The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters. A Comprehensive Guide for Authors by Josh Bernoff

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters. A Comprehensive Guide for Authors by Josh Bernoff https://amzn.to/446ArCp “If you’re serious about writing a business book that matters, then look no further.” —Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When, Drive, and To Sell Is Human ENDORSED BY MORE THAN 50 SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS AUTHORS Your brain burns with a powerful idea worth sharing. Could writing a business book spread that idea, create real change, and launch your career on the path to visibility and influence? Definitely. But don’t start by piling up words. Instead focus on the story. What urgent problem does your reader face? How can they solve it? And what journey must your reader take as you guide them from confusion to understanding, action, and success? Build a Better Business Book is the first accessible and comprehensive guide for authors who want to create impact. Josh Bernoff, a bestselling author, veteran editor, and insightful writing coach with decades of experience on 45 successful book projects, explains the systematic way to refine your idea and then research, write, publish, and promote a book that matters. Learn how to: Build your book not just from ideas but from people and their compelling stories — and how you can research and tell those stories. Write a first chapter that creates powerful motivation by emotionally connecting with readers. Select among the three major publishing models — traditional, self-publishing, and “hybrid” — on the axes of speed, cost, and influence. Plan your book as a project, then efficiently execute on that plan with a low-stress, high potency tool: the fat outline. Structure chapters that no reader can put down. Collaborate with coauthors, editors, and ghost writers without excessive bloodshed. Promote your book to maximize your sales, revenue, and influence. Josh Bernoff’s book projects have generated over $20 million for their authors. This guide includes results of an extensive author survey and secrets from interviews with successful business authors like Jay Baer, Laura Gassner Otting, Phil M. Jones, Joe Pulizzi, and Scott Stratten. Don’t waste valuable energy without accomplishing your goals. Construct your business book as a compelling story, and you won’t just get your words in print. You’ll create change in the minds of your readers. And that is the first step to making a meaningful impact on the world. About the Author Josh Bernoff is the author, coauthor, editor, or ghostwriter of eight business books. Book projects on which he has collaborated have generated over $20 million for their authors. His most recent book is "Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters -- A Comprehensive Guide" (Amplify, 2023). He is also the author of "Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean"(HarperBusiness, 2016). Toronto’s Globe and Mail called it “a Strunk and White for the modern knowledge worker.” He was coauthor of "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies" (Harvard Business Press, 2008), which was a BusinessWeek bestseller. Josh writes a blog post on topics of interest to authors every weekday at Bernoff.com. His blog has generated 4 million views. He lives with his wife, an artist, in Portland, Maine.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. It's so wonderful to be here with you again.

Geez, we can all just come together and unite, be as one on the Chris Voss Show. Because that's really what it is. It's about being the one, uniting, aligning our minds in a spectacular way of being even more brilliant and intelligent, as it were. And we're also going to laugh a little bit, too. Should we do that as well? That sounds like a good deal. Anyway, wow, we've already got the comments just flooding in from our guests. Amazing fan base, clearly not mine.

There you guys. All three of my fans are here. All three of your fans are here, so there you go. And I'm one of them, sir. So we've got an amazing author, a multi-book author, who's going to be coming to you with some incredible business books and writing and authorship stuff that he's done. And he's going to expand your mind and make you more brilliant.

And, of course, I'm just here to make you laugh and tell stupid jokes. So in the meantime, that's all the more reason to refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com versus chrisfoss, youtube.com versus chrisfoss, linkedin.com versus chrisfoss, and see us over on christmas one on tiktok uh today we have him on the show he's the author of the newest book comes out june 20th 2023 josh burnoff is on the show with us today uh and uh his title of his book is called Build a Better Business Book, How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book that Matters, a Comprehensive Guide for Authors. He's joining us on the show today.

He is the author and co-author, editor, or ghostwriter of eight business books. That's a lot going on there. Book projects on which he has collaborated have generated over 20 million dollars for their author his most recent book the one we just mentioned uh and he is also the author of writing without bullshit boost your career by saying what you mean writing without bullshit he must have read my book uh toronto's uh globe and mail called it a strunk and white Fremont knowledge worker. He's a groundswell winning in a world transformed by social technologies, which is a Business Week bestseller. And he writes a blog post on topics of interest to authors every day.

His blog has generated four million views. Welcome to the show, Josh. How are you? I'm doing great. It's great to be here and talk to your audience it's great for you to have uh to have you here as well and we've been friends on facebook for probably a number of years i think yeah well you know faith the facebook thing happened and all of us signed up in like 2007 and now we're all still friends wait so you didn't

follow me as a friend no i'm just kidding i don't know. You know, it's amazing how that whole thing worked where you just kind of found friends through the allogamation of everyone getting together. And then, of course, finding out who the smart ones were and blocking and kicking all the rest. So you made the cut or I made your cut. We made each other's cut. So give me a.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Okay. People want to connect with me. Everything is at burnoff.com.

That's B-E-R-N-O-F-F.com. There's a blog there I post every weekday. And burnoff.com slash books will give you access to my books. There you go. So, Josh, we need to establish one thing. What is a strunk? Is this a canadian thing no it's uh probably the most influential book ever written uh uh about writing and the quality of writing was called the elements of

style and the authors were strunk and white oh okay so uh it's eb white who went on to become the editor of the new yorker yeah um so to say this is a strunken white for the modern knowledge worker is sort of like saying, you know, this is the New Testament of the Bible. It's like, oh, that's the next thing we need to read. See, this is why I do this show. I learn stuff every day, and my audience does, too. I intend to help people get smarter, so let's do that. That's what our job is. All right.

So let's get into it. What motivated you on to write your latest book here? Well, what motivated me was that after 15 years of working with authors and eight years of doing that exclusively, the authors I was working with kept asking the same questions over and over and over again. Questions about how to get published, about how chapters are structured, about how to have an idea that's actually worth writing about, and questions about how to promote a book. I mean, obviously, step one is to get on the Chris Voss show, but after that,

there are a lot of other questions that people have about book promotion. So I said, all right, let me write this all down. And 70,000 words later, now there's a book that's got everything an author needs to know about how to create and be successful with a business book. And this is really important. We should probably hand this out to people because we get pitched hundreds of times a month on the show, if not a thousand. I spend about half the month saying no. And I wish I could say yes, but I mean, I can only do two to three shows a day. There's a weekday. There's just only so much I can do.

And people sometimes get angry about me. But this is a book they should read because how to build a better business book is really important. Well, part of my goal here is to get there to be less crappy business books in the world. Okay. So maybe if there are fewer crappy business books, they won't keep pitching you. And people need to understand what it means to differentiate a book,

how to have an idea. That's, that's a big idea that's actually right. And that is differentiated from the other 73,000 books on the same topic. And, and they need to understand how to structure things so that you don't write the book that we've all read, which is like, oh, there it is again, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five. Why do I keep reading the same thing over and over again? This could have been a goddamn blog post.

So hopefully I can educate people so that they can produce books that are worth doing or give up and do something else if they're not smart enough to do that. You know, there's a shirt and a brand line for you right there. You don't have a book. You have a blog post. You know, I have people that I'll consult with on starting a podcast, and they'll call me up and be like, hey, Chris, what's so good? There's a deal for a podcast. I'm like, okay, what is it? And they tell me up and be like hey chris was so good this idea for a podcast i'm like okay what is it and they tell me and i go you have an episode you don't have a podcast you have an episode you have like an hour or two of data and you got nothing after that like yeah so you should do that you should make that shirt seriously i that

would be funny as hell uh seth godin gave you a nice review uh you know i read your book and uh it helped me because i my next book was going to be uh building a company on uh have and not having hangnails or something i don't know i just made that up so i don't know okay maybe not the best title not the best title so your book helped dissuade me from uh starting that so let's give it let's get into the depth of this a little bit more. Let's get some ideas and concepts out of you on what you put in the book and some ideas. Okay. Well, let's start with this.

What does it mean to have an idea that's worth writing a book about? So we can already screen out a whole bunch of people who shouldn't be contacting you. hang neils are out yes well it depends if it's a medical book i guess but yeah that's true that's not a business book yes you need you need three things okay first of all it has to be a big idea and all that that means is that there's a specific group of people for whom this is significant so if you're going to write a book about, let's say, the effect of artificial intelligence on the workplace, well, there's a lot of people in the workplace, a lot of managers, a lot of people need to hear about that.

The second thing is it needs to be right. Now, obviously, new interesting ideas, you can't always prove they're right, but you at least need some evidence. You need some case studies, people who did it this way and were better off, statistics and data's excellent. You just need some sort of information that makes it right. And something new about that information, that is, it can't just be rehash of what's already out there. The third thing, actually more important than the other two is that it's a new idea so i said big right and new a new idea is one that is differentiated so yes if you're going to write

a book about the metaverse well there's a lot of books about the metaverse but if you're going to write a book about how the metaverse is going to lead us all to have strokes and heart attacks from sitting in our chairs all the time. What? That's a new idea. I didn't say it was right, but it would be a new idea. So you need to differentiate. There has to be some sort of a spin or way of looking at it

or a perspective that makes people say, Oh, I haven't seen that before. Unless you can... Let yourself uninstall the metaverse. Yes. Unless you can complete the sentence this is the first book that blah blah blah blah unless you can complete that sentence you don't you shouldn't really be spending your time on the book wow so it needs to be right it needs to be

new and it needs to be big and it needs to be big yeah so it needs to be big. Yeah. So it can't be small. You can't go small. You got to go big. You know, these are real important facts because, you know, I mean, I've gotten a lot of weird book pitches. In fact, sometimes it's kind of fun to get the book pitches because you're like, really, you wrote that? But, I mean, the same can be said about my book, so there's that. Somebody in the audience says,

I need to update my book on job hunting with social media or social networking. I mean, I mean, do what you want, man. It's your book. Um, you know, how many books get written every month? I think it's like hundreds of thousands. I don't, well, you were with, with, uh, platforms like Kindle direct publishing, anybody can put a book out there and say, I wrote a book. I don't think it's hundreds of thousands a month, but I do think it's hundreds of thousands a year.

And if you're talking about business books, there's definitely thousands of things that could be classified as a business book every year. And how many of them make an impact? 100, 150? Certainly not nearly as many as are published. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far.

We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff, with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as CEO. And be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com.

Now back to the show. I know. I see their pitches. I mean, I love people that have ideas and they give them. And like I said, we wish we could have more folks in them. But this is from, there's a few different data out here. So I'm going to throw some out just for shits and giggles for a conversation piece. The awful truth is about book publishing. The numbers of books being

published every year has exploded. I'm seeing between by 2020, Boker had given out 40 million ISBN registrations to U.S. publications. Some people are quoting me, 2 million books were self-published. 1.7 million are published in 2022 statistics. It seems to be about $2 million a year, roughly, give and take, depending on what the Internet tells you. Maybe we should ask for GPT so we can get more information. But that's an extraordinary number of books that are failing miserably.

They probably are never going to get to the top. Why do you think so many of those authors of books fail? Okay. So first of all, I want to pick apart some of those numbers that you've got here. You've got to understand that now it's trivial to upload a file to Amazon and then your published author. They do print on demand, so there's no need for any to be actually printed.

Until somebody actually buys one, then they print it and bind it on the spot there and send it out. So to even call those books is a bit of a stretch, right? It's, it's the potential book that, that isn't going to be a book until somebody actually buys one. So let's clear up, clear away all of that crap. The reason that, that people write business books, the ones that don't succeed is because it's about them. I want to write about my experience of starting a company. I started a company in 2022. I have generated $61,000 worth of revenue in 2023. So obviously I'm the world's foremost expert.

And the challenge is that in order to be successful, it has to not be about you. It has to be about your readers, right? Your reader is thinking, well, how do I have more energy? You know, what diet should I have to have more energy? Or I'm suddenly in this position where I have to manage a team and two-thirds of them don't even come into the office anymore. They're all working remotely. How do I do that? So if there's a big question that you can answer, and if you have actual data or experience or case studies to back it up, absolutely go for it. But if it's like, I'm so great because I did this thing once, well, nobody gives a crap that reminds me of back in the day when uh i think i was at a hundred thousand on twitter

and i was like one of the top twitter's top thousand users or something uh there was a guy that i saw on twitter and he was selling a course because he got from zero to a hundred within 30 days on twitter i'm like you're selling a course for this? Like, seriously? But, you know, you and I have probably seen that all over social media over the years. So what you're saying is it's not about so much you, but solving problems for your readers and the people who are going to buy your book.

Is that what you're saying? Yes, absolutely. So you need a class of people who've got a problem, right? I have a lot. I'm on social media. There's a class of people who've got a problem. I have a lot. I'm on social media. There's a class of people who have a lot of problems. Yes, but you need one solution that fits a whole bunch of people. And that's the problem.

I can't solve all their damn problems. Well, I can't solve all of people's problems. So if you look at it, I mean, this book is a niche book that I wrote. This is for people who want to be an author, right? And if what your issue is is that you want to be a tennis player, well, then my book isn't going to help you. You know what? You give me a great idea for a business book.

I can't solve all your motherfucking problems, goddammit. Solve it yourself. How's that? That sounds like a good title, but the next step is we have to google it and see if someone already wrote it someone probably did better it's not we're gonna make it we're not putting that i can't i can't resist this when i so when i work with authors on ideas right i do this thing where i meet with them and and somebody that stands in for their audience

and we do this idea development session and And I say, well, I use two very sophisticated tools. The first one is thesaurus.com, right? Because sometimes the word you want for your title is just a little varying from the words that we're talking about. And the second one is the universal search engine for book titles, which is called amazon.com. So they're like,

Oh, here, why don't we call the book this? And I type it in and i'm like well actually turns out that daniel pink wrote that book in 2021 so maybe your title your thing with the same title maybe we shouldn't really be using that books have become like dot coms where it's like it's so hard to find a unique thing i'm i'm gonna tell you that that's actually not true oh okay i stand corrected you're the

you're the expert here well i i do this all the time where we we i work with authors and we turn around these ideas and they and what happens is i use i'm a word guy right so i listen to them and i'm like oh wait you said this i never heard those those that phrase. And then we'll go and search it on Amazon. And I'm like, oh, my God. There's no book with that title. You could own that. Now, yes, if you go look at the.com, it might be taken. But, you know, this is, I mean, if you look at my previous book, Writing Without Bullshit, okay, people were were like how the heck did you come up with

that that's that didn't somebody i'm like no i typed it in and it's like oh nobody's got this and that's really what i wanted it to be about about how to be direct and clear and i'm like okay i own it and for for uh the first seven years of my my independent uh work without bullshit.com was my website so There you go. My next book, we found a lane. I was really surprised we found a lane. It came to me one day driving the car. I was listening to a lot of different business books and leadership. I have to finish writing the book, but if it sticks on the material of the title,

then it sticks. I was really surprised. title and it sticks but yeah i was really surprised i looked on amazon i had to blink twice and i'm like are you are you for real and sadly i can't tell anybody what it is but it has something to do with the no it's actually called i can't fix all your mother whatever i referenced i don't want to say that for youtube uh i've already kind of blown my why the thing there um so let me ask you this. You talk about what makes business books boring, and clearly you read my books. So what is that? How do people not be boring in their business books?

Are they just boring in life? Are they just boring people in life? Even boring people can write excellent books. And even interesting people can write boring books. And even interesting people can write boring books. So no, it's not about how boring they are as an individual. I have to say, having done a few podcasts before this,

I looked at the video recordings and I'm like, pick it up a notch, burn off, you're boring. I'm not boring in print, but in person, I got to work on on it anyway anyway how not to be boring the number one thing the simplest thing the easiest thing the most powerful thing is that books are made out of stories that includes business books okay so you need to tell me about sarah who uh you know was suddenly realized that artificial intelligence was going to change

the way that she did her work and the challenges that she had and then how she learned to use AI to be successful. And that's, I've just made that up. I have no idea if that exists, but if you find these stories about people that your audience can identify with, people that like oh yeah that's like me then you succeed um the the first book proposal i ever wrote i at the time i was at forester research and i was their expert on the future of television um made a whole bunch of interesting predictions and i wrote a book because i'm like this is this is going to change everything and i was right about it changing everything i sent the proposal to an agent and the agent comes back and he says, I can't sell this.

And I said, why not? There's some shocking changes coming. He's like, there's no people in here and there are no stories in here. And business books are made out of people and stories. And I was like, I can do that.

So from that point forward, it was always about interviewing people and the experiences they had and explaining what happened with them. And that's what people remember. They're like, oh, yeah, that person at the beginning of chapter three who had writer's block and then you explain how they got past it. That's me. I understand that. There you go. You know, stories, you know, we talked about this on the show.

I think my audience has heard me say it ad nauseum but it's important stories are the are the uh owner's manual to life and that's how we learn from each other because uh i didn't get my owner's manual in the mail did you i think the post office sent it to zimbabwe well i got it delivered to me orally by my dad but eventually that kind of information goes out of date and you have to figure it out on your own yeah most guys get it delivered orally to them by their wives telling them uh how boring they are and how they need to do better at folding the socks or whatever well there you go i'm not going there yeah i think you went a different way than i did with that joke but that's okay. We all get it. So, you know, you talk about a number of things in the book.

One aspect is deciding between the three publishing models. And this is really important to me because at first I was going to try and push my book to go full publishing. And I was hoping since we have such a great relationship with, you know, Simon Schuster and Penguin Random House, all the people, they might pick it up. But then I talked to some of my friends who actually were big time CEOs who put out books with major publishers and man, they talked me the hell out of it.

It was kind of interesting. But you talk about traditional self-publishing and hybrid and the different axioms of costs and speed and influence of stuff. Tell us a little bit about that because that's real important in the decision making, I think, that people have to make. Yeah. So the traditional way that everybody knows about is you write a book proposal, which is a significant amount of effort. You get an agent and then you shop the book to publishers. And, of course, that's a crapshoot. You might get picked up.

You might not. The most important thing these days to publishers is what promotional resources do you have? Given your podcast audience, Chris, I think you could actually do that and succeed. But if you succeed with that, the good news is you're probably going to get an advance. So they're going to pay you $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 to write the book. But you're going to have to wait 15 to 18 months for it to come out. And I did an author survey, and what I found was that it confirmed what I'd known anecdotally from working with authors, which is that all authors are unhappy with their publishers. There's a lot of things they're unhappy about, but the most important thing to recognize is that when you have a publisher, it is still your job to get the book edited and be great.

They're not going to have their editor do a lot of that work and all of the promotional effort or 90 of the promotional effort is your job um so they're like so these people are like you know i have a book with a major publisher and it didn't sell well what did you do to sell it because the publisher isn't going to do that now yeah put that aside second model is hybrid publishing where you basically hire a publisher to publish your book and if you look right this this book is hybrid published my publisher is amplify um i've done two of the books i ghost wrote amplify published um and one of the books that I wrote when I was an analyst was published by

Greenleaf, which is another one of these hybrid publishers. And you end up paying tens of thousands of dollars up front in that situation, but the royalty rates are higher. So if the book sells a lot, you could actually end up making more money that way. Oh, wow. Yeah. But if it doesn't sell a lot, you're out those tens of thousands of dollars.

Basically, you're taking more of the risk as opposed to the publisher taking it. And in my author survey, the people with hybrid publishers were significantly happier with their publishers than the ones with traditional publishers, and there's a reason for that. The customer of the hybrid publisher

is you, the author. That's who's paying them. Whereas the customer of the traditional publisher is you, the author. That's who's paying them. Whereas the customer of the traditional publisher is the bookstore. That's where they get their money. So you, the author, are like an important supplier, just like the printer is. Whereas when you hire a hybrid publisher, then you're the customer. The third way people can get books out,

the easiest way is to just self-publish. And, you know, you basically, for just a few thousand bucks, you can hire people to do the cover and format the pages and get it set up on Amazon and so on. But of course, that is most likely to be a paperback. It doesn't have a lot of impact. And while it's fast, you can typically get a book out in three or four months if you do that, as opposed to the 15 to 18 months in traditional publisher, about nine months at a hybrid publisher.

While it's fast, it's unlikely to just take off. And there are people who self-published and have sold millions of copies. Phil M. Jones, the sales expert just take off and there are people who self-published and have sold millions of copies phil m jones uh the uh sales expert uh who wrote exactly what to say he uh he was enormously successful but most of those self-published books go nowhere again the author's responsible for almost everything including all of the promotion in that situation yeah you have to spend a lot of time town squire the, squire,

the town squire square, uh, yelling on your little soapbox about your book. But even then, you know, I've had people on the, we joked about how, uh, you know,

I get pitches on the, all the time from PR agencies, you know, top number one, Amazon seller, this, this guy sold worldwide. And then I go on Amazon and they have like one review but what's funny is is and

i'm just like seriously uh you know what was that like a nanosecond of an hour on amazon or something you you comprise those numbers and launch but you know what's funny is sometimes major publishers and we're talking simon schuster penguin random people out of book to show um i've had authors on they have one review and uh you know sometimes it's kind of a niche topic you know like physics and how how uh i don't know math works and you know people that is that's not a they're not a big fan of that but you know they're gonna maybe sell in colleges but uh so i've seen it in major publishing you know one one thing i don't know if you write about this in your book, but one thing that interests me and the people that swayed me from going the big publishing route was copyright control.

Well, in most cases, you're going to retain the copyright, even with a major publisher. But that doesn't mean you retain all the rights. So, you know, with a hybrid publisher, with my book, if I said, Oh, you know what?

I'm going to take the first three chapters out and publish another book. They're like, it's your book. Do what you want. And I'm going to be like, okay, I'm going to take that and I'm going to self publish it on Amazon. They're like,

well, we don't think that's a good idea, but it's your book. Do what you want. Whereas when you work with a traditional publisher, they have exclusive rights that are listed in the contract. And if you say, I want to come out with a paperback edition, they're like, no, you know what? We don't think we want to do that.

And that's the end of the conversation. And sometimes they pick your cover too. I've had authors on the show that have complained about that. And the other big problem is is is the timing and if you're writing a book on like ai uh we had an author on who wrote a major published book with on nfts and of course by the time it got to market a year after you know they do their whole planning thing and you know nfts were dead uh we we just had someone on a brilliant mind on on scotus in the court and the book is brilliant it's current and up to date but you know we had him on the day the scotus is scotus the supreme court's putting out

one of his most extraordinary things this week of some of the most extraordinary uh decisions and i'm like geez if you could have put you know he missed the whole uh he missed the whole uh row row versus way getting overturned all because it took a year and a half for the major publishers to get his book to the thing. So now he's probably got to go run and do updates for, you know, all the new stuff that was in his book. But yeah, that's a, that's a big challenge that, you know, waiting a year, year and a half to get your book published with a major publisher. Yeah. It's not just a question of the book ideas becoming obsolete. Any book that has

anything to do with technology, that's a big challenge. Groundswell, the first book that I wrote about social media with my colleague Charlene Lee, we thought about that all the time because we're like, we're writing about this. This could change. Yeah, if you go look at

that book now, there's a, there's a whole chapter on my space in there. So people don't, don't really have a whole lot of interest in that anymore. It's still around. I still use it. Please. It's not really an important strategic perspective,

but, but it's not just that. It's, it's that the people write books because they want it to have an impact. They want to generate leads or they want to increase their reputation. And I don't want to wait. If I have stuff to say now, I don't want to wait 18 months for that stuff to get out there and to actually generate business for me so people books that they want to do something for them um especially in these fast moving kind of markets there they get frustrated with with the schedules of traditional publishers there you go let's talk

about uh ai artificial intelligence and uh what will ai do to the worlds of books because i've seen people saying hey you know you could punch out a book and write it really fast. We talked about some of the issues a second ago of, you know, how long it can take for delays. I mean, if you write a book about AI with major publishers and then you've got to wait a year for that baby to come out after final edit. Yeah. I mean, you're just going to look kind of maybe foolish. You're going to be on to GPT-7 by then. GPT-7, your book's all about GPT-4 or whatever.

Yeah. Well, so let's talk about that. First of all, I've seen people who are actually publishing books written almost exclusively by AI, and they suck. They're terrible. Do they even edit them and put the human in or what's in there one hopes that they edit them but but the problem is that um among all of the things that that uh chat gpt and it's it's uh competitors do there's this thing that's missing that every real author has it's called wit okay so uh ask ask chat gpt to write some jokes sometime and you'll see boy this thing really has no idea what

humor is needs to work on stand-up routine yeah and and wit is not just that it's it's which things you put in which order it's how you had you lead people down the path and then suddenly veer off in an interesting direction it's short and long sentences it's the choice of words the the unique choice of words it's you know every author has got some element of that um and uh that doesn't show up in in ai writing Now, will this affect the way authors work? Absolutely. I'm working with an author right now who uses ChatGPT as an aid. And what does that mean?

So you're like, read this research study and summarize it for me. Oh, wow, you did that in nine seconds. Wow, that saved me a lot of time. Um, read this thing that I wrote and tell me what you think the three main ideas are. Oh, those aren't really the ideas I wanted to emphasize. I better go back and fix that. Um, I, I did an exercise recently with book titles where I put in descriptions of books and I said, give me what you think the best title for this book would be. And it would come up with four bad ideas and one pretty good idea. And I thought, okay, if I was doing an exercise like this,

we could maybe get to that good idea by having a conversation with ChatGPT. So just like spellchecks are an aid right that and you know that that now you when you're writing it's like oh you left a word out of this sentence it's like oh yeah good that you noticed that these are things that will help people write but the idea that it will do the writing that's the the books are like that are going to be really boring, and there's no way they'll be successful. And I can see when ChatGP does stuff for me. I mean, they're pretty good at doing little PR blurbs or ad copy, but you have to edit it.

You have to put the human in it. I have this vision of injecting the human into the machine, and maybe that should be the cover thing but um you know and there's then there's the recent thing with the attorney who used chat gpp to write an argument well that's the other problem that it was bunk yes it makes stuff up so that's the other problem is the accuracy issue plus the internet is full of you know all all sorts of nonfactual made up. Yes, but this is where the human comes in. If you're like, oh, well, here's a study that was published in madeupshit.com. Maybe I shouldn't include that.

Whereas if it just gets sucked in by chat GPT, you're like, oh, okay, I'll put that in. And what's the source? Well, it didn't tell me that. Didn't realize that's where it came from. Got to have those notes in there. Yeah, it didn't tell me that. Didn't realize that's where it came from. Got to have those notes in there. Yeah, it's interesting to me. It'll be interesting to see how people use it because I can always read a chat GPT copy,

and unless someone's injected enough human in it, I can read the bot. I can tell it's a bot. There's a static nature to it. I don't know, a staccato. There's a stanza to it. I think't know, a staccato. There's a stanza to it. I think maybe it's the word I'm looking for. I can tell that it does.

It is the evenness of it. It's the consistency. And people are like, you should be consistent. Well, if all of your paragraphs are three sentences long and all of your sentences are 12 words long, you'll fall asleep when you're reading stuff like that um and it's not just that there's just i don't know like like one of the things chat gpt does when you ask it to write things is at the end it says and in conclusion well man the only other people who write that way are college students with no imagination so please

as human beings we can do better than that yeah it'll be interesting to see what what uh comes of chat gpt i know i know like i said it made it makes some better copy and add copy sometimes but you still have to inject the human um you know in writing books, you know, people said, well, you know, podcasts are going to replace by the thing by AI and bots. And I'm like, I don't think they can be funny or not funny as much as I can be. The wit, like you mentioned, is a big deal in, into it. And people just, people just need to realize that we're just going to become better editors. I think is what i've decided on chat gpt like we might let write copy less we're bringing we're going to become better editors

oh yeah people become more productive and and you know whose jobs are threatened who's boring people right if you are less interesting than than a bot uh and you're in the creation business if you write copy that's less interesting than what a bot can write then you should have your job replaced because uh we need people who are better than that wow shots fired at boring people from josh burnoff on the show this morning people wow who hurt you josh Show us on the doll where the hurt. Oh, God. Well, just edit a few 60,000 word for you. Oh. And then you'll understand who hurt me. I see you, Mario.

There you go. One thing that's important about your book that I'm sure listeners and audience wants to know, you know, your book projects generate over 20 million for their authors. You talk in the book about promoting your book and maximizing your sale on revenue ka-ching and influence that's what people really want to give us a little teaser

on that if you would okay so first of all let me talk about the 20 million dollar number that is not saying that these books generated 20 million dollars in royalties and advances because if you look at people who make money from books they're making money from speaking they're generating leads for their businesses uh one person i worked with built a business around the reputation that they built from the book and sold it for millions of dollars so that's how you make money from books and the people who make millions of dollars from book sales you know the malcolm gladwells and Daniel Pinks of the world, even though that's happening, they're also making millions of dollars from public speaking. Yeah.

Now, the biggest mistake that authors make is that after they write the book and turn it into whoever's laying out the pages, that they relax. It's like, oh oh finally done with that no this is when you need to start planning your book promotion um and there's five pieces to that you can remember it by pqrst p is positioning what you know so what kind of book is this this is a business strategy book for financial services executives, right? Q is what's the question it answers, the big question that people have that it answers. And then the R, S, and T are the tactics. R is reach.

How are you going to hit as many people as possible? Yes, appear on the Chris Voss show is the start of that, but we need to go further. S is spread. What stuff will you have that actually people will want to share and spread? And T is timing because unless you make sure that as much of that promotion happens over a short period of time as possible, it's attenuated and it doesn't have the impact it should. There you go. You know, the revenue part of it's hard. You know, it's hard going through the editing process, man.

I really fried out in that process um i remember what i was getting to with the um ai i was searching for something if people couldn't tell my audience was probably like he's searching for an idea that he lost track of it's the alzheimer's kicking in folks um back to our ai discussion if we can flip back to that uh the the the interesting thing about ai one thing i found and i never really understood it until i did my book and went through editing was being able to preserve one's voice my voice in my book and i think that's what maybe a lot of people might make mistakes on with ai is you're going to lose your voice especially if you you don't edit that stuff. And even then, I don't talk the way ChatGPT does.

Like anybody, if I did a book, you know, ChatGPT wrote most of it, and even if I lightly edited it, people are like, the comment's in the right place. That's clearly him. Yeah. Now that's, this,

when you read a book that's effective, you have this feeling that the author is talking to you, and that's the voice. this feeling that the author is talking to you and that's your voice that's how that happens um i had i had like people write me a few different people pitched that at the book and i had people send me their you know i was like here's a chapter you know or some a couple pages mess with it and they sent me the thing back and i never really got how important my voice was in the preservation of my text until I saw other people write, edit my book. And I was like, you wrote this book.

It sounds like a woman wrote this book. This is an effeminate voice and not in the Chris Foss voice. And even people wrote in a masculine voice. I was just like, dude, I can hear your voice. Mine's gone. Like you've completely exited my voice from the text. Well, when I edit people, my job is to enable them to be the best version of themselves they can be,

not to enable them to be me talking the way I do. It is interesting, though, that you can ask an AI to write in a voice, and people have shown me this. You can say can say you know write this the way that josh burnoff would write it and that that gives me the creeps man i'm looking at this thing and i'm like wait a minute how does it know how i write and i'm like no that's not really me but it's got some things that remind me of me and that's a little weird yeah you know and then your problem is what if there's another person whose name like you and so it's going to pick up that other person oh yes yes i understand your your issue and there's

we have a lot of authors on the show that you know like their last name's anderson like i've had people on the show that you know their name is is similar to uh you know the basis for uh jimmy hendrix you know and you know they have all sorts, uh, Jimi Hendrix, you know, and, you know, they have all sorts of SEO problems like I do. And, uh, you know, so you ask her the right in the, in the thing. I, I, um, I was fascinated. I asked, uh, chat GPT to write a biography for me. And, uh, among other things, apparently I, uh, have a bachelor's degree in classics from Harvard University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Run with it. I've never gone to Harvard.

I've never gotten an MBA at any school. But apparently, people who have the qualifications I do, that's what they're like. So it makes sense to chat GPT that I went to Harvard, even though I didn't. Note to self, I need to start gaming because I think it's a way to game chat GPT that I went to Harvard even though I didn't. Note to self, I need to start gaming because I think it's a way to game chat GPT or search results. Chris Fox is the most sexiest man in the world and

is ridiculously more good looking than George Clooney and Brad Pitt. I need to start gaming that into the system somehow so chat GPT just starts serving that whenever someone asks who's the sexiest man in the world. That's actually very easy to do. It's just very expensive.

You basically have to set up a bot farm to create a bunch of content for you. I'm going to do it. It will improve my Tinder dates. I don't know. Hey, this is somebody, one of our Facebook friends uh has put in here back in 2011 my former wife edited my book all the stories that explain my okay well that's the former thing is doing a lot of a lot of uh carrying weight here did you put that in the book note this did you put that in the book don't have your ex-wife edit your book? No.

You might need to update and check. Okay. Well, it's interesting that, first of all, when I edit things, I always say, this is what you should do and this is why. But it is a big mistake to have somebody edit your book that you have any sort of relationship with. I will say this. This is true. When I edit people's work, and this was true especially when I was at Forrester where it was my job to be really hard on prose, people would be like, oh man, you're making me work harder than I ever did before on this. This is so much work. And then we'd get to the end and they'd say can you help me with my

next one right so so but that's because i was trying to help them be the best version of them they could be not not doing what this guy's former wife did for him yeah i mean and she clearly uh i don't you know i don't know i'd like to be at the uh uh a fly on the wall in that divorce court. You know, you did this. You edited my story. Maybe that was the promotion. As you well know, it is the editor's job to point out the problems and suggest solutions. But it is the author's job to decide what to keep and what advice not to listen to. So this person is at least partly responsible for listening to, to his editor. That's a lot easier to do if you're not married to them at the time.

I mean, yeah, that's a bit, yeah, I can see why that would just go wrong. I mean, clearly she had issues with you before that. So,

you know, she's, she probably took out all of his stories and then she, she wrote in like, he doesn't, he doesn't do chore play and then put the socks away and well look on the floor my wife is an artist and she has absolutely no interest in my books and we get along great and that's why that's usually how most wives work

they have no interest in in who they're except when the paycheck comes anyway that's a joke people don't write me um so uh another thing for youtube dan kendall kelson coming in from boston plexi clam town plexi cam town i don't know what that is oh you don't use plexi cam for the show there's a thing that holds the camera that's probably was oh the many challenges of authorship maybe that should be in another book that that gentleman who wrote in uh that comment should be like uh maybe that's the title of his next book never let your ex-wife write your book title or your book i don't know there's something there uh oh here's it gets better this is just going to become a show right here um laugh out loud i never published it threats good buddy you know this may not be a good book to publish but that could be an excellent novel i think what

we need to do is have to do another show josh and have you on and have whoever this is on and we can do a uh like a a whole workshop therapy thing therapy therapy workshop we'll bring in a therapist and we'll just do a whole thing here it It might interest you to know. So when I do these idea development sessions with authors, I say, okay, it's going to be you and me and a third person who you trust who can stand in for the audience. And I had to add in an extra thing, which is, and that you're not married to.

Because I want that third person to be able to say, no, I don't get it. Or, oh, that sounds stupid. And not have any of the interpersonal dynamics mess that up. They have to be able to be honest. And that's not a good role for someone you're married to. Yeah, that's true. I mean, maybe you need to add a whole new chapter in your book about, uh, um, therapy and marriage and psychology.

And I don't know, I'm just kidding. Don't add that to your book. There are husbands and wives that write books together'm just kidding don't add that to your book there are husbands and wives that write books together but i wouldn't do it that way you know we've had them on the show and they're lovely people but you can tell there's some tension there sometimes when i'm talking about the book or interviewing them you really can and like and like sometimes i've had a husband wife right they do psychology for you know how to have a happy marriage and i'm just sometimes i'll watch the show in the green room and I'm like, there's some tension going on there. I can see what's going on.

I can't resist sharing this, right? Okay. So the first book I wrote, my coauthor was a woman named Charlene Lee. Brilliant, brilliant person. And it was a really intense experience for us to work together. It was a sort of an intellectual version of a marriage and one of my wife's friends was like aren't you worried that josh is spending all this time with charlene and i'm like she said no and of course not because that was a knock down drag out intellectual kind of of uh you know collaboration and that was it it was our relationship was a totally on the intellectual plane and that has nothing to do with what what's going on in the romantic plane with somebody you're married to there you go there you go uh so this has been pretty interesting and there's a lot of stuff that's in here how to write a first chapter that creates powerful motivation

by emotionally connecting with your readers uh planning your book structuring chapters uh that no reader can put down that's something that's really good collaborate with co-authors editors and ghost writers without excessive bloodshed wait there's blood oh there can be yeah well come on you just talked about what it was like to work with an editor so yeah i had a great experience with my editor it was just the bloodletting of you know you write all that stuff and you know you write a hundred thousand words and 50 pages or 500 pages whatever and they hand it back to you and they're like these two pages are good the rest we just kind of threw in the trash and you know and then you look what they threw in the trash you go probably so but no it was more the editing than the editor i love editor, but it was the editing. Just, it was just so, you know,

I wrote the book in like, you know, most of the book is a memoir of my stories that I've been telling for 50 million years and lessons from the stories in business. So it was really easy to pound the book because I'd just been telling those stories forever. Now I'm actually gonna have to write something for my next book. I have to make some shit up for the next book but uh you know these are important lessons and i i highly recommend people check out your book because writing better books are are good and they might get you on the chris voss show because uh we get pitched so much stuff dude and there's so many weird there's so much weird stuff but hey you know it's like one of those it's like back in the day when there used to be a magazine for everything there was like a magazine for hangnails and even so here's here's what i think

you ought to do whenever you get a pitch from an author you need to say what is it that makes your book big what is it that makes it right and why is it new okay and if they can answer those questions if they come to you with that they're you're like oh this person's got a brain maybe i'm gonna get somewhere but if they can't answer those those questions then don't have them on yeah and then like we read your book and it sucks too and i'm like yeah but i have a podcast and you don't so no no no no see how that works that's the whole reason i'm the host i don't have to be interesting i just have to be kind of funny every now and then we bring on and we bring on the smart people like yourself. Everybody knows why we have guests on the show.

What's his name? King. What's his face? The interviewer from CNN. Larry King. Larry King. The guy's a fucking idiot. But he just has great people on the show.

That's not true. I love Larry King. That's a mean thing to say. Going to hell for sure. Anyway, guys. Anything more you want to tease out josh before we go this has been a fun show especially the whole wife thing that came in there okay um well whatever whatever your readers questions are if you're thinking about writing a business book if you're in the middle of it and you're in pain if you're having writer's block, if you can't figure out the right way to get published, anything for any nonfiction books,

I've tried to answer all those questions. So burn off.com slash books, go take a look. And if you want to communicate clearly with people in the office at the risk of them actually understanding what you're saying, that's a writing without bullshit. The previous book. There you go.

Check that out as well. Folks, all of his books go on Amazon. You can find them. Just Google previous book. There you go. Check that out as well. Folks, all of his books go on Amazon. You can find them. Just Google his name. Thank you very much, Josh, for coming to the show.

We really appreciate it. It's been fun. Hey, it's been great to be here and definitely wackier than any other podcast I've ever done. So that was fun. Yeah. I never had to be writing the former wife in my book.

That made it the second half of the of the show just got better with that. I was like, yeah. All right, so there you go. Anyway, to my audience, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Guilt them. You know, you have to have at least five relatives in your downline,

according to the Chris Voss Show. We're not a multi-level marketing, but we do guilt and shame here. So please refer for the friends and relatives, go to goodreads.com YouTube.com LinkedIn.com If you're not subscribed to LinkedIn, big newsletter. That thing is killing over there. It grows

like a weed every day. I'm just like, who subscribed to this thing? And it's me, which makes it more astonishing. Also go to TikTok, Chris Foss World and the Chris Fosswell podcast on TikTok. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and order up the book wherever fine books are sold.

Build a better business book, how to plan, write, and promote a book that matters, a comprehensive guide for authors, out June 20th, 2023. See you next time. I missed the plug there, Dan.