But I've sort of paused, I took the coaching courses on that. And then sort of pause, I don't feel like this is necessarily where I'm headed right now. In the same with, I know, there's a lot of people you have on the podcast where they get into consulting. And that's where there can be a lot of money like, “Hey, I wrote this book.” And now you can hire me to consult, and there's a lot of money there. And I don't think that there's anything really there that makes sense for me. Yeah. And that's why I'm just sort of continuing to create content and seeing where it leads for me. 

Anna David:   So what shape is the book in? Do you have a release date? Where's it at? 

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah, so the book right now, I would say is roughly 80% done. And the remaining 20%, I know what it's going to be. I just, you know, haven't sat down and forced myself to write it out. But I would say it's 80% done to get to the point of like, okay, now I need a real editor to come in here and fix them, like copy editing and all that sort of stuff. I don't have a release date, I would love for it to be in the fall this year, like September, October. But I'm self publishing. So I know, there's a lot of things that I need to figure out to get to that in. So I'm sort of trying to line up now so that I can sort of see the end of the tunnel for writing the book. It's like, I really need to start lining up those things, and probably trying to schedule like future podcasts and stuff. Because I'd love to be able to do kind of the podcast tour and get the word out there around the time the book comes out. But yeah, so that's my goal is kind of fall this year, we'll see what happens.

Anna David:   And then are you going to use the people who have been helping like your advanced reader team to do reviews and that kind of thing? Or have you not even gotten there yet? 

Jesse Anderson:    It's definitely something I've considered and want to do. I don't have any plans for that yet. And my my wife has been on like advanced reader teams for other books, just sort of like, you know, unofficially or anything, but I'm probably going to recruit her to take, take charge of some of that, and do some of that communication of getting people excited, and yet doing the reviews. Because I know how important reviews are. It's funny how you don't even think about it before. And now that I'm writing a book, I'm like, oh, I gotta get everyone I know to try and write a review. So that I can get past that hump where you never want someone to come to your book page, and then be like, ah, 17 reviews, that's not enough or something. 

Anna David:   I know. And you just don't realize until you release a book, how much it means and how quick it is to do one, you don't need to write a big frickin novel, just a couple sentences. So as we wrap up, what advice would you give somebody about, you know, sort of going from, I'm not a writer to, hey, I'm writing a book, and it's, it's evident in your face, how excited you are about it? And so what advice would you give somebody?

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah, I think a lot of it is just, you just need to put yourself out there, like the building in public is, don't be like, don't be afraid to just write something and then see what sticks. And I know, Cole talks a lot about that, that's a lot of kind of the ship 30 philosophy is, just write about stuff and then see what people care about. I think it's so easy to think, Well, I'm not an expert in this, I don't, like for me, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a doctor, I don't have some education, background and ADHD. But I know a little bit more than a lot of other people. And so it's a lot easier to teach somebody kind of when you're at that level anyway. So really just, I kind of approach a lot of it from like, teach what I didn't know, six months ago. Trying to just teach just a little bit, you know, in the past of who I was, and that's really kind of been successful for me.

I think you don't have to become this high lofty expert of like, you know, teaching down to the masses, like you are just trying to teach a person who, you know, didn't doesn't know what you didn't know, six months ago, and sort of doing that. And I think another thing is, I've really come to understand that it's more about building a community than building an audience. And early on, when you're kind of like, you know, when you're nobody is building an audience, you're just trying to get somebody to look at your stuff. But it builds because you interact with them. And then it becomes like, Oh, I'm actually like, this isn't just a person that reads my stuff. This is my friend that I see like some of the things I post and like I reply to their things, and I get in the comments and all of that. And I think really kind of just thinking about it as a community really helps you change your perspective in the things that you write.

And so whenever I'm writing stuff, I write a lot of like, kind of quippy tweets. It's about random ADHD things. And I just try to think of how I would feel if I saw someone else tweet this thing, like, and what I want people to feel is like, yes, right on. I feel the same way. Like, I'm like this feels like we're sharing this experience together. And that's sort of like that. I try to keep that perspective in mind when I'm talking like not that I'm just sending down something, again, sending down to the masses, but I'm bringing people along. And a lot of times when I'll tweet about things, and I know, I'm talking about Twitter a lot, because that's basically where a lot of my writing starts.

Anna David: Yeah. I think it's really relevant today.

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah, so a lot of the thing I do is, I will tweet a question, but with my own answer, so an open ended question. So like, there's this thing called, like, the ADHD tax, which is like, when you have ADHD, there's a whole lot of things that kind of happened, like you forget to pay bills, or things like that. And then you end up paying a bunch of fees on top of it. So people call it like the ADHD tax, because you didn't, because your ADHD causes you to do these things. And then it becomes more expensive. Yeah. And so I recently tweeted, and said, What are some ways that you pre pay the ADHD tax? And then I kind of made it a little thread and added like two or three ways that I do it. And then that kind of helps, because then if someone doesn't have anything to add, they're still like, “Hey, this is great. I'm learning from this.” Or if they do have something to add, it sort of helps build the community because more people start to add in their ideas. And then you end up like with the conversations that happen in the threads. And I find that a really great way to kind of help that community. Basically, I'm sort of presenting a topic to the group like, “Hey, let's talk about this today.” And it's great. And I learned so much through those as well.

Anna David:    Fabulous, so can people who are listening still join the team, that community and give me feedback on your book, or is it too late? 

Jesse Anderson:    Yeah, so I have a let's see what the website is. I want to make sure I have it right. So you can just go to help. I'm so sorry. There we go. Just helpJessewrite.com gives you a place where you can sign up. So if you just go to helpJessewrite.com. Enter your email there. And probably in the next few weeks, I'll be starting my next draft release and inviting people to do that where I'll do, like I said earlier, sort of like, Hey, if you can do it this week, this is the week I really need people to join in. Yeah, like I said, a lot of the stuff I do is on Twitter, and you can follow me . It's just a first name, middle initial last name. So Jessie J. Anderson, and that's my username everywhere. So Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok and the website JesseJanderson.com.

Anna David:   I love it. Well, Jesse, thank you so much. This was so informative. And y'all thank you so much for listening.

Jesse Anderson:   Awesome. Thank you.

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Turning Your Books Into Movies with Ben Mezrich

 

Ben Mezrich has sold over 10 million copies of his books.

And, by the way, that’s not even the impressive part. The impressive part is that he sells EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS BOOKS as a movie or TV show; in fact, if Hollywood isn’t interested in the treatment, he doesn’t even write the book.

Mezrich has gotten into this position because of a chance encounter with some MIT students, which led to his writing Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, which led to Kevin Spacey snapping up the film rights before the book was even out, which led to the book spending over 60 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Then there was his book, The Accidental Billionaires, which David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin jumped on as Mezrich was writing the book and which, of course turned into the multi award-nominated movie The Social Network. (Mezrich is the only non-fiction author to have two adaptations open at #1 at the box office.)

He’s written numerous other books, including Bitcoin Billionaires and The Antisocial Network and is also a consulting producer on Billions. Oh, and his most recent book, The Midnight Ride, has an NFT component that already has over 3500 owners.

So how does this happen? How does a former struggling novelist become Hollywood’s go to guy pursued by designers who want to dress him for his book tours? And what is the secret to finding the sort of story that makes Hollywood salivate? It’s all in this episode.

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

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TRANSCRIPT:

Anna David: Okay, well so basically you have the career that we all want, is what it comes down to. And yet you're not hateable.

Ben Mezrich: Thank you. I try not to be hateful. No, everything has happened in my career by accident and luck and timing. And there's been just a lot of really crazy moments. So I'm just happy and lucky and fortunate all along, and it's just been a blast. So I'm happy to tell you any stories you want to hear.

Anna David: I was reading, you know, you've been getting press for so many years. And I was reading this old story, I think in the Boston Globe about how Maybach flies him out to parties, and different people send him clothes and all of that. Is your life still like that? Was that true?

Ben Mezrich: And yeah, that's all it got crazy for a while. And, you know, I still get flown around. Like this weekend, I have two separate sorts of parties. I'm supposed to be flown to, although COVID Put a big crimp and all of that sort of thing. But yeah, when you do a book tour, there are definitely clothing sponsors that want me to wear their clothes and suits. But all a lot of that has to do with my wife, my wife is very, very good at cultivating these relationships and throwing these book parties and sort of a lot of authors come to me like, “How did you do this?” And I'm always like, Tanya did all that I didn't, I just sat in my room and wrote. And she's, you know, she had a TV show in Boston for a little while, she had a fashion line in Boston, she's done a lot of amazing things. So she's kind of cultivated this, this really great network of people. I mean, the other thing is I write books, for gambling type personalities, a lot of hedge funders like my stuff. So there's a lot of people in the finance world who read my stuff. And so, in that world, when there's an intersection between the finance world and the Hollywood world, where all of that craziness  comes about, so yeah, it's been, Gosh, 15 years of crazy parties and stuff like that.

Anna David: Mostly, the writers who are on the outside be like, “Hey, could you let me in?”

Ben Mezrich: So I've been through that as well. I've had my battles with certain Hollywood types trying to get into the premiere of my own movie, there've been incidents like that, too. There  was an incident with Scott Rudin, way back when, with The Social Network with Scott Rudin is a character, you know, himself. And then, and I'm sure there's lots and lots of stories about him. But in general, I've been very fortunate,  I've worked with really amazing people. And I think that's the key is that the only real power a writer has is who they sell their project to. And once you sell your project, you have to assume that you have no power. So you want to sell it to people who are going to treat you like a partner, or treat you like you know, part of the team are going to take you on the ride with them. And so when I'm making my deals, it's not just the dollars, you're looking at who is buying this project and, and what do they want to do with it? And are they people you want to hang out with and are they people you want to work with? And I don't think I would sell a project today, to people I didn't want to hang out with. And that's different in the beginning of your career. At the beginning of a career you sell to anybody who offers but you know, you reach a point in your career where, you know, you know that it's really important, these relationships are more important than anything else. So you're always looking for that kind of special thing. Anna David: You know what's interesting. So Molly Bloom, who I've known for years, I heard her say that when she was going in, pitching Molly's Game, she had this epiphany: "Everyone's passing. I'm reaching too low. I need to reach higher." And that's how she got to Aaron Sorkin. And I think that's so interesting.

Ben Mezrich:  I mean, I think that's really smart. Molly's story is as great as the movies. I've always, I always get asked, you know, what books do you wish you would have written? And that was one of those books that I would have loved to have written? 

Anna David: Would you want to live the story that she lives? 

Ben Mezrich: Oh, no, I just want to write it from the outside. I don't want to actually get involved with dangerous Russian monsters. I think that yeah, it's just a great movie and a great story. But yeah, I think there's something to that. If you can get to an Aaron Sorkin obviously, that's the dream. And the reality of Hollywood is it takes an Aaron Sorkin to get a movie made. It's extremely hard to start at the bottom in Hollywood and get something made. It happens but it's like a lottery ticket. 99% of the things you sell are never going to get made. And that's because it needs an A list writer and a list director and a list actor and anything less than that. And it's just a struggle. It's a continuous struggle.

Anna David: Oh, yes, talking to somebody whose book was optioned 15 years ago. And I'm like, “Oh, this is so awesome. I've got it made." They even hired a big writer to do the script. And then you get the email "Congratulations, your rights have reverted back to you" and you realize, that means "We're never talking to you again." So okay, so let's talk about your journey. So you started off as just a novelist in the same sort of, you know, terrible situation most writers are in. And then what happened?

Ben Mezrich: Yeah, so my story is, I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was 12 years old. So that's all I ever wanted to do. And when I graduated from college, you know, my parents were not thrilled with that choice. And so I basically locked myself in an apartment for a year, my dad said, “I'm not going to let you starve. But if you don't have any proof by the end of this year that you're going to make it as a writer, you gotta go to law school.” That was pretty much the conversation. So I wrote nine novels that year, I locked myself in a room and I wrote a novel a month, basically 400 Page novels, I wrote round the clock, I was writing 40 pages a day, just craziness. And they were all rejected, rejected, rejected, 190 rejection slips, had them taped to the walls, like a serial killer. It was just crazy writing. And eventually, an editor took pity on me, a guy named John Karp, who's a very famous, powerful editor. Now, he didn't buy anything I'd written, he said, “I'm not going to buy any of the crap you've been writing. But go read John Grisham and Michael Crichton and try to do what they do.” So then I started writing thrillers. And I wrote one book that was slightly better than the rest, and I got a literary agent. 

So at the end of my first year, pretty much out of college, I had a literary agent, and I sold my first book and nobody read it. So I wrote about six medical thrillers, they were sci fi, medical pop thrillers. And they never, they didn't go anywhere. One of them was made into a TV movie. So I did have sort of that level of success in my early 20s, or mid 20s.

But my books were not selling, nobody was buying. And then I ran into this group of MIT kids in a bar. And they were going to Vegas every weekend. And it was just this crazy story that started going to Vegas with them. I convinced the main character to sort of tell me his story. And that became Bringing Down the House, which was my first nonfiction book. And it was going to be this little book, you know, tiny first printing. I had been paid less for it than I'd ever been paid for anything. It was a nothing of a book, because it was about Vegas. It was about cards. And this was before Vegas, and cards were interesting again, and I wrote an article for Wired Magazine, and I got a call in the middle of the night, phone rings. And it's a guy saying, “I have Kevin Spacey on the line.” And so back then that was a better call than it would be today. Let's just put that out there. Kevin Spacey back then was the biggest star in the world. And I get on the phone with him. It really was Kevin Spacey. And he said, I love this story. I want you to come out to LA. So I flew out to LA pretty much the next day. And I met Kevin and his producer, Dana Brunetti, Dana, right. And Dana was at the time Kevin's assistant. 

This was that far back. And they're like, “we want to make a movie out of this.” And I was like, great. Seems like a great idea. And I asked him, “Well, how much are you gonna pay me?” And they said, “nothing, zero.” And I was like, “zero?” And at the time I was massively in debt. Because I had had all these books published, they all kind of failed. I had spent every penny I'd ever made. I owed a million $2 million. At 28 years old. I was vastly in debt. And, so basically, I went to my agent, I had an agent through the TV movie who had gotten me an agent. And I said, ''They want to make a movie, they want to pay me zero.” And he's like, “Well, let's see what we can do.” And the next day, he called me and said, I have an offer from someone else for $750,000. So I go back to Kevin and Dana. And I say, “I've got this competing offer now for $750,000. And what are you guys going to pay?” Dana's like, “Nothing, zero, still zero.”

I said, "So how can you offer me zero against $750,000?" And they said, "Well, if we gave you $300,000, right now, what would you do with it?" And so I was at a crazy period of my life, and I was massively in debt, and they knew all my stories. And I said, “I'd probably spend all of it.” And they said, “We're gonna do something better. We're gonna actually make this movie. And  you can talk about Kevin and publicity, he's going to talk about you, this is gonna be great for your career.”

So we ended up taking that deal, turning down three quarters of a million dollars and freaking my agent out, and it worked. The book came out and I went on the Today show. And the book was a huge bestseller for a couple of years, and the movie, although it took a number of years to get made, put me on the map in an enormous way. And from that moment on, I actually have sold every book I've written as a movie off of the treatment before I've written a page of the book. So I've sold something like 25 movies, at this point, right off of a 10 page treatment. And one of them happened to be the social network project, which comes along a little bit later, we can get into that. But that's what started me off. It was really a phone call from Kevin Spacey in Milan, right, because of an article in Wired magazine, and it was my first time it became a feature film that actually got made, because there was an actor with an A-list actor attached, you know?

Anna David: So two questions. So the Today show was interested because Kevin Spacey is involved. 

Ben Mezrich: No, I had actually booked the Today show. Randomly, this publicist at the publisher had gotten me it was, you know, the only real publicity I'd ever gotten, and then having to be a really big show. But I was able to talk about Kevin during it. And I think that was helpful. Who knows? Then I went on CNBC. And at the time, CNBC Power Lunch was a really big deal. And this was a book about gambling, and everybody who watched CNBC was a gambler. And so I think that the Today show, and CNBC together is what really made that book just go crazy. I remember it went to number one on Amazon. And it sold out in the first three hours. And it was one of those situations where they were just always trying to print books, because they were always selling and it just happens, you know, I think what was great about that story was it was the perfect one sentence. It was six MIT kids who took Vegas for millions. And it was an easy sentence for every news show, to throw at the end of a news report. So it was on every single channel all the time. And there's this group of MIT kids who took Vegas for millions. It's like the perfect sentence. And I think that easy sentences, what just turn that into some moment, basically. But on the Hollywood side, that movie really opened enormous doors for me, because I decided right there, and then that I wanted to have a Hollywood career. On top of that every book I would write had to be a movie. And so I basically became very close to my Hollywood agent at the time. And I said to him, “every project I'm going to do, we're going to come out here, we're going to pitch it all over town. And we're gonna develop these relationships with lots of producers and lots of studios. And that's the way I want to do books.” And that became the model for me. And so, even today, if someone tells me a story idea, I think it's great. I'll interview the people, I'll write 10 pages, and I will take it out to Hollywood. And if I can't get a studio deal, then I won't write the book. I won't, I won't even look at it. That's it, I'm done. So that's the way I do my projects now and have for 20 years.

Anna David:  And knowing, as you said, how impossible it is to get things made. I don't mean to be woo woo. But it's like you made this decision. And it happened. And obviously you've got a serious feel for what people are going to respond to. But so questions, rumor is that like, so everybody wanted the social network. And so like they're like, oh, people went, the producer went to the 21 party and that wound up being Dana, is that true?

Meznich: So Dana, and I became very close. There's so many stories about Dana. Do you know Dana at all? 

Anna David: I met him through Mike years ago. I think when he was Kevin Spacey’s assistant, or just became.

Mezrich: Yeah, Dana is one of those people that it's almost like he's a mythical creature. I love Dana. Dana is a genius. He's also terrifying. He can be completely insane. And I think if you talk to enough people, you'll hear so many crazy stories about Dana. But Dana and I were like brothers from the very beginning. There's no question about that. When I went out to LA that first time and Dana and Kevin picked me up at the airport, it was like Kevin's little Mercedes. And the first place they took me, we're driving along and I'm a kid from Boston. I mean, I've never been to Hollywood a few times, but I was not, you know, in that scene, and we're driving along and we pull up to this huge mansion. And I recognized it and it was a Playboy mansion. And it was literally the first place. They drove me. And we sat down and it was like movie night. And it was these moments where I think Dana really, really, we got along extremely well. And we definitely worked as partners together, selling I think, Gosh, eight or nine movies in a row we sold together. 

But the social network was a really interesting situation. Because what happened with The Social Network was, again, a random moment. I had become known for writing these true stories. So I would get pitched a lot of stories. Every time some young college kid pulled off a scheme or somebody did a crime, I would get a call, they would either reach me on the phone or an email or something like that. And it was the middle of the night and I got an email from a Harvard senior. And it said, “my best friend founded Facebook and no one's ever heard of him.” This is in Boston, and I went out for a drink in a bar. And in walked Eduardo Savarin, the real Eduardo, and he sits down he goes, “Mark Zuckerberg fucked me!” Started the conversation like that, and told me this completely insane story. So I think this is awesome. I went and I actually found the Winklevoss twins on the internet. I just found him on Facebook. I started meeting with them. I started meeting with Sean Parker, and I wrote a 14 page book proposal, which I called Face Off was a horrible title. And I sent it to my agent. And he sent it out to I think 11 or 12 publishers, and it leaked onto the internet. So it leaked onto Gawker. Gawker printed my entire book proposals, something I'd never seen before. I don't know if they'd ever printed a full book proposal before. And everything went crazy. Facebook freaked out and was like, What are you writing? And they came after me. And I had sent it to Dana.

Because Dana and I were like brothers, I would send him every single thing. And we had sold eight or eight movies. By that point, we had sold all these books that I had written. That never got made, but we had sold, you know, a number of books together. And Dana thought it was cool. I do think Dana, I don't remember for sure. But I think its first response was similar to my mom's which is like, I'm not sure anybody will watch a movie about Facebook, but he definitely thought it was cool. But that day when it leaked on Gawker, Aaron Sorkin saw it.

And David Fincher saw it. And Aaron Sorkin called and said he wanted to write it. And David Fincher called and said he wanted to direct it. And so then you had Dana and Kevin, because Dana and Kevin, Ricky have already sent the proposal. So they came from their angle, they met with Scott Rudin, who came with the Aaron Sorkin situation. And Mike DeLuca, who was at Sony, MGM, and Amy Pascal. And that became the team. And so it was this incredible moment as a writer, like that's the dream team at that point in time. There was no better team of people. And to be frank, nobody else could have made that movie, because you were dealing with Facebook, you know, a billion dollar corporation.

You were dealing with huge egos, you know, people, people who are incredibly known for taking over a movie set, right. It was one of those just magnificent kinds of situations to get into. And, it was wild. And I was there for the whole thing. And it was great. And yeah, Dana. Dana was a big part of it. And, and, and DeLuca Mike, who is just awesome. I love Mike, I think he's one of the best people in Hollywood. And he had done 21 as well. So basically, you know, Dana and Mike were involved again this time. Yeah.

Anna David: Actually, I went to The Social Network premiere. I was living in New York at the time, and the New York Post assigned me the junk. And I interviewed Jesse, and did the whole junket thing. And that was some premiere, I still remember being like, Oh, they've spent some money.

Ben Mezrich: Yeah, I mean, they went all out. And I will say it was just one of those situations where they really knew that they had something special, like a kind of movie that's going to last decades. And it was a cultural moment. I mean, I don't think there was a single newspaper in the world that didn't cover it, or magazine or anything like that. It was just one of those things. And I think what's really interesting to look back on now is Facebook wasn't that big a deal before that movie, it was just this company. But what I saw, and I think what a number of people who made the movie saw was that this was a moment that was going to change all of our lives. And we were documenting it, we were creating the mythology of this world changing technology, which sitting here today, it's clear that we were correct, that Facebook has led to everything that's happening in the world, good and bad. And so it's just a spectacular moment. But for me personally, it was obviously life changing, and just such a ride. And accidentally, the book was Accidental Billionaires. But I think that most of my career has been things like that, where I fall or stumble into a story, and it just becomes something immense. So yeah, it's been wild, for sure. 

Anna David: So finding the stories, you know, obviously you said, you know, people come to you, they're pitching you stories, but I'm assuming a lot of these you're finding on your own. How are you doing that? And what is the thing that you know makes it? 

Ben Mezrich:  Yeah, so the majority of my stories have been pitched to me. I will say only a few of them have ones that I've gone out and found. I basically sift through pitches now on Twitter, but whatever. I mean, something like the Gamestop Story, which I just wrote that book, I mean that everybody saw. So you could say I look for it, but I was getting tons of people writing to me saying you should be ready to be writing it. But in general, I'm looking for something that you can sum up in one sentence that the whole world will be interested in, that can make a great movie. So that's to have great visuals, it has to have incredible Shakespearean type themes, do it exotic locales, or that sort of drama, you know, conflict. I mean, it's the magic is it has to be a story that not everyone already knows. And yet everyone would want to know or be interested in it. And that's the tricky thing, usually something that we've all heard of, I mean, every day people will email me about things. I'm like, yeah, but there's probably 100 writers writing that story. Right now, I don't want to be one of a dozen Wall Street Journal writers trying to get this story. I want to have the main character come to me and say, Look at this crazy thing I did, and I realize, oh, man, everyone's gonna want to hear about that.

And that's what I'm really looking for. But it's got to be simple. It's got to have a big theme. And it's got to be the origin of something life changing. So the things that I've written about to me that have worked have been stories about big, big events are moments or technologies or shifts in the cultural moment, that even though my book was written 10 years ago, people will find a reason to read it 10 years from now. So that's hard. It's not easy. So when I look back on the books that I've written, I think Vegas and Bringing on the House is one, I think, you know, Social Network is certainly one. I think Bitcoin Billionaires is going to be one of those stories that people are going to, and the entire crypto world is built a lot on that story, which is really interesting. And as we make that movie, I think there'll be a big moment, I do think the Gamestop Story is going to be a big moment of a story. I wrote a book called Wooly about the wooly mammoth, coming back to life, and the scientist at Harvard is making one. And although I haven't found that story yet, I think that's going to be a big story in the future. So that's really what I'm looking for all the time is this big, kind of, but again, it has to be able to sell as a movie.

So I have to be able to write a 10 page treatment, that when I take it out to studios, there's going to be a dozen of them bidding on it. And, and I feel like to me, that justifies me writing the book, if I can't get and there's been moments where I've sent out a pitch that I just thought was awesome. And I haven't gotten the movie deal. And I put it aside and they say, you know what, I'm not going to write it. I'm not going to, I can't get excited about it. Because in my opinion, a book is a platform. The book is a story. And many writers feel differently. And I think that's cool, too. But for me, the book is a platform for this story that hopefully has a much bigger life than that. Because books are one component of it. I want to see a movie in a television show and I want to see all the magazines writing about it. I wanted to become something that the whole world talks about and you don't. It doesn't always happen, you know, it's happened two out of 25 books so far, but that's what I'm trying to do every time.

Anna David:  That ratio for what you're talking about, which doesn't happen in most people's lifetime ever. Thinking about it, it also requires a certain not psychic skill but back when you know with the Winklevoss in Bitcoin was like, who cares about Bitcoin today? I'm like, what? So I mean, you are on to these things early.

Ben Mezrich: Yeah, I mean, and this goes back to Michael Crichton, my worship of Michael Crichton, I used to keep all of Michael Crichton's books on my desk. And I think what he was a genius of was picking something that two years from now we would all be talking about. And that's what I'm always trying to do, and it's hard, you can't really do it. But I think I get that feeling. You know, I get that tingle. That sense that something is really important. And with Bitcoin, you know, listen, people have been pitching me Bitcoin stories for years, and I've been turning it down. I'm like, I'm not interested. This is math. This is geeky. There's a bunch of weirdos sitting in their rooms. But then when I heard the Winklevoss, we were at the center of this story. It blew my mind because I was like, Nah, those guys, I can wrap the movie around. And as I started meeting with them, I spent six months just hanging out with them. I was like, Yeah, this is huge. It's a big moment in history. Sadly, I didn't go by a bunch of Bitcoin, because I'd be really rich right now. But I definitely saw that I knew crypto was gonna change all our lives. And so yeah, I mean, I think I do have sort of a spidey sense about it. And yeah, it's hard to sort of know what you can put your finger on and say okay, that's the next big thing. But it is something I'm always looking for.

Anna David: In crypto, the web 3 spaces. So you did an NFT thing with this latest book?

Ben Mezrich: Yeah. So now I have this. This is actually new and it's sort of separate from meeting the Winklevoss twins and becoming friends with them. They started telling me you got to look into NFTs is really cool so then I ended up launching an NFT project. That's going to be a movie I'm writing the script for it. And I dropped an NFT line which sold out and we're doing three lines of NFTs and anybody who owns the NFTs gets to own a piece of the screenplay I’m writing about the NFT space. And I'm hoping that becomes a platform for other writers to come on and drop NF T's and build their careers that way. I think the NF T is going to give writers and artists and musicians another way of taking a community, building a community and having the community support them. So this is the first time I've kind of stepped into something rather than just writing about it. And it's been really wonderful. And it's been incredible and fun. But it did evolve from the sort of Bitcoin story. Yeah.

Anna David: Well, what does that mean owning part of a screenplay?

Ben Mezrich: Yeah, it means that the people who own one of each of my three NFT drops, who dropped two so far, and the third one is coming, are going to get 50% of the screenplay. So I'm going to write a screenplay and partner with the community. We're going to try and make the movie. I'm going to sell it to a studio or I'm going to make it on our own. And the money that comes in is going to go back into the community.

Anna David: And so they don't own the rights to the movie in any way? 

Ben Mezrich: No, they own the rights to the movie, they own an NFT that gives them partial, you know, ownership of the project, essentially. So it's not like they can say, you know, we want this star to be in or this star to be that kind of thing. But it does mean that if I sell it for a million dollars, half a million dollars goes back into [inaudible]. So it's an interesting model, and we'll see if it works. It's kind of brand new. You know, this is the Wild West, the NFT world. There's no real rules yet about how this works. And there's Neil Strauss, who's doing something Gary Vee, there's some other people trying to do something in its space. But this is the model that we think will work going forward. So we'll see what happens as I write the screenplay and see how it works.

Anna David: Yeah, this is actually I've been doing a couple of episodes on NF Ts and writers and really exploring that world. I didn't even know we were gonna get into it till I started doing my research. But in terms of the screenplay, you don't normally write the screenplays though. 

Ben Mezrich: So I've written a few screenplays, I just wrote one, I had a book called The Midnight Ride that came out a few months ago, which actually sold to Spielberg and Amblin. And they let me write the first draft. So actually they gave a screenplay to Steven Spielberg just a month ago, which is a little terrifying and intimidating. I wrote a draft that I wrote for the show, Billions. So I was a producer and writer on that. So I wrote episode three of last season, season five of billions. And I've written independently, I've probably written about five screenplays at this point. So it's not the main thing that I do. But I've definitely written a few of them. 

Anna David: And do you still lock yourself away when you've got the story. And you're like, bye, bye, Tanya. Bye, kids see in two months, like, how does that work?

Ben Mezrich: I mean, I listen, it's definitely gotten harder. So actually, in the beginning of the pandemic, I mean, I wrote two books in the first six months. I mean, I was really writing, you know, at a really great clip. Now, definitely, you know, I have a sequel to The Midnight Ride, due next month, which is going to be challenging. I think that yes, I, my process is, I spend a large amount of my time researching and doing the outline. So that's kind of the biggest time commitment for me is actually researching and talking to everybody I need to, to get all the information I need. And then writing a very stiff outline to kind of outline that. I know every chapter, I know what happens in every chapter, I know the page numbers of every chapter, and I never even missed a page. So I put together a really tight skeleton, then is when I start writing, and it starts off, you know, a few hours a day, but I don't write by time I write by pages. I'm one of those writers that believes, you know, you say I'm gonna write five pages today. And if I'm done in an hour, I'm done an hour and five hours, and five hours. So I start off with like six pages a day.

And then as I get into the heat of it, I'm up to like, 12 to 14 pages a day. And towards the end of that process, yeah, I lock myself up for a couple of weeks, and finish up the book. But it's always a struggle, as you know, writing every book is a struggle. And even though I've written 20, some five of them, it never gets that much easier. I know what works and what doesn't, I know how to write. There's very little editing for me at this point, pretty much. I write the book, I hand it in, it's pretty much done. The editor will come back. I mean, I do edit it. But the work is really the writing of the book. I'm not one of those people who edits, edits, and edits.  I don't edit. I hand in the book that I finished. I don't edit my own books at all. So I write a draft. It's done. I send it to the publisher, then they'll come back with stuff, you know, and they'll be like this chapter, add something. Can you put a little bit more in there and I'll make those additions. But when I write to the end of my manuscript, I don't even look at it. I don't read it. I literally put it in the mail, I hit send. Which is crazy, right? But honestly, that started a long time ago with Bringing Down the House. I didn't edit, bring down the house once. It went to the publisher, and then the publisher had some changes to make, but I don't self edit myself. And it's weird. I can't, I can't, I can't edit myself. I'm a happy writer. So it's funny. I have my friend from college, this guy named Scott Stossel, who was my roommate in college. He's one of the people who runs the Atlantic Monthly. He wrote about My Age of Anxiety. Brilliant book. Yeah. And Scott is one of those writers who's miserable, who sits there. He's a genius, but he'll write and edit and write and edit. And it's just these years and years of misery. And, and that's, I'm the opposite of that. I'd like to do it. Yeah. Good. It's great. It's perfect. And I sent it out. 

I think for me, the key is I'm not a perfectionist. I don't believe in being perfect. I don't want to be perfect. Good is good. And so I never try to perfect what I'm doing. I just want to get it written. So when I go on a story, I write it to the end. And then I send it in.

Anna David: Here's my question, well you’re writing a very clean copy, clearly. I mean, a lot of people's first drafts are like, Wait, what is that word?

Ben Mezrich: Yeah. I mean, if I went back to sort of 20 years ago, I'm sure it would have been worse. Now, at this point, I think I know what I'm doing. So yeah.

Anna David:  My big question. And you've been so generous with your time we have to wrap up. But in terms of this outline, you are getting new sources as you're working on it, right? So the outline does evolve and change or...

Ben Mezrich: The other thing is I write very quickly, right. So, you know, eight weeks is a book, not a year. Yeah. So I do all of my research. Before I start writing, I've interviewed everybody I can get all the legal documents I can get. I've got all the information I can get. I will write the outline of that information. And then I start writing. So once I start writing, there shouldn't be any new information. If you know if it's a developing situation, like the Gamestop Story was a little different, in that I was writing it while it was happening. So yeah, in that respect that one, you sort of had to go back and not go back and change anything but it certainly evolved that there was writing it. But no, something like The Accidental Billionaires, for instance, I had written this proposal, I had done the research. And then Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher stepped in, but I hadn't written the book yet. So suddenly, I had this massive movie developing. So I locked myself in a hotel, I went over to the Westin Hotel in Boston, and Aaron Sorkin came into Boston. And I literally wrote 11 weeks, I wrote that book. Never really left the hotel. And I would hand him chapters as I went, so no, all the information was done before I start writing. The research stage is usually complete before I start the actual writing, because to me, the writing is like this, frenzied, furious, crazed, you know, six pages, 10 pages, 14 pages, 20 pages a day. Music blaring, the room is pitch black, it's like a rock concert to me that I'm performing. 

It's like that moment where you could be godlike. I think that one brief moment in your life when you're not captured by all your anxieties. And then you know, whatever it is that doesn't work in your life. You just sit and you write in your creating. And for me, it's almost trance-like, so I don't want to have to stop for anything. Once I start writing, I do not stop until I get to the last page. Because I'm a big believer in that's where you go wrong. Right. So if there's research I haven't done yet, I just whizzed through it. And in the end, then we'll find a way to fix it in post right. I will not stop once they start writing the scene. 

Anna David: You already absorbed everything. It's not like you're like, oh, Eduardo said bullet like it's in there.

Ben Mezrich: Yeah, I know, every chapter I know, every character I know. You know, I know everything that I need to know. I've got photos of every room that is in the story. I've got, you know, either blueprints from the internet or I've been there myself with a video camera. Like I do real crazy levels of research. And so yeah, there's no sort of saying, oh, shoot, I don't know what this is or what happened here.

Anna David: Yeah. So for anybody who's listening and dreams of having their book made into a movie or TV show or whatever it is. First of all, in terms of rights when you're doing it like this, how many rights do you need? Whose rights? 

Ben Mezrich: That's a good question. So that's usually the way I look at it. That's the movie studios problem. So, if it's a public figure, you don't need any rights. You know, if you're writing about Mark Zuckerberg, or you're writing about the Gamestop story, you're not really going to need anybody's rights to do that. Certainly not for the book, when the studio wants to make a movie, they're going to need certain rights. If there aren't a lot of news articles about those characters. So for instance, for the MIT story, these are a bunch of unknown kids who played blackjack, a movie studio would need those rights. An author of a book wouldn't necessarily need rights. But I certainly didn't want anybody pissed off and unhappy with the story. So I sat down with everybody who I was going to write about and said, I'm going to write about is this cool. And I think for the main character, I did end up making a deal with him for his rights, to make it easier to sell the movie and that kind of thing. But usually, I don't think so much about that. But the other thing is, don't forget, I've sold the movie.

So the studio comes in pretty early, and starts talking to the main characters and figuring that out. I've also had situations where a producer will come to me with a story, and they've already locked up rights. That's what my book 37 Parallel about this crazy UFO hunter, Beau Flynn, who does all the rocks, movies, who did go notice bows wonderful bow came to me, he's like, I've got this great story, you've got to take a look at this. And I flew out to Colorado, and was out in the mountains hunting UFOs with this guy, and it was just an incredible experience. And that became, I thought, a really cool book. And so I didn't really think about, you know, the rights. I don't think about it. Because for the most part, I'm not writing about unknowns. But less of someone emailed me and was like, I have this incredible story. If I wanted to tell it, it would have to be a situation where they're on board, it wouldn't be the kind of thing where I go to them and say I want to tell your story. That's not the kind of writer I am. So for the people you're talking about who are like, “Oh, I saw this news, that looks like a great story. I need to go get that guy's rights.” I would never do that. That person would have to come to me and say, I've got this great story, I want you to tell it. And I would say I'd love to tell it.

That's all there is to it. I'll tell you. I'm not going to buy anything from you. I'll tell it, it'll become a big movie, you'll become incredibly famous. And we'll all win, that's the deal I'm looking for. But yes, the studio does often have to come in and figure out rights, but they don't actually need rights for a true story. They only need rights if it's not a true story about somebody. So yeah, it's complicated. I definitely would suggest that a starting out writer doesn't try to do that. I think there are so many great stories to tell, that don't necessarily involve buying somebody's rights. Why would you choose that? Unless you had a certain reason why you were going to write that story. But there are a million journalists out there trying to do those stories, right? And it's not like they're getting anybody's rights. If you open the Wall Street Journal tomorrow, there'll be a dozen stories in there. Nobody's been paid for any rights. If a studio decides to make that story, the studio will come in and buy the rights. But none of those writers got anybody's rights.

Anna David: Same with podcasters now. 

Ben Mezrich: Right.  Yeah, I mean, in terms of you don't need people's rights. 

Anna David: They're telling all kinds of stories.

Ben Mezrich:  Yeah. But eventually, if a studio wants to make a movie off something, they'll figure that out. But that's not really my role. So, yeah, I don't really think about it that much.

Anna David:  And so well, this has been fantastic. I usually end with you know, how do you want people to reach you? But really, you only want people to reach you if they've got an incredible story. And they want you to tell it right?

Ben Mezrich: Yeah. I mean, I love people. I'm on Twitter. You know, I think that's the easiest place to find me. I have a Discord for the NFT stuff. So if people are interested in that, there's Benmezrich.com, or Ben MezrichNFT.com. But really, I think Twitter has become sort of the go to place for people to pitch me stories. And that's what people do. And I love young writers coming and talking about writing and stuff like that. So I'm happy to answer any questions anybody has. But I think it's a great moment. For writers. I think this is probably in my entire career. This is the moment where there are the most places to sell something. This is probably the golden age for people starting out and writing to me because there's more places to sell it than there ever were in history, and more places to tell a story than there ever were before. So, you know, there's streaming, there's podcasts, there's just a million different ways to do it. Self publishing and Kindle and Substack. And it's an infinite number compared to when I started out. You sent query letters to agents. That was much the only ballgame right, and by mail, you go to the post office every day with your stack. Right. So, you know, I think there's just a lot of opportunity now.

Anna David: Yeah, as my previous guests said, because of the NFT revolution. The writers haven't been celebrated like this since the Renaissance. That's what she said. 

Ben Mezrich: That's a good way to put it. I like that. Yeah. 

Anna David: Well, Ben, thank you so much for your time. Listeners, thank you for listening. And this has just been delightful.

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