The School of Greatness - 227 How to Write a Book to 10x Your Income with Tucker Max
Episode Date: September 14, 2015"Life is hard, so don't expect something else." - Tucker Max If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at http://lewishowes.com/227. ...
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This is episode number 227 on how to write a book with Tucker Max.
Welcome to the School of Greatness.
My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message
to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
Thanks for spending some time with me today.
Now let the class begin.
Welcome everyone to the podcast.
My name is Lewis Howes and thank you so much for being here.
If you are a regular on the School of Greatness podcast listening, then thank you for coming
back.
And if you're brand new here, then thank you as well for being here. And I hope you stick around and make sure to subscribe
to me over on iTunes. We've got an awesome guest today. His name is Tucker Max. He came on about
a year ago. We talked about book marketing. And today we're talking about a couple of things.
One, he launched a business a year ago on my podcast and now has done over a million dollars in sales on accident, essentially, from starting his business on the School of Greatness podcast.
So it's a pretty interesting case study.
We talked for the first few minutes about what happened once he mentioned something he was thinking about doing and how it blew up instantly and made him over a million dollars in the last year from the launching it on the School of Greatness podcast.
So that's pretty cool.
If you guys want to hear a case study there about what being on the show can do for your business.
And then secondly, we talk about how to write a book.
So if you're an entrepreneur, a coach, a speaker, an expert, you're a lawyer, a financial advisor, you've got some type of expertise, and you're thinking about writing a book, we talk about the different ways to go about it. We talk about
self-publishing it. We talk about doing an e-book. We talk about how to find a ghostwriter to help
you write the book. We talk about going for a traditional publisher, which takes a couple years,
and all the time and money and investment it takes in that. And we cover really how to write a book in a couple of short months
with only using a few hours of your time
and creating something that can 5 to 10x your business by doing it.
And Tucker's developed a system that he shares with you on this podcast.
He gives you the system that you can do it yourself.
And I think it's pretty powerful.
So I hope you guys enjoy this episode.
If you're thinking about writing a book or if you've ever thought about it,
this is the episode for you.
And if you have a friend who is an expert and wants to increase their income
or their business and their expertise and their authority with a book,
then make sure to send them to lewishouse.com slash 227
and share this with your friends online
because this is going to be a powerful episode for everyone who's interested.
And without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into this episode.
I'm so excited to share with you on how to write a book to help you 10x your income and your business
with the one, the only, Tucker Max.
Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast.
Very excited about our guest today.
He's a good friend.
He's been on the show once or twice at least.
Once.
It's once.
Okay.
No, actually you've been on twice.
Oh, yeah.
That's right.
You split it into two episodes.
Double episodes.
So welcome.
Welcome Tucker Max to the show.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Welcome.
I'm happy to be back, Lewis.
Yeah, man.
This is episode the third time.
So the last time we did one about kind of your journey from your writing days with the
books that you did and also just your lifestyle from now, you know, not being in that lifestyle
anymore with all the craziness that you did with the late nights, the drinking, the ladies
and all that.
We talked about why you stopped it all, the change maker.
And then we did another one on how to write and market a book and become a bestseller
because you've written two – well, you've had three books on the New York Times bestseller
list at the same time, right?
Yep.
And only like two other people in the history of the world have ever done that or something.
For nonfiction, yeah.
Me, Nogginwell, and Michael Lewis.
So you've got a lot of experience in writing books.
You've got – how many books total have you written now?
Well, so counting the book that we just did for Book in a Box, it's five.
Five books that you've done.
And three were New York Times bestsellers, right?
Yeah.
Well, yes.
One of them was not released.
It was like sort of a free e-book.
So like it couldn't be.
And then Book in a Box.
The Book in a Box book was a number one Amazon bestseller, but not like we didn't put it in bookstores.
Nice.
Okay, cool.
And how many books would you say you've sold for your own titles?
Three million.
Three million books.
That's crazy. What do you think is the key
to selling millions of copies of your books uh dude i tell every author the same thing you want
to sell a lot of books you have to write a book that people want to read right plain and simple
that's it like everything else is details yeah if it's a crappy book that no one no one's gonna
want to read it so you have to read a book you have to write a book that other people care about
that helps them in some way shape or form that brings value to them.
Because why else would they spend money on something?
Yeah.
It's almost like you don't need to have – a lot of people focus on this marketing plan.
But it's almost like – I think of guys like Robert Greene.
He has like zero marketing plan for all of his books.
And they just sell millions of copies because they're amazing books and they're done really well.
Wouldn't you agree?
Yep, definitely.
But he's not like this marketing guru or has some big launch.
He's just like, okay, it's out.
No, I mean that's actually Ryan Holiday and I did the marketing for Mastery for him.
And it was like very casual.
It was like, okay.
We did some stuff, but it was mainly just doing stuff with people like you or know, like people like you or whatever, where it's like, hey, I'm going to go on your show.
I'm going to talk about what I do, what my book is, and then people buy it or they don't.
And then more people buy it because everyone that buys it reads it, loves it, and tells their friends.
Exactly. That's it.
So that's really the secret is write a great book and the rest is details.
But we decided to bring you back on because you told me it was like a week or two ago.
So we did this episode, episode 78, where you were like, hey, we're thinking about doing
this thing where we help authors write their books and market for them and help them get
the traction and sell thousands of copies and become experts and have better authority.
And the struggle is we get so many authors that reach out to me that ask for advice
and they never write books or it takes them three years and they go back and forth with
publishers. They don't know what to do. And so you decided to launch this thing
called Book in a Box. And we launched it on your podcast. It wasn't even a confirmed idea. It was like an opt-in, right?
We were testing one person at the time, and we weren't sure it works.
And then I went on your podcast.
And I remember, dude, I remember how it happened.
I think what happened was you were talking about writing your book and how you're dyslexic, so it's so hard for you.
And so I'm like, hey, I'm doing this interesting thing.
And we talked about it for like 20 minutes, and that was it.
And then the Lewis Howes effect happened. And your I'm like, Hey, I'm doing this interesting thing. And we talked about it for like 20 minutes and that was it. And then the Lewis Howes effect happened and your podcast went up and we got like six clients off of your podcast. And we were, this is like, you know,
10, $15,000 package. Like we, what we're doing is expensive, but it works and it's amazing.
And I, like I turned to Zach, actually, you know what happened, dude, here's what happened.
So I went on your podcast on like a Tuesday.
And then it doesn't go up for like a week or something or two weeks, right?
And so the next day, I got an email.
Zach and I got an email.
Like the book in a box was in the sort of subject.
And it's like, hey, can I do this?
How do I do this?
Where do I sign up?
And I turned to Zach.
I'm like, I don't understand.
This podcast isn't even out.
And Zach emailed the guy back.
It turns out it was your podcast editor.
Oh, wow.
It was the guy.
That's hilarious.
The editor of your podcast reached out to us to ask us about the service.
And I remember I turned to Zach and I was like, dude, I think we're on to something.
We need to get a landing page up really quick because Lewis has a big audience.
And let's see what happens.
And so your podcast came out and then we were like, I mean, it was crazy.
We probably had 30 or 40 real leads.
And if we'd had a professional site and a real sales process, we probably would have closed half of those. But as it was, we closed like six of them. And like some of those people
have their books out. Lucas Carlson has his book out. There's a couple of others that I'll think
of their names in a minute. And so after that, it was like a hectic two weeks.
Because you're like, all these people want books and we have no game plan.
Right.
I mean, like, well, we knew.
Let's see.
Let me look.
I'm looking at Nick DiNardo.
We found from your podcast, Brandon Hampton, who's blowing up now.
His company is.
Cole Hatter, who's got a big conference coming.
We're both speaking at it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm speaking at it, too.
Right.
So all these, like, that conference exists because of your podcast, dude.
It's the Lewis Howes effect.
And so all these people came to us.
And so we had it.
We were like, all right.
We've tested the process once.
We think it's working.
And so we actually charged – those people all paid way less than we're charging now.
And we started working through it.
And then it's like so quickly, I'm like, Zach, this is a real company.
We've got to stop everything else we're doing.
And this needs to be our pure focus.
And he fought me on it for like two weeks.
And then he was like, yeah, you're right.
Everything else is a waste of time.
And so we focused and focused and like built this up.
And now as one year later, like the the podcast my podcast with you launched like sometime in
august one year later we've done 1.4 million dollars in sales we have eight employees we're
about to hire two more and we're on a growth path to hit three million this year and realistically
i don't even know i mean they'd be made up numbers but somewhere between 5 and 15 million next year
wow that's lewis house baby. Lewis Howes creating jobs for America.
I love it.
It should have been me at the VMAs instead of Kanye up there talking.
I know.
Seriously.
At least it made sense.
This is fascinating because you and Zach, you were telling me he's just like a really
smart side hustler.
He came to you and he was like, hey, I just want to put something together.
Let's figure out some ideas of how we can run a business together.
Did you have a bunch of other ideas around that time or what were you guys doing?
Yeah, we were doing – essentially, we were doing a lot of – I had my publishing company
and I did a lot of consulting stuff.
I helped James Altucher do all of his publishing stuff.
I helped Ryan Holiday start his book marketing company and I helped – all this sort of
stuff.
But it was mostly just stuff I liked doing. It was fun. It was
essentially just consulting. And, um, so I was doing some of those things with Zach and we were
starting to sort of productize some of it, but like none of it honestly was that innovative and
none of it was honestly that exciting. It was just like, it was better than what most people
were doing, but it was still sort of the same thing. And it wasn't until we really kind of stumbled upon this new way to take someone's knowledge and wisdom and turn it into a book that we realized we had something.
And to me, here's the thing.
You know you have a company when you have product market fit before you're even officially selling it.
When you pre-sell it before you can actually deliver it.
Exactly.
I mean, well, that's the definition of lean startup methods and Steve Blank stuff.
And Eric Ries and all those people test it out.
And I didn't go on your podcast intentionally thinking, all right, we're going to test this company out.
I literally just floated the idea because it came up in conversation.
And we were so blown down by the demand.
came up in conversation and we were so blown down by the demand.
Yeah.
We were talking about,
you know,
how you marketed your book and how you,
you know,
did all this and wrote great,
right.
How to write a great book. And then you were just like,
you know,
we're trying this out.
If anyone wants to try it,
you know,
send us an email or something.
Yeah.
And it went from there.
It was insane.
Yeah.
It was nuts.
And so what,
I mean,
tell me about the evolution of book in a box since then.
I mean,
you know,
the pricing has changed.
You have a streamlined process now.
Like what can someone expect with this process?
And who is it specifically for?
Because, you know, there's lots of experts and entrepreneurs who are listening that probably want to write a book.
And that maybe they're thinking an e-book process.
Maybe they're thinking a publisher.
They don't even know what to do.
So first off, actually, let's maybe talk about who should write a book. What are the different
processes people can write a book, whether they work with you or they do their own thing? What
do you think is the best solution for people based on their goals? Right. Excellent. Okay.
Good questions. Who should write a book? I think right now the best people to write books are generally speaking people who can in some way, shape, or form indirectly ROI a book.
Like get a return on investment, right?
And so that breaks down to, let's see, consultants very clearly.
If you're a consultant in any sort of field, whether it's fashion consulting or financial consulting or whatever, how do
you separate yourself from the herd?
Well, if you're really good at your job and you know a bunch of stuff, that's great.
But how does anyone know?
And a really great way to show the world and to show potential clients that you are the
person they want to hire is to be the guy or the girl who wrote the book on your subject.
Right?
And so every consultant, that's
probably 10 to 20% of our current clients are consultants. And every single one that's put a
book out has seen their business double or triple or even do more. And it's not because, I mean,
if you do a good book, it's almost inevitable that you're going to see your business go up
as a consultant, right? So that's one big one. Before you go on to the next one, I'm curious, what if your book doesn't sell? What
if you do a book and it doesn't sell? Is it still worth doing a book?
So our very first client, Melissa Gonzalez, she owns a pop-up. She's like one of the people who
kind of invented pop-up retail or really kind of modernized it. And she has a pop-up retail
consulting firm. And she has sold, I think, less than 1,000 copies.
Her book was the first book we did.
She's the woman, I think I told the story in the last podcast.
Like, she asked me how to write a book without writing it.
And, like, I made fun of her.
And then she's like, are you an entrepreneur?
I'm like, yeah.
She's like, well, so am I.
And my job is to help people solve problems.
Do you help them solve problems?
Or do you just lecture them about hard work? And I was like, well, so am I. And my job is to help people solve problems. Do you help them solve problems? Or do you just lecture them about hard work? And I was like, oh, and it was like that call out that
led me to kind of develop the book in a box process. And it was for her. She sold less than
1000 copies of her book. And so far, she has tripled. We just talked to her. She's tripled
her business year over year. The book came out in November of last year. Tripled her business already.
She signed two multimillion-dollar contracts, like big ones, with some of the biggest retailers in the country, like Macy's or Nordstrom's.
I don't know exactly who it is, but someone like that.
And she was one of the best people, but now everyone knows she's the best. And she's keynoted three conferences about retail because she wrote the book on pop-up retail.
But only 1,000 copies sold.
So you don't necessarily need to sell tens of thousands of copies or millions like you.
If you're in a niche.
Exactly.
If you're in a niche, then how many people actually care about your topic?
Probably not a lot.
But that's fine if you're a consultant because you don't make your money on the book sales. You make your money on the influence that the book creates and that the
perception it creates. And then also, a lot of people are going to read the book and say,
I need to hire this person. Melissa told us the story. She's like, there's two big things that
happen because of the book. When she was speaking at conferences now on panels, she said before,
retail, you think it's a very female business but she said it's actually the highest level still kind of
sexist and old school male and she's like after she wrote the book like men would shut up when
she was talking on panels before they would like talk over her and be like oh you know what do you
know little girl and because she's the no seriously that was that she said that was their attitude
and now if they're like um they like vow to her because she's the, no, seriously, that was that she said that was their attitude. And now they're like, um, they like vow to her because she's, they treat her as an authority
because she is right. And then the other, the other big thing is people, exec high level retail
executives will say like, they won't say, get me a pop-up retail consultant. They'll say, get us,
get me Melissa Gonzalez. I want, I want the, I want the woman that wrote the book.
And that's actually one of those weird things you don't think about.
But the number one sort of – you know what the number – number one search engine is Google.
Number two is YouTube.
Number three is actually Amazon.
And it's the number one search engine for professionals.
Because if I want the best wealth manager in the world, I don't know.
You can't Google best wealth manager in the world and get an answer it's going to be nonsense
right but if i go to amazon and i google wealth managing books i'm going to look at the authors
and like the top 10 books who has a wealth management firm that's interesting i didn't
know that amazon was the third biggest that's great it is okay so it's for wealth managers so
all right so that's consultants.
Then speakers, too, for pretty obvious reasons.
The people who book speakers want them to have books because that's a status signal.
It's a signal of credibility and authority.
And then also it gives speakers something to sell at their speeches.
It's pretty clear.
A big, big, big sort of entrepreneurs and business owners.
Books are incredible for generating leads.
So, for example, we do a huge number of books for wealth managers and estate lawyers.
Really?
Yeah.
No, seriously.
Both of those occupations, they have weird laws about how they're allowed to promote themselves
right like uh like like estate lawyers can't give referrals fees to anybody right and so like they
basically have to like get wealth managers to recommend they develop relationships well instead
of giving them business cards to give to their clients they give we have a bunch of estate
lawyers who wrote books and then now the wealth managers give the book to their clients. We have a bunch of estate lawyers who wrote books.
And then now the wealth managers give the book to their client and say,
this is who I recommend, the guy who wrote the book on estate planning,
instead of just an estate planner. And so same with wealth managers. We have a couple that have some pretty novel, cool strategies. So they write a book about their strategy, which gives it away,
except if you have a lot of money, you don't want to read this book and learn how to implement their strategies. You read it, you're like, this is genius. And then you're like, here,
take my money, just go deal with it. So those are a couple of examples, business owners,
entrepreneurs, and then also C-level executives. We see a lot of not just CEOs, but like CMOs or CTOs or CIOs
who like want to raise their status and credibility
and maybe like be sort of positioned
for a higher C-level job.
Like that's a great way to do it.
Amazing.
I love this.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of potential.
I mean, most of my audience is entrepreneurs
or people that are interested in building businesses and taking their life to the next level, people that have an expertise.
So anyone in that – you're talking about nonfiction.
You're not talking about people writing novels.
We only do nonfiction.
If you want to write fiction, that's awesome.
But good luck.
You can't use us.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Now what's the normal – what route do you think is the best route for people today to take in writing a book?
Should they self-publish?
Should they find a big publisher and try to get a big advance?
Should they e-book?
So, yeah.
There's two reasons to use a big publisher, right?
If you have a big platform, like someone like you, Lewis, actually.
We talked about this.
You called me and we talked about this when you were thinking about doing your book.
I actually recommended that you not self-publish.
I told you you should go try and get an advance because you're the type of person who can get a $500,000 or $1 million or more advance because you have a massive audience.
So every traditional publisher, essentially to sign someone, you have to have an audience, right?
traditional publisher, essentially to sign someone, you have to have an audience, right?
So if you have a big audience, or if you want to use your book to get a lot of mainstream media attention, like you want to be in the New York Times, and you want to be in the New Yorker,
and you want to be in like Newsweek or whatever, then no one in America cares who publishes your
book. They care what's in the book anymore except the people in media.
So like the New York Times, if you're self-published, you're going to have to do a ton of stuff for them to cover your book.
But if the same exact book, if Simon & Schuster publishes it, then they'll take it seriously and potentially do a story about it.
do a story about.
So those are the two reasons.
If you have a big platform, you can get them to write you a big check, which for some people is worth it.
For other people, it's not.
Or if you have the ability and the sort of need to generate a lot of mainstream media
attention, those are the two reasons that go traditional publishing.
Everyone else probably should do some form of self-publishing.
So whether it be e-book format or just self-publish it uh into a paperback and and it's probably not going to be in bars of
noble or anything but you're going to have a book that you can sell online exactly buy your own
copies and sell them at events or or people can find you man it's like i'm telling you it's it's
crazy how much our authors will sell so few copies, but they get what they actually want for their book to get for them.
They get the consulting gigs.
They get the five to ten clients.
It brings in way more money.
They get the speaking.
They get whatever.
They get new leads for their business.
They get joint ventures.
They get invited to speak at things.
People look at them and treat them differently because they wrote a book.
It doesn't matter if it's self-published.
What actually matters, though, is does it look professionally published?
That's the difference.
So if you write a book that looks self-published,
like it's got some janky clip art cover, you know,
and it's like four pages long and the first sentence is misspelled,
then it's like people are like, ugh, this is ghetto.
But if your book looks amazing and feels amazing and is laid out beautifully and is a cool cover,
no one looks at who the publisher is.
They're like, oh, man.
They think because your book looks good, automatically your credibility and status is raised.
And then if the book actually is good, if you have good ideas in it, then it's like you're off to the races.
Yeah, that's powerful. The challenge is going with a big publisher. I'm with a big publisher
with Rodale. And to be honest, they've been incredible. I went into the expectation of
thinking they're not going to do anything for me because every author friend of mine says that
their publishers sucked. And so I went into it thinking, I'm going to do everything myself.
I'm going to design the cover.
I'm going to be doing the tour, the book launch.
Everything's going to be on me, the publicist.
But they've been going above and beyond.
And because I went in with that expectation
they weren't going to give me anything,
they've blown my mind.
Yeah, right.
You've been super happy with them.
I'm so pleased with them.
I mean, there's been some little things back and forth that we disagreed on.
But at the end of the day, it's been unbelievable, their support.
And I'm so grateful for them.
You know why they're throwing a lot of weight behind you though, don't you?
Because I'm throwing a lot of weight behind it too.
And they think it's going to be a big home run.
Exactly.
Because you have a big platform and because they see you putting so much effort into not just the creation of the book but the marketing of the book.
And so they're doubling down on their winners.
So they probably signed whatever, seven or ten authors this quarter.
And three of them they've already given up on.
And then another four they're doing like – or five they're doing minimal work for.
And then there's two they're devoting all their resources to.
And it's you and whoever else the other person is.
Yeah, exactly.
They said I'm the big one for the fall, so we'll see how it goes.
I'm telling you, your next book is a Lewis Howes effect, man.
It's coming, dude.
Exactly.
The challenge is I put together – going traditional, here's the challenges.
It's been great because I've got a big vision and a long-term vision with it,
but the challenge is it was a year of writing a proposal and putting together a marketing plan
and writing the first chapter and outlining the whole thing. And I worked with my agent with that.
And I worked with a writer to help me really craft my ideas better. So that took 10 grand
and 10 months to put together this proposal that I went back and forth on and did all these interviews and things.
It took time.
It took 10 months.
It was effort.
I remember, man.
I remember going through it.
Yeah.
Then, you know, I get the deal.
I sign the advance.
And I got to write the book now.
And that took another essentially 8 to 10 months as well of time and money and hiring editors and hiring people to help
craft certain things and flesh it out.
So all in all, it's been 50 grand just to write the book.
And with all the people involved and all that different thing happening and all that happening,
it's been a lot of work, a lot of time and energy.
I'm excited about it.
I'm thrilled with the journey and the process.
It's what I wanted.
But for most people, they don't want to spend
two years and 50 grand to
get a book written. And for most people, it doesn't
make sense either. Exactly. Because here's
the thing. You're like the perfect person to go
traditional because you have a big platform
and because this book
is going to be sort of like your coming out party
for the mainstream media. You know, like, dude,
I've known you're awesome for like six, seven years, right?
And your audience is known for, you know, whatever.
How long has your podcast been around now?
Two and a half, three years?
Yeah, three years in January, yeah.
Three years.
So for three years, you've had an audience and people get it, right?
But like the mainstream media doesn't know who you are yet
and they need something that they understand to like sort of justify to them the reason that they're covering you.
And it's going to be your book even though like you're going to be one of those overnight successes that took 10 years just like all of us.
Like they're going to discover you and you'll become the hot sort of interview in the fall when your book comes out.
And it will be like, oh, Lewis Howes and this and that and all that sort of stuff.
And your phone will be blowing up and everyone is going to want their piece of Lewis Howes in
the mainstream.
But like all your fans will be like, I knew about this fucking dude for three years.
What's wrong with you?
Exactly.
Exactly.
You better keep returning my texts, dude.
Of course.
When I was big, I returned your texts.
Now you're about to get big.
You got to return mine.
Of course.
Of course.
Okay. So that got to return mine. Of course. Of course. Okay.
So that's the traditional route.
And again, that's only for a certain amount of people.
That's for people that have a bigger audience, bigger brand, that really want to make a big splash.
If you own a small business or you're a consultant or whatever, you wouldn't be able to even utilize all that attention.
You probably couldn't get it.
And even if you got it, you wouldn't, there's no way for you to utilize all that.
It would be a waste.
Exactly.
And if you didn't have like a long-term vision of, you know, other products and courses or
how it was going to enter in your backend funnel and things like that, it probably wouldn't
make sense.
Exactly.
And so on the other side of the spectrum, we've got the big advanced, big publisher spectrum,
which, you know, takes a couple of years and however much money it takes and time and energy
then you got, and you know, you may not get a good, great publisher. You know,
Rodale has been great for me, but you may be, uh, you know, entering a war zone with a publisher
who's just going to kill your ideas and put a horrible cover on and not do any marketing.
So you may get that. That's the challenge, and that's the risk you take.
Now, on the other end of the spectrum, I've written a couple e-books,
and I know a lot of marketers online who write e-books.
And sometimes you can make a lot of money with that,
but really there's not much credibility when it's this 30-, 40-page e-book.
You're not getting the credibility for the clients
and the higher-end consulting that you want as an entrepreneur. And you've seen that as well. I mean, you've probably written e-books, you're not getting the credibility for the clients and the higher end consulting that you want as an entrepreneur.
And you've seen that as well.
I mean, you've probably read e-books, right?
Yeah.
So like e-books are great if you want to be in the direct sales internet marketing business
and you want to sell $40, $50, $60 e-books and you create like a scarcity fear model
and you do that, then that's fine.
create like a scarcity fear model and you do that, then that's fine.
Or you're selling something very specific that's very valuable. Like what's a great example?
How to invest in gold or I don't know, whatever nonsense those people sell, right?
But you can make a lot of money doing e-books like that if you really want to do that model.
Absolutely.
But e-books are considered down market and low status for a reason because
most people who dabble in that space, that's who they are. If you're a serious professional
and if you have real knowledge and wisdom in your head that you think other people will find
valuable, then doing a professionally published book, whether it's self or traditional, is the way to go. Yeah. And obviously, I'm going to have the Kindle e-book version of my book available on
Kindle and all these other places and iBooks and stuff. We're not talking about that. We're talking
about if it's just an e-book, it's not traditional as well. Right. If you're not selling it on Amazon
or it's not through a publisher, it's just this PDF that you're selling through a landing page. That's what you're talking about. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So then the third option, which is
kind of the sweet spot, you've helped solve this problem that your first client said you needed to
do. Melissa Gonzalez said you needed to create is really how can you serve the people in the middle
who do have great information, who do have gifts to offer
the world, that have great businesses, but just are trying to get to that next level.
Again, on the School of Greatness, I'm trying to teach people always how to get to the next
level in their life.
Speaking of, hold on.
Do you have diplomas for your School of Greatness?
Because I feel like I should get an honorary degree.
You should.
Well, you're a professor, man.
Well, dude, I built a seven-figure business because of my time in the School of
Greatness on the podcast. That's it. You're a professor and you're a student. I will be a
professor and a student at the School of Greatness. I love it. I'll teach classes and then I'll sit in
on other classes. There you go. I mean, you're making multiple million dollars a business. So,
I mean, I'll take it, man. I'll take it as a great case study. But that's really the sweet
spot. A lot of people here who are listening are in that kind of sweet spot.
They've got a great expertise.
Some people who are listening have huge platforms, but a lot of people have great expertise.
They've got a six-, seven-figure business running, and they're trying to get to that next level.
But they don't want to do a crappy little e-book.
They don't have the time or the platform to do the traditional book, which takes years and a lot of money.
But they want to write a book.
And whether they use you, you know, you're not the only service.
There's other services out there.
But whether they use you or not, what's the process for them doing it themselves?
What would that journey be?
There's no one that does what we do, I don't think, or at least not the level we do.
But there are definitely other services that can help you along the process.
So the basic steps are very simple.
We actually released a book about our method, but there's a lot of books out there that are about sort of what to do.
But it's very simple.
You have to understand.
So I'll tell you exactly how we do it.
First, you need to understand what kind of book you're writing, right?
So to do that, you need to understand why you're writing a book. So you need to sit down and think, okay, and if you say, oh,
I want to be a bestseller and sell a bunch of copies, that's nonsense. That's not a realistic
goal for someone who, unless there's someone like you who has a big platform and that kind of stuff,
right? You're looking at a book as a means to another end, right? And so you need to know
specifically what it is.
If you want to be able to speak at conferences, okay, that's a goal.
If you want to increase the number and quality of clients, that's a goal.
Things like that.
So you need to know what is your goal?
Why am I writing this book?
Sharing your wisdom with the world is part of it, right?
But that's not actually the goal.
That's the result of what you do.
You need to know what you're hoping and expecting to get from this book, right? So once you
understand that, what's your goal? What's the expected result? The next thing you have to
understand is what audience do I have to reach to achieve that goal? So if you want to be booked to
speak at conferences, then the audience you need to reach are the people who book speakers at conferences and the people who go to those conferences, right?
Or if you want to book consulting clients in the fashion industry, then it's the decision makers at fashion companies.
That's your audience.
And people always want to say, oh, my audience is everybody or all women.
That's not an audience.
Not even the Bible's audience is everybody or all women. That's not an audience.
Not even the Bible's audience is everybody.
Right.
Seriously, there's a lot of Hindus who don't read the Bible.
There's plenty of people who don't care about the Bible.
So it's like the best-selling book of all time doesn't fit that and neither does yours.
So you need to be very specific.
So you got your goal.
You got your audience.
Now you need to ask yourself, what do I know that that audience will find valuable? Because that's what your book needs to be about, right? The book needs to be
about other people, not about you for it to be successful for you. You've got to write, we talked
about this at the very beginning, right? Like what makes a book successful? And I said it, I said,
you write a book that other people find valuable.
Like I wrote in my original books were entertainment books, right?
People bought them to laugh and they made people laugh.
And so I sold millions.
If you want to, um, to become, you know, to be established as a, as a high level, uh,
financial consultant, then you need to write a book that has information that people who
are looking for financial consultants will find valuable.
That really serves them in a big way.
That gives them results, yes.
The problem you see with so many authors, even high-profile authors,
is that they write books that they want to write that are about them.
Ultimately, they just write bragging nonsense, right?
Or, look at how smart I am.
Look at how fancy I am.
And you'll see these really famous noteworthy intellectuals or whatever come out with these books that flop and go nowhere.
And that's why.
It's because the book wasn't about their audience.
They weren't creating value for other people.
They were just celebrating themselves.
Those books go nowhere.
But I know for a fact your audience is covered in these people
because we serve them as clients. They were our first set of clients. You have a bunch of people
in your audience who are really smart, who are really accomplished, who know things that are
valuable to other people and that want to share those things with the world. Well, that's the way
you do it right there. That's the process. Whether you pay us and then you just can do it over the
phone or you do it yourself, that's where you need to start is what's my goal?
Who's my audience to reach that goal? And then what do I know that that audience will find
valuable? Because that's the book. So let's talk about, I kind of heard about the planning
process right there and kind of figuring out your ideas and the goals and who you're reaching and
that audience. What's the actual, if someone is going to do it on their own,
if they want to write a book on their own,
what is the next step for them in doing it in, again, not the traditional way
and not the e-book way but self-publishing, having a nice paperback book?
So then you've got to sit down.
That's called the book positioning.
So once you go through that exercise, you're going to have a really good idea of
you know who your audience is, you know what you're going to write about.
Now, traditionally,
you can just sit down and start banging out on
a keyboard.
It sucks, though. It's really hard.
Is there a good format or an outline that you give to people?
Yes.
Our book
is for the company. We created a book
called The Book-in-a-Box Method.
It's literally our exact process with all the templates and docs exactly that we give to our freelancers and that we use.
So there's a lot of books about outlining that you can look at.
That's just one of them.
But we have very clear templates for outlining.
And I would recommend doing an outline first.
And here's why.
If you don't do an outline first, then you better hope that you have an incredibly organized mind naturally, which like five people on earth have.
Because if you don't do an outline first, you're going to end up all over the place.
And it's going to be really, really difficult for you to get back on track.
And it's just going to take you a long time.
It doesn't mean you can't do it.
It just means it's going to take a long time.
What does the outline look like?
Is that 10 bullet points and then headlines?
Or what does that look like?
So the most basic form of an outline is essentially the table of contents.
That's an outline.
You start with the title.
You understand, okay, what's the title of my book?
So you can kind of conceptualize it.
What does the book say in a sentence or a paragraph? And then what are the sections of my book? So you can kind of conceptualize it. What does the book say in a sentence or a paragraph?
And then what are the sections of the book?
So if the book is sort of like how to run your surgical career, then it's like, okay, here's the five things you have to do, right?
And then so there's five.
And those are like maybe the five chapters or the five sections of the book.
And then under each one, you just keep subdividing each section.
So we write a lot of books.
Most of your audience are basically how-to books.
They know something and they can teach it to other people.
So all a how-to book is, once you've got the positioning, is explaining it to someone who's interested but doesn't understand any of the process.
So what are the literal steps you would walk them through?
If you use that as your basic framework for an outline,
you could do a decent skeleton outline in like an hour.
Gotcha.
And then from there, it's essentially,
do you have people,
if you were going to teach people to do this on their own,
if you have them write one chapter at a time or...
It depends on the person.
So what we do at Book in a Box is, this is what's cool about our process, is that we
get people, we don't ask people to do any work.
All we do, we do all the work in the background, so it feels like magic.
All they do is talk on the phone to us, right?
And then we have, we're very structured.
We have a very structured set of questions, and we know exactly what to ask them, how
much to get out of them, etc., right?
So people can do that on their own.
I mean, the reason you pay us is so it only takes you about 12 to 15 hours.
You can do it on your own in far, far – it's far more time, but it's far less time than if you were writing on a keyboard, right?
So that's the first thing, honestly, I would recommend for most people.
That's the first thing, honestly, I would recommend for most people.
Unless you are a professional writer or you are good at writing or you really like writing,
I would argue that you should, once you have your structure, you should essentially talk out your book first.
Think of it as like recording a rough draft of your audio book first.
And then we use Rev.
It's like an app on your phone or Rev.com.
And Rev, it's like a dollar a minute.
They transcribe it.
So what you get back is all your ideas.
It's spoken.
And so it's in very rough form.
It's not easy to read.
But now you have a rough draft of your ideas. And it's much, much easier for most people to edit than it is to write from scratch.
And what's the average length of a book that someone should have?
The how-to book, what's too long, too short?
What's the sweet spot?
We found that the sweet spot is somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 words.
So it's about half the size of a book you're going to see on a shelf at Barnes & Noble.
So it's like 130, 160 pages?
Yes.
Right.
So we've actually looked at the data on the Amazon accounts.
And there's actually other people who've done sort of research on this.
What people find is that shorter books are actually way better because people aren't intimidated by them.
They'll start them.
They'll finish them because they know it's short.
And if it's short, usually all the bullshit is stripped out.
So people are like far
more engaged instead of like do you understand why most uh books like there's this idea that
books need to be like 250 pages or more that's because physical retailers like barnes and noble
wanted big books so that they could put them on the shelf and people could read the spines
so they could sell books it books. It's a requirement of
physical retailers, which makes zero sense in an online world because you have people who are busy
and they want to learn something, but they don't want to have to read 300 pages. They want to read
100 pages and they want to get it and get out. So what we found is shorter books not just get
read more, but they get engaged more, which is what you're looking for, right? You're looking for a result. So you want people to not just know the book
exists, but to buy it and then actually read it. So shorter is better. So once they've recorded it,
how long do you think it takes to record eight to 10 chapters or 30,000 to 60,000 word book?
Right. Our sort of frame of reference is about 8,000 words an hour.
Okay. Right. So that's why like with our process, it's about maybe 10, whatever hours of interviewing.
So we get about 80,000 words and then we'll cut that down to maybe, you know, 35 to 50 because,
you know, when you talk, you're redundant and you stutter and all that kind of stuff. And so
you cut all that down. And then, so I would say to a good 40,000-word book, yeah, you're looking at 8 to 10 hours
for most people.
That's for a day of recording your voice as opposed to a year.
I would do it all in a day.
I would break it up to hour to two-hour segments because you get exhausted if you talk.
Sure you do.
Yeah, of course.
hour to two hour segments because you get exhausted if you talk sure you do yeah of course well just say a day of time total um you know as opposed to you know 10 months to write a proposal
and 10 months to write the book you know whatever it takes it's there's something different about
speaking than there is having writer's block you know writer's block is a real thing even
even for the greatest writers it's a real thing Let alone if you're not a writer. You know what I mean?
But there's no such thing as speakers block.
No, you can speak all day and you've
got the information in your head, so just speak it out.
Exactly. So if someone, again, if someone
was doing it on their own and they were recording
this out and it took them 10 hours
to record everything, they got their outline, they've done
the voice audio, they've translated on
transcribed on Rev.com.
What's next for someone if they're doing it on their own? So, right. So what's going to happen is this is a
kind of, it can be overwhelming for a lot of people, but you can get through it if you break
it up into steps. So once you get the transcription back, then it's going to be, let's say 80,000
words. And it's like, Oh my God. So you can hire editors, uh, to do this. I be careful because if you're hiring freelance, it's really tough to know quality, right?
Some people are great.
Some people are not.
If you're doing it yourself, here's what we recommend is you go like literally just don't think of it like, oh, my God, I've got to edit 8,000 words.
Think of it like I need to turn this paragraph into something readable.
So don't think of it like you're writing.
Don't even actually think of it like you're writing. Don't even actually think of it
like you're editing. Think of it like
you're translating. Because you're going to look
at the audio transcription.
The transcription you
get back from Rev or whoever. And it's
going to, seriously, you're going to be embarrassed.
And it's going to read really weird. Because
you could get this
podcast transcribed and I would
look like on the page like a total retard.
Like a monkey.
Right, exactly.
Transcriptions read really unusual.
So what you need to think in your head is I'm translating my transcription into book prose.
So the best thing you can do is read the paragraph.
Think what am I saying in this paragraph?
What's my point?
And then how can I say it in the smoothest, simplest way possible? Don't try and be fancy. Don't try and use big
words. Don't try and use jargon. Just understand I'm trying to say X, so I'm going to write X in
the simplest way possible. Be direct and clear and concise with people, and people will love
your book. You don't have to be Malcolm Gladwell to write a great nonfiction book.
Okay.
So once you do all the editing and you've got the book complete, the range skip complete,
then what do people need to do?
This is the difference between self-publishing and professional publishing is what you do
next.
So there are companies who will – know obviously we do it as part of
our whole package of course but like there are companies who just do this who do just publishing
uh like you have a finished manuscript and you send it to them um we we do it for some people
we don't advertise it on our site but like we'll do it for some people if they have a good finished
manuscript but there's another company called mill city press i know um there's a company called
blurb also and they both do solid work both of them are good but basically what you here's But there's another company called Mill City Press. I know there's a company called Blurb also.
And they both do solid work.
Both of them are good.
But basically, here's the components that matter.
You need a really nice cover design.
Do not skimp on the cover. Because remember, when someone's looking online, the first thing they see, the first piece of information about your book is either your
title or your cover. So get your title right and spend money on the cover. If you're spending less
than $500, it's probably going to be terrible. And I would recommend spending at least $500.
And then I would really, if you can, go the extra mile. Go to places like Dribbble or Behance or places like that.
I'll tell you, 99designs is actually pretty good.
You need to use their $500 and up package, but you'll get good designs on 99designs if you pay.
The lower tier packages don't do very good, but the higher tier ones actually do really well.
Pay.
Because if you're a professional, you need to signal to the world that you're a professional.
And that means you've got to spend a little bit of money.
Book cover is super important.
Title is super important.
And those services usually will help you with that.
But I would really recommend making sure you manage that process if you're doing this yourself.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So once you get the professional design, then what?
Cover is big.
Interior layout is another big one.
So have you ever like downloaded a book?
Oh, actually, hold on.
Let me go one step back.
Proofreading.
I forgot about this because like I assume it, but you can't assume this.
You must get your book copyedited and proofread.
Oh, my gosh.
That was a headache for me.
That was like weeks and weeks of stress.
Isn't it the worst?
I know it is.
It's super stressful because you've got to go through all these tedious changes.
But, dude, that's the difference because every one of your listeners, I'm going to say this and they'll all shake their heads in agreement.
As soon as you see a misspelling in a book, you immediately think at least 20% less of the author or the publisher.
Hopefully, they don't think that of me because I'm sure there's a couple of them.
But every book has a misspelling or two or some mistake.
You're in the greatest books, right?
Here's the thing.
You're actually right.
They've done studies on this.
I think HarperCollins did a big one.
And they had something like 10 professional copy editors recopy edit like 100 of their best-selling books of the last 20 years.
And every single book had at least one error in it but but here's the thing
most uh none of the books did all 10 copy editors find an error right so if you're if the errors in
your book are so minute that copy editors are missing them you're fine the problem is like
people like they'll they'll proof it a couple times, which is, like, almost worthless.
Because you miss, you get script blindness, right?
And so then they'll hand it to their wife and then their best friend who wrote good essays in college.
And they'll be like, oh, yeah, that's more than enough.
No way.
You're going to have, like, 10 or 15 misspellings.
You're going to have basic grammar mistakes.
You're going to have things in there that signal that you
did not take this seriously.
No one expects you to be a grammar
expert, but they expect you to pay
$200 to go get it proofread and copyedit.
That's hugely
important.
When you do that, then obviously cover
designer, those can go at the same time.
Then you must... This is
a little bit less important but it
is a big signal of professionalism is interior design interior layout like have you ever uh
downloaded a book on kindle and like you upload you know like you start to read it and it's laid
out all weird and there's weird indents and right that's because those people didn't actually
professionally format it they just uploaded it from Microsoft Word into Amazon.
And then all these weird characters and all this stuff jumps in there. And then everyone knows immediately that you're an amateur. And it's almost like you wasted your time,
whatever how long it took you to write this book, you wasted it because you didn't take
that extra step to make it look good inside. Exactly. Exactly. So you lose credibility.
A lot of times what you're earning with your book is not – people don't judge you just by the knowledge and wisdom in your book.
They judge you by all the signals around your book like your cover, your interior design, the spelling.
It's the same as like think about if someone meets you out.
Everyone's like, oh, you should only judge someone by the content of their character.
But who does that?
Nobody.
Monks do that.
You judge people by
are they dressed well?
What are they dressed like?
Their first impression too.
It's like going to a new website.
If you see a website that's horrible design
and misspelled, it doesn't matter if they have
great information or not.
You judge them.
They're all pieces of information.
What are you wearing?
Are you shaven or not? Are you clean? What's your hands what you're wearing are you uh like shaven or not
are you clean uh what's your handshake like what do you smell like uh how do you act in conversation
can you make small talk these all these things are pieces of information about you the same thing is
true for books cover interior spelling all those things so a couple more things book description
people like they go it's just marketing copy.
Who cares?
But like think about when you go to an Amazon page.
What do you look at?
First, you look at the title and cover.
Then the thing right next to that on the Amazon page is the description of the book.
You get to write that.
So take your time and do something awesome there.
You know, like really, like look at some really good, Tim Ferriss' For Our Work Week is really good.
What's another? There's a couple. Tyler Cowen, Average is Over is another good one. Look at
books that have really good book description and just imitate them. Basically, the best ones
make you really excited to read the book but don't give quite everything in the book away.
They tell you what's in the book.
They make you understand why the book...
It's the same thing as any copy.
Here's the problem. We solve it.
Here's kind of how we do it, but we're not telling you
everything, so you've got to read the book.
That's book description.
Another one is author photo and author bio.
What you look like
in your author photo
is a huge piece of
information. Lewis, you probably had all
kinds of professional headshots and all that stuff,
didn't you? So many. Of course!
Because you understand how important that is.
Yes. So many people will take an iPhone
selfie and it's like,
oh my God. And people
will judge you based on that.
We did a full day photo
shoot inside and outside trying to get with a stylist with everything,
with clothes options to get the right photo for the cover and the author bio.
I'm even looking.
We're on Skype right now.
I'm looking at your Skype thing.
Like every picture of you online is like perfect.
Like you time.
No, and I'm not even making fun of you.
That's really smart you're a public
figure and you're like you know like if your job is to be in the public eye then you need to spend
five or ten times as much time as a normal person right but if you're a normal person you need to
spend time on this not as much as you but like time you know it's got to be it's got to be you
got to look think of it almost like a dating profile. Like not the exact same – you don't want to look seductive, but you want to look good in sort of like your profile pic on whatever, Match.com or something or eHarmony.
Same thing in your author photo.
And then your author bio also is a piece of information, especially for people in your audience who are actual authorities in their business, but they don't have a lot of name recognition, then your bio needs to tell the world why we should care about this person.
Why do you matter? But you can't be too braggy. You can't be like, oh, I won the science fair in
10th grade and blah, blah, blah. No one cares. My SAT score. No, no, no, no, no. It just needs
to very clearly and succinctly explain why you're an expert and why you have credibility.
Sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we've designed it inside and out.
Everything looks perfect.
It's edited.
It's proofread.
Thing is complete.
Yep.
Now, if you're self-publishing it, what are the options to get it out there?
To market?
Well, actually publish it and actually physically have it and put it in bookstores if you're doing it on your own.
Yeah.
So the big thing, honestly, is to get it on Amazon.
I would almost say that for 80% of authors, if you have it on Amazon, you don't need to worry about anything else.
Yeah.
Seriously.
Like iBooks is okay.
Amazon is, I think, 85% of the e-book market.
Amazon is, I think, 85% of the e-book market.
And then Nook, iBooks, and Kobo are like 12%. And then there's like a whole bunch of other ones that are like the other 3%.
So like that's kind of it.
You know what you can use?
If you're doing this yourself, there's a service called Book Baby that's really good.
And you basically submit the manuscript once and they handle sort of everything, royalties, whatever, all this sort of stuff.
They kind of do it all for you.
And they're a pretty solid service.
But the frequently asked questions on Amazon walks you through their process like step by step.
It's super, super, super easy.
And anyone – and you can pay services like Mill City or Blurb or Book Baby,
they can do those for you as well. Gotcha. And what about if you wanted to get into
the Barnes & Noble, if that's something that's something you wanted to do?
Not really possible. There's only one kind of way to do that. And you want to get listed in
a database called Ingram. So that's another thing. I didn't go super deep into the details, but
if you want to be crazy legit, you need to get an isbn which is an international standard book number it's like the the number
that's on the back with the barcode right and so uh if you have that that means that you actually
had to pay whatever like 50 bucks or something for an isbn and uh and people like it's a signal
of legitimacy but only to people who like media look at that and some other people look at it. But most people don't really look at that that much.
So that's not a huge deal.
But you can get those a couple of different places.
And then what you do is you get a database called Ingram and books in print and then Ingram.
Ingram is sort of like the big, big book distributor.
And if you're in Ingram, then any Barnes and Noble, any bookstore in the world can order
your book and can have it there in like
a day or two.
So we obviously, for Book in a Box,
all of our authors are in Ingram.
We put them on Amazon. So like
what we tell authors is your books will be
available to be ordered in bookstores, but
they are not going to be sitting on the shelves.
Gotcha. So how does someone get them sitting
on the shelf? Is that really a big publisher needs to do that
or retail?
So,
no, no, they won't do
it request constantly. Like they just won't.
That's just not, it sounds crazy. I know,
but you have to understand the book business is
just old and antiquated and just a
crazy, ridiculous business.
There's only traditional
mainstream publishers for the most
part, can get books into bookstores. Now, there are other ways, sort of, but you still kind of
have to go through the big publishers. You have to go through what are called distributors.
And so some of the big publishers are distributors as well, like Simon & Schuster. So for example,
I have a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster. My publishing company, Lioncrest. If we go to them with a book that is big, and they think
they'll sell a lot of copies, then they'll go to BNN and try to convince BNN to stock it.
And we've gotten a couple books into BNN. We don't advertise this at Book in a Box because
I don't want authors thinking that we can do this as a service because honestly
it doesn't matter how much money you pay us.
It's up to being in whether they stock your book.
So we don't even bring this up
to get expectations
askew. We've gotten actually
one author.
I've gotten a couple others in before Book in a Box
just as a consulting gig. I helped
some big authors. I helped Hugh Howey figure
this out and a couple other people.
And then we got one of our authors in
who she sold a lot of e-books.
And then we went to Simon
and then Simon went to BNN.
And BNN was like, yeah, we'll stock this.
And so we got her in.
But you kind of have to have
those sorts of connections.
Sure.
Okay.
But honestly, man, being a bookstore doesn't really mean shit.
Seriously.
No,
it doesn't.
Like it,
it means something to you because like your book is going to be Rodale's like
paying for like,
uh,
co-op,
which means like,
like the,
for the book to be on the front counter.
So like not a lot of people browse bookstores anymore and not a lot of
people go to bookstores anymore,
but someone like you, it's a big thing for someone like like who's gonna sell a hundred thousand books in their
first month or something right it can make a difference for someone at that scale but like
if you have one copy in like each even if you have one copy in every bnn it's gonna be tucked
away in the corner no one's gonna find it it doesn't matter you know gotcha gotcha uh in the corner. No one's going to find it. It doesn't matter. Gotcha.
In the next process,
after that, we could do a whole other episode on marketing, which we did previously.
We talked about marketing before in the previous episode
number 78.
I will spare people for that.
There's a whole process to this.
Maybe we can do another episode
again after my book launch.
Maybe we'll do a recap of all the marketing stuff that I'm building up to
and we can kind of join forces.
No, I know.
You're doing some cool stuff, man.
We talked about some really cool stuff.
I'm excited to see it.
We got some even more stuff that's happening that I'm going to share with you
that I'm super pumped about that I'm going to reveal here soon.
So I'm excited.
But the thing is, what I want to recap this is,
is there's a lot of steps to this process
of planning the book to creating and writing the book and editing the book to publishing
and marketing it.
And if you're going to do this as yourself, how many hours would you think if you did
it on your own and you hired your own people, the proofreaders, the editors, the designers,
how many months would it take or hours or weeks and how much money
would it take to really get a solid book if you did it all on your own?
It totally depends on the person.
But generally speaking, it takes about 1,000 to 1,500 hours to – if you do everything
on your own, it's going to take you 1,000 to 1,500 hours to write and
publish a nonfiction book. Now, you can shorten that drastically by buying expertise in various
areas, like buying the book cover. When I say do everything, I mean everything, right? But spending
500,000 bucks on a book cover takes 100 hours off of that or something. Yes.
And then like getting someone to help you with editing or proofreading and copy editing, right?
That takes another 100 hours off.
So you can – I think a reasonable person like someone – your standard audience, someone who's fairly successful, has done some stuff, has some money.
you can expect to spend five.
I think five grand is a good budget.
And spent wisely can take, let's say, 1,200 hours down to like 100 to 150 hours.
So you can reduce it quite a bit.
Maybe 200 hours or something like that.
So you're in the hundreds of hours where it's like you're spending, let's say,
two hours a week for a year and you're spending five grand. I think that's a doable thing. And then we're like the next year up. We charge $18,000 and you're spending 12 to 15 hours on the phone and we're
done in four months. And it's amazing. Wow. So 12 to 15 hours total time on the phone.
There's probably some emails back and forth and some other things.
Emails and then you edit the manuscript if you want. So you can spend a lot of time on that
or none. We have authors that go both ways. Gotcha. So essentially four months from the
first phone call to publish book. Yeah. If you go quickly, we say four months,
five at the outset. Some authors like to take a longer time. We've got books that are going to take a year, but
we only take four to five months.
It's amazing. If you want a book that's done
quick, effective,
done well, that looks professional
and you guys do the design, you do
everything. You do the proofreading, the editing,
the layout.
We actually do some marketing now. We change
package and add that.
That's why we increase. We used to be $15. We increased the price to $18 because we've added on some basic marketing. We do some marketing now. We changed package and add that. That's why we increased. We used to be 15. We increased the price to 18 because we've added on some basic marketing.
Like we do some cool Amazon promotions. So you're going to probably be number one in a small,
small subcategory. You're not going to be number one in business, but you might be number one in
fashion business or something like that. We do that sort of stuff.
We do a press release and we have a deal with
Bookshout or BookBub.
It's Buck Books.
They have a massive list.
I'd never heard of them and they have a list of a million people
or something crazy like that.
We have a set promotion with them.
We do some basic marketing. If you want
advanced marketing, we can either
connect you to PR people or to people like
Ryan or someone like that.
So we do kind of all of that.
Okay. Awesome.
So for people that are interested, they want to get
signed up now, do you guys take new clients now?
What do they do to get signed up?
What do they have to do? Fill out a form or something? go to bookinabox.com and there's a little uh sort
of uh like a form thing at the bottom fill that out and one of our author consultants will email
you within 24 hours and get on the phone and we talk through everything we see we don't actually
like this is the truth i'm not trying to like be salesy with this we don't actually take every
single person who applies.
I was going to ask you that.
I was going to say, do you take everyone?
Well, because here's the thing.
First off, some people are dicks and terrible to work with.
And so we have a great team and cool employees.
And I'm not going to subject them to some horrible person who treats my people like dirt.
18 grand is not enough.
Life is too short.
But that's very, very, very few people.
18 grand is not enough.
Life is too short.
But that's very, very, very few people.
But the only type of person we systematically don't take is people who think that we're ghostwriters or that we'll just do the content for them.
We don't do that.
We're a service to turn your knowledge and wisdom into a professionally published book.
So if you have great ideas, we're going to give you a great book.
If you have decent ideas, we'll give you a great-looking professional book full of decent ideas. But if you have no ideas, we can't do anything.
So those people we reject too. We've had a couple of them who's like,
what do you mean? I have to actually tell you stuff? And it's like, yeah.
That's what ghostwriting is. You pay someone 50 or 100 grand and they write a book and you're paying them to put your name on it. Exactly. Yep. So there you go, guys. Hopefully, this was helpful to have you kind of understand
the process of writing the book. And again, hopefully, I'll do another episode where we
talk about the marketing after my book launch. I'm going to give a whole little breakdown of
what we did. You know what you should have is you should have a bunch of marketing people and have
it like a roundtable like me, Ryan Holiday, like all kinds of cool people. And we can talk about all
the things that went right, that went wrong, that you could have done different, that were genius.
That would be fun, man. I'm down for that. If you guys want to hear that, maybe a roundtable of a
bunch of us, then leave a comment below this blog or this post and let me know wherever you're listening to this ad.
Just leave a comment below if you do.
And again, this has been extremely helpful.
Tucker, we could go on for this for hours.
I know you've got so much wisdom in your years of writing and creating books.
Well, I'm a professor at the School of Greatness.
You are a professor, man.
You'll come back.
You'll be back to do more lectures.
But hopefully this made sense for a lot of people.
And I'm looking at – I'm at bookinabox.com right now and I see the process.
There's a whole like mapping out.
So even if you do this on your own, go check out the site because there's kind of like a little map there you can see on how you want to do this yourself.
I'll tell you what, Lewis.
I'll do this for your audience.
I have the – we have a book called The Book in a Box Method that details our process in detail.
If someone's listened all the way through, don't put this on your page because I'll get too many people emailing me.
Email me at tucker at bookinabox.com, and I'll send you a PDF of the book for free.
I have no problem giving the information away for free.
We just charge for the service.
That's it.
There you go.
There you go.
So if you want to do it on your own, he's got the process. You can go follow it and do it on your own. It's just going to take you a year or whatever. I'll just send you the book for free. We just charge for the service. That's it. There you go. If you want to do it on your own, he's got the process.
You can go follow it and do it on your own. It's just going to
take you a year or whatever. I'll just send you the book for free.
No problem. There you go.
If you want to learn more about doing it, then fill out the
information and do a free call
and see if it's right for you.
Hopefully, that's been helpful.
Here's the thing, guys.
It's all about getting to the next level.
If you're here listening right now and you've been thinking for a while that it's time to do a book, I want to do one, but it's a struggle, follow the process.
Either get a book from Tucker.
Again, it's Tucker at Bookinabox.com.
Get the book and do it yourself.
If you don't have the money to invest in it, then do it yourself.
And if you want to accelerate the process, then do a phone call and see if this is the right fit for you.
Because it's powerful to have a book.
When I wrote a LinkedIn book that sold like less than 1,000 copies, it made me seven figures over the next year and a half because I became known as the LinkedIn expert with the book.
And now there's like 50,000 books on LinkedIn.
But I was one of the first people to do it.
So it doesn't matter if you make this a number one New York Times bestseller.
It's about having the credibility and the authority that a book gives you.
And it opened the doors for me to be in all these events and conferences.
People asked me to speak constantly, do a lot more webinars.
And it just opened up incredible opportunities for me.
So I highly recommend doing one on your own or just investing
in this because it's going to take four to six months and then you're done and it's professional
and you don't have to worry about the stress. So are there any final thoughts, Tucker, about-
Dude, that's like the greatest commercial for writing a book I've ever heard.
You should be in media, man. You're good at this.
Well, the thing is, listen, doing it myself, I understand the process.
And my first one, it took a lot of time and energy, and I did it on my own and made a lot of mistakes.
But it still brought me a lot of business.
So whether you're going to do it on your own or use Tucker or hire someone for $100,000 to write it for you,
I just recommend doing one if you want to get to the next level.
So that's where I'm at.
But, Tucker, you are the man.
We've gone over an hour now, and I feel like it was 20 minutes.
So thank you for sharing your wisdom.
I'm going to ask you a final couple questions that I always ask people.
Shoot.
I don't know if I asked you this the last time.
So I just started doing this probably six months ago.
So if it's the last day for you in however many years from now, the last day, and all your books have been erased, everything you've ever created has been gone, and you've got a piece of paper and three truths to write down that you know to be true about life.
And this is going to be the legacy that you leave behind to the world, to your family, to everyone else.
Signed by you, three lines with three truths.
What would you say they would be?
Man, that's hard.
That's hard on the moment.
All right, so three truths.
Number one is life is hard, so don't expect something else.
So many people think it's not supposed to be hard.
It's supposed to be hard, and then you kind of live for the easy parts and try and make your life easier. But the default
is hard. So life is hard. Don't expect something else is number one. But number two, I would put
most of your problems are in your head. Figure out which ones are and aren't, you know, like most
people, like they're anguished and sad and like all these problems they think they have. Most of them are sort of made up, not real problems or the things that like they're kind of the miseries in their head.
You know, not everybody, not all.
Of course not.
But like so much of it is.
And then the third, I would say it all boils down to the relationships you have with the people you love.
And so like almost nothing else matters.
No, no.
Actually, I would say it all boils down to the relationships you have with the people you love
and the things you do that make the world better.
So that's kind of four.
I'm kind of sneaking a fourth one in the third.
That's all good.
I like it.
I like those three truths.
Two final questions.
One is what are you most grateful for recently? But yeah. It's all good. I like it. I like those three truths. Two final questions.
One is what are you most grateful for recently?
Man, I married an amazing woman, dude.
Like I met an amazing woman and I married her. And I feel like my life sort of has two – it's going to have two segments.
It's like before I met my wife and after.
And I got a lot done before I met her.
But I feel like she's an amazing woman who's both helped me become better and forced me to become better in a lot of ways.
And so I'm grateful not just for her but like everything surrounding that.
The family and like all that kind of stuff.
Definitely.
And honestly, man, I'm kind of grateful for like, uh, I don't want to say the
company. It's more what the, what we're doing at Book in a Box. Like, I hate to sound like a
salesman, but this is true. I really feel like, I feel like we are creating a process that's going
to unlock a lot of the world's wisdom. And, and, and to me, that's like, it's really exciting,
man. I'm seeing the books that we're doing and all we're doing, we're just doing the process.
But like, I see the wisdom that's coming out of some people's heads and it's like shocking
and amazing and i'm like wow that didn't exist the wisdom existed but it was locked up in one
person's head and now the world can access it and it's like that's really cool and some of these
things are relatively small but you do like you, the Great Wall of China is built by
a lot of small bricks put together, you know, and it's really exciting to see all this wisdom
being unlocked and to start to see the impacts of it is it will only at the very beginning.
It's very cool. Love it. One final question before I ask it, I want to acknowledge you for a moment,
Tucker for, for your friendship. And a lot of people
have different opinions about you, but knowing you for the five plus years I've known you,
I want to acknowledge you for just being a great friend, man. You've been consistently there.
You've consistently shown up and given me tough love, helpful love. And you're always open to
share your wisdom to the world. You've done it for me,
and you do it with everyone else through your books, through your businesses, through when you
speak. And I want to acknowledge you and just say thanks for all that you do, man.
Dude, thank you, man. I'm just glad I can help, dude. It's cool when you reach the point in your
life when you realize that most of the nonsense of your, at least me, I had a lot of nonsense in my youth.
You kind of get past that and you start to realize – it's sort of like I said, like your question.
Like the only thing that matters is what you – the relationships you have with the people you love and the things you do that make the world better.
And if you focus on those two things, you're going to have a pretty good life.
Yeah, yeah.
Final question.
What's your definition of greatness?
I just said it. No, seriously. Someone great is someone who has great relationships with the people they love and vice versa. And someone who produces something meaningful for the world. And it doesn't have to be like, you don't have to be like Einstein or whatever, man. If you make something in the world a little bit better, that's fantastic.
I mean there's 7 billion people on earth.
If we all make the world a little bit better, that's a crazy level up.
You know?
Yeah.
There you go.
Tucker Max, thanks so much for coming on, man.
I appreciate you.
Thank you, man.
Thank you for having me.
And there you have it, guys.
I hope you enjoyed this episode and hopefully you got a lot out of it.
If you're interested in doing a book, I feel like Tucker has got some great wisdom.
Again, having three books on the New York Times bestseller list at once, it's pretty impressive what he's done as an author.
But some of us don't have that luxury to really go out there and spend a year or two of writing a book.
So make sure to check out lewishouse.com
slash 227. And you can see all of the links back to Tucker's information on how to get, you know,
the system that he does and also how to get his free resources so you can do it on your own.
Again, lewishouse.com slash 227 to get all the show notes from this episode. Share this with
a friend. If you have a friend who's interested in writing a book, share this with them. Tell them to listen to it and download the free resource
that Tucker provides as well if they want to do it on their own. I'm so grateful that you guys
decided to show up today and listen and tune in. Thank you for sharing it with your friends. Again,
lewishouse.com slash 227. Send it to a friend right now. And you guys know what time it is.
It's time to go out there and do
something great. Thank you.