How To Finally Write That Book & Make it a Bestseller w/ Keith Ferrazzi | EP #59

How do you fundamentally put a footprint in the sand around who you are?

How are people going to know you?

You should be asking yourself, is my positioning in this world about my business and my leadership? You can develop that in what we're going to be talking about today.

The title and the COVID Oh, my God.

Yeah.

So important. Some guy had gone in the back of the room and just taken an ugly orange color and wrote Never Eat Alone on it. And so that ended up being the COVID for Never Eat Alone. Don't think of a book as this craz Mount Everest thing that only special people do. Think of a book as your heartfelt ability to sit and be contemplative about what really matters to you, who you are. What do you want to project to the world? It's a forcing mechanism, an accountability mechanism to focus on your brand and what you have to say to the world.

Keith, welcome to Moonshots. It's great to have you here, pal.

Any conversation with you is a blessing.

Thank you. Great. Let's jump into this conversation, which is for entrepreneurs, for CEOs, for thought leaders who've never written a book but want to write a book. Our goal here is in service to them, Teach them how do you write a New York Times bestseller? Maybe. How do you write a number one New York Times bestseller? Each of us have written one of those. The question of, does it really actually matter? Let's actually start with that. Do you think it matters that your book is in New York Times bestseller?

Let me wind this back a second.

Okay.

I think it's a little different Positioning. One is that I think it's important that everybody write their book. I don't care if you publish it. Because what I'm about to suggest is that you writing your book is you putting a footprint in the sand around your brand. What matters to you? What are you trying to tell the world? You talk about an mtp.

Yeah, Right.

I think everybody should manifest. And again, the way in which one quote writes a book is the same way as in which you develop your positioning, your thought leadership, your brand.

Right.

So if any CEO out there, you should be asking yourself, is my positioning in this world about my business? Is my positioning around my leadership? Is my positioning around whatever? You can develop that in what we're going to be talking about today. So whether or not you're shooting for the New York Times list or whether or not you want to see your book at. On the. On Amazon, it's kind of irrelevant because what we're really talking about is how do you fundamentally put a footprint in the sand around who you are?

All right, so let's dive into all these parts, which is how do you decide what book you're going to write? And then how do you write and then how do you get it published and then how do you promote it and how do you get on the list? And does that list really matter? And I think your point is, right, it. It doesn't matter if you're a number one New York Times. It might matter for you as an ego to be able to claim that.

I mean, let's not take it away from me that I've gotten one. So I don't want to, you know, I got say that it doesn't matter at all. You have one too.

Well, I got.

You just have it in partnership.

Yeah, I got to number two twice. And then I had Tony Robbins as like, you know, the master promotional engine.

Of the world we're about to tell these folks is you use any leverage you can.

Right?

So it doesn't matter. You've got a number one, I've got a number one.

And.

And has it changed our lives? Abso fucking lutely not.

Yeah.

At the end of the day, you write a book for a number of reasons. And let's talk about that, because I think it's important folks to realize. I mean, you said the first one, right? Developing and promoting your brand. How are people gonna know you? So for me, when I wrote Abundance with Steven Kotler back in 2012 and got in the TED stage and gave that opening keynote, it really was a pivot moment for me, and I became Mr. Abundance. And all of a sudden, good news was cool. And we'll talk about a second reason. Not in this podcast, but later. But you don't make money on the book or the book advances. You make money on.

You make money on speaking.

Speaking, Right.

And the tipping point for you, Abundance was a big success. But. But the TED Talk, like, we should talk about that when we get to the second half of our work together today, which is gonna be speaking. But the TED Talk is instrumental, too.

It was. It was. And the value of that. And does it matter if you're on a TEDx talk or on the TED Main stage, and we'll talk about that in our second podcast we're gonna do, which is on how to build a speaking business.

But I agree.

Go back to. Why do you write a book?

So if I'm talking to any of my clients, I coach executive teams, right? And a number of my clients, you know, I ask them, I said, do you have a book in you? And I'd say, half of them say yes, and the other half say, not interested at all. The ones that say yes, I put them through a simple exercise because I'm curious why they have a book in them. It's interesting because some people have a book in them and it has nothing to do with their workplace. It's because they're a Christian and they believe in financial success for the underprivileged, and they want to write a book about being a Christian and having financial success. I get surprised sometimes by whatever somebody comes at me, what really matters to them. Just like when you're trying to design somebody's mtp. Sure. But then there are others who are like, I have no interest at all. And when the ones who say, I have no interest at all, I push them a little bit. And I said, well, how do you represent yourself to your employees? How do you represent yourself to the world? How do you represent yourself to your shareholders?

Who are you?

What matters? And I said, let's think about writing a book. Now, a book, to me, starts with the simplest thing in the world, because most people see this Herculean effort of Mount Everest that they someday have to climb. No, you don't. You don't even have to get the base camp. All you gotta do is. And what I always say is, go on a piece of paper and write 10 sentences that define for you what you have to teach the world or what you want the world to do differently. Just 10 things, and try to make them in some order of flow. And what would those be? And then what you do is you write those 10 things and then show them to a few friends and talk about them, have a dinner about them.

Sure.

And then once you muse on that with somebody else, then go from 10 sentences to 10 sections with three sentences.

So sort of flesh it out a little.

Flesh it out a little bit more. Three sentences. And then show that to a few friends and get a bunch of musings back. And then maybe you get to the stage where you write 10 paragraphs. By the time you've done that, you've started to structure both what you think you have to share with the world and what the world resonates with, or at least the people who have a sense of who you really are, what they resonate with. Once you get to that, I think you've got the bones of what is most important, which is starting to structure what you have to share in the.

World at the end of the day a book is moving someone through a sequence of thoughts and feelings so they come out the other end understanding the point you wanted to make.

Right.

And you and I. One of the things I think books fail to do and this is something that I live my life on. I think if there's a core element of my brand that I'm starting to realize about myself, it's not whether I was the relationship guy with never or the future of teams with competing in the new world of work and other things. I think at the core of my brand is something very different. It's high return practices. I'll explain what I mean by that. I had a. Remember Pocket Coach?

Yeah, I remember. I was an investor.

Lovely failure of $6 million.

It was a great idea.

It was a great idea and it still remains a great idea. And the idea was that there was extraordinary things we all needed to not just learn, but to do differently.

Yes, different habits.

Different habits, rituals, practices and by the.

Way, like atomic habits, it proved success.

But my idea was, okay, if you read good to great, you would know what a great leader is like. But would you really know what to do? So my idea was I was gonna go and take all the great books. Originally the book was called Pocket Coach and the idea was that I was going to take all the great books, turn them into practices so that along with the book you would get dosed practices on an ongoing basis. And what I found interestingly enough was that there were basically no practices in most books. Yeah, there were a lot of concepts, there were a lot of learning, there were a lot of inspiration, there's a lot of ideas, a lot of storytelling. But the what you fucking do day to day differently. What are the practices and how do I. They weren't there. All of my books are practice based. And that's just my brand. Right, My brand. I think if anything else, it's a highly practical practice based.

Well, for those who don't know you fully, I mean you began As a Fortune 500 executive, you were CMO at Starwood Hotels, Deloitte and at Deloitte. And today I view you as what Tony Robbins does for individuals, coaching individuals. You do for executive teams. Right. You come and coach teams for high performance and there's a lot of practices, a lot of this is how you get to that end point. And I agree. I mean a book where I can learn something and it changes my behavior is really important.

And I wouldn't say that, yes, that's my brand, but there are others where you read a book and you're inspired or entertained. Entertained, Right. So all of those are good. I just want to suggest that the key to your success as you start to think about this is these are the questions you should be asking yourself. You should be asking yourself, is my brand what? And how does a person, when I have communicated on paper or on stage with an audience, what does that audience look like? So let's go into the basics. Who am I speaking to? That's different. You speak to entrepreneurs. Now, the overlap of that is that you also inspire and speak to Fortune 500 CEOs, but that's not your core audience.

Yeah.

My mission, my mtp. Inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future. I want to go back to why write a book? You said something a little bit ago. First of all, we talked about what you said about defining your brand. Because if you have a book that really defines your brand, your employees, and again, speaking to entrepreneurs, a great book can launch a company. A great book can launch you as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, can align your organization.

Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, and then Exponential.

Organization that I recently wrote with Salim or EXO2. It also can allow you to pivot.

Right.

And this is something that you've used in your life.

Yeah.

So you and I were talking about this yesterday when we were having lunch. I like to use books to learn. Not to read and learn, but to write and learn.

To force you to learn.

It's a forcing mechanism. So, you know, when. When I wrote my first book, Never Eat Alone, it was an accident. You know, it was. I always had a book in me. I mean, we want to hear the funny little story.

Yeah, I want to hear it. I want to know, why did you write that book?

Yeah.

So I always had a book in me. And remember, I had been the chief marketing officer of two companies, and I.

Thought my book and pretty significant companies, big companies.

And I thought my book was going to be about marketing.

Sure.

And I came out to Los Angeles and I was an entrepreneur. I had left marketing because I wanted to be a CEO. I was working for Michael Milken, and I was running one of the companies in his portfolio. And somebody came to me and said, we would like to write an article about you on your success. You had such crazy success. You were a Fortune 500 executive by the time you were 30, and then now you're a CEO, blah, blah, blah. And so they wrote an article about me, and it was about my perspective. And this is very important for anybody thinking about writing your book. Again, when this journalist came to me and said, I want to write an article about your success, I stopped. And I didn't want the narrative to be run by him. I stopped and I said, give me 24 hours and I'm going to write for you the 10 things that I think defined my success.

Okay?

And I delivered those to him 24 hours later, after thinking about them, and he called me back and he said, you've just written my article. My article is going to be those 10 things. And we're just going to go in more detail now, right? So the structure. I commanded my own narrative. And it was about really. It was about things like deepening relationships with individuals, being authentic, being generous, all those things. And then when I published that, when that article got published, somebody reached out to me and said, you should write a book on that. Now remember my head. I want to be a CEO of a major company. I'm a marketer. That's where I am. And somebody comes along and says, you should write a book about this. This world of networking and career development, etc. And I said, no. I said, I don't want to do that. That's not my brand. I'm a corporate guy. Yeah, I'm going to be a CEO. And they said, we'll give you a quarter of a million. And I'm like, I'll do it.

So it was, we'll talk about advances and how much is real and so forth, you know, I had a not too dissimilar story on my first book. It was just after the X Prize. No, the X Prize had reached some level of popularity, but had not been won yet. And I got. I read an article that a guy, Steven Kotler, wrote about me. He wrote one in GQ and one in. I think it was Wired at the time. And when I read this article, I was so enthralled by his writing. Not what he said, but the way he wrote was so incredible. I did something unusual. I called him up and I said, stephen, would you give me writing lessons? I want to learn how to write like you. And because I. The book I had in me was I wanted to write a book about space, right? I'd been a space cadet for 20 years, and it was like, I'm going to write about the future of humanity in space and this and that. And so I took writing lessons. I wrote a book proposal on space. Didn't go anyplace, and I put it aside. And then here comes 2009, and I am at Singularity University in the first year and I'm having a conversation I'll never forget with Neil Jacobstein and with Ray Kurzweil about the idea that technology was turning things that were scarce into abundance. And that word abundance just grabbed me and I started thinking about that and it became so powerful inside me. I called up Stephen and I said, stephen, you and I are writing a book together and it's going to be called Abundance. And it was like that, committed. And lo and behold, I got a quarter million dollars advance that I split with Stephen.

And abundance, very difficult to do coming out of the shoot on a first book for anybody. So just to manage expectations, Stephen, who.

Had been a writer, a successful writer, was getting like 60k advances and, and, but it was our partnership and sometimes someone who's got a wider reach and someone with writing skills and we'll, we'll talk about. Do you write with somebody on your own?

I know that that's probably in the sequence later, but let's use this as a moment. Neither of us would have had the success we had in our first books if it wasn't for an extraordinary writing partner.

Yes.

I just want to note that. So there's two ways to think about this. One is if what you're writing your book for is to document your positioning and to put a footprint in your brand and further explore it, fine. But if you're going to put things out to the world, there is a skill set called extraordinary writing, which is rare. And I would never have had, never eat alone as a success if it wasn't for Tal Ross, who was my co writer. And similarly with Abundance, you wouldn't have had the same if it wasn't for Steven.

I was incredible storyteller. And as good as ChatGPT is today, it just doesn't come close. Maybe GPT 5 or 6 will come close, but. And we'll talk about that a little bit later.

So I just think it's important to note that neither of us believes that you do everything alone, building the right team. And we'll get to that later. But I just wanted to note how important it was. You don't have to think. I would imagine it would be daunting for most people to think of writing a book. You don't have to write the book, you have to be the quarterback, you have to be the leader of the book. And there's a whole set of assets that you'll be leveraging to make that happen, which we can talk about in a moment, but I want to get over that hurdle.

Yeah. And you can write with a co author where you're both named as the authors. You can have a ghostwriter who comes in and interviews you and writes the book in your voice.

And just on that, I'm often, I'm intrigued by your thought. So Tal and I had an extraordinary writing partnership for Never Eat Alone. And by the time these days, I always make a habit of making sure that the person who's writing with me is on the COVID Yes, 100%. And the reason I do that is because I want them on Saturday night when they're trying to decide where they have an extra glass of wine or do they turn to the book if their name is going to be on it just with mine, I think it's important. And I don't think an author loses anything by sharing the coverage.

Yeah.

And so abundance was written in my voice. I, you know, first person voice and so forth. And then Stephen and I had continued our partnership in our second book, Bold, and our third book, the Future's Faster Than youn Think. And those were jointly voiced books.

Right.

And at the end of the day, it's been incredible. You will if you have a co author. It's a very intimate relationship. We used to joke that we were each other's lovers, you know, in terms of. Because we'd be up at 5 in the morning writing for two hours. And it's, you know, you go deep in that regard, we'll talk about, you know, writing styles. So why write a book brand, build a speaking career.

Learning and curiosity.

Learning and curiosity.

I think launching your business. You talked about speaking as a business, but you're right. Right now, ironically, of all I've written four books, none of them are on the subject that I actually make my money from. I make my money coaching executive teams. And so I am now cultivating the 20 years of work in a new book around high performing executive teams. And that book will be out next year. And it's going to be important for the business that I have, which I have had for years, to take that business to scale. So is there any other reasons you write a book? You know, like I said, there are people who have a book in them about something meaningful in the world.

Right.

When abundance came to mind, it's like it was bursting from me. It was like I had no other choice. I had to write that book. It was like something that was new and true and sort of using Peter Thiel's what's your thesis that you think is absolutely true and no one else agrees with? When you feel that feeling. Getting it out in a book can be a very powerful means. So for me, I love your process and I agree with it. When I start sitting down to write a book, it is outlining the argument flow in terms of the chapters. One of the things that I think is very important in books is storytelling.

Yeah.

I think that books that are really engaging, we as humans, we receive and we communicate information in terms of stories. And so when you open a chapter and it is a compelling story about an individual, it's very different than just a bunch of data.

Yeah.

I have helped many of my friends write their books. Peter Guber is a dear friend of mine. And when I remember one time sitting out on my balcony for a dinner party and Peter Guber, who mostly known these days as one of the owners of the warriors, who really helped turn that franchise around, the Dodgers, helped turn that franchise around, but also an Oscar winning movie producer. Peter and I were sitting and I asked him, I said, what is your great dream? What's next? And he said, I have made a legacy in my product that people will always remember some of the movies that got Oscars. He said, but there's something underneath it that I want to leave as a real legacy, which is helping the world tell better stories. And so I helped coach him through the process of writing his book on storytelling. And from his perspective, it was legacy. He was writing a book for Legacy.

Sure.

And he did. We helped get that to be a number one New York Times bestselling book. Peter doesn't lose in anything. Whether it's a pennant, an Oscar or a number one New York Times bestselling book.

Another reason to write a book is to tell your side of the story. Right. So Paul Allen writes the idea man, which is his side of the Bill Gates. Paul Allen, Microsoft founding.

Right.

And so that's interesting, I think, righting a wrong or telling your side because you know, a lot of times the person who is the most vocal stories out there in a book is a way to provide a consolidated approach to that data backed approach.

So. So now that we have some, hopefully what we've done at this stage is we've helped our listeners awaken to the idea that maybe they should have a book in them.

Yeah, I think everybody can have a book, right? What is it take and how do you do? What kind of commitment? So I was never a good writer in high school or in college. My love of writing actually developed later in life. And I actually love writing. I get up, I like am excited when I wake up before my alarm because I have extra time to write in the morning. And I write almost every single morning, first thing in the morning where I'm super, super clear still today. And it's either writing a blog or writing. And I'm always working on multiple books. So right now we just published EXO2 Peter's longevity practices coming out next. And then with Cheo Rose Washington, who my head of research, we're going to be putting out a book which is the follow on to Abundance. And then there's a book on mindsets after that. And so it's just, I've turned it into a day to day activity and I'll write for an hour. Steven Kotler once taught me that if you can write a single finished page per day, that would put you at the most productive book writers out there. That's a book a year.

So that's not my process.

What do you do?

Yeah, I need designated sitting time to write my books, to write anything. So I have a writing day. So my Fridays, it took me a long time to block off my Fridays. And today is a Friday. And I'm doing this for you.

Thank you. And also for our listeners.

Right.

And for our. I'm doing this for you, actually, I'm doing this for you. But the, the Fridays are my writing days.

Yeah.

So my team knows that they're not allowed to block my Fridays for anything other than my writing. And it's, it's the. If I can't, I got to get into a writing groove. I can't just go grab an hour to write.

Yeah.

My head's not there and I got. Maybe, maybe I've got more monkey mind than you do. But I've got to get quiet, in the groove, focused and ready to really think and iterate. That's just me. I totally love the idea of, you know, doing it for an hour every day. And if that works for you, that's great. But I block the time. The other thing that I think is really important.

But can I ask you, when you were an undergrad at Harvard, you were writing then?

Yeah. So I was an undergrad at Yale. How dare you.

Right.

I'm thinking of Eric Puller, who was at Harvard.

I was Harvard Business School.

Harvard Business School.

Okay.

But no, when I was. Yeah, it's interesting. Maybe a little bit vulnerable, revealing. So I grew up kind of thinking I was smart until I went to Yale and then everybody there because I had not gone to the kind of schools that all these kids had because I wasn't literate and I hadn't been, you know, steeped in the literature. I didn't feel smart. And as a result, it really stymied me a bit. I didn't think I was smart enough. And it took me a while to realize, regain again my confidence in my intellect because I was, I was smart in a different way.

It's shocking to me since I've never seen any aspect other than the brilliant intellectual.

Well, you know, you see it, and I guess it was always there. But I. But when you've got a bunch of people, these erudite philosophers who have read all of Kant and Nietzsche, and I hadn't done that, I felt minuscule. So it set me back. But when I graduated from Yale, I got into business and I started writing about the things I cared about. I started writing manuals in manufacturing for continuous process improvement down at the plant front line. So I wrote my first book right out of Yale, working at a manufacturing company, about worker empowerment. So soon as I started getting practical, my writing started to show up.

And you enjoyed it?

I loved it. I loved it. And that's when I knew I had a book in me and I knew that my intellect wasn't this erudite stuff. It was very practical in nature and I wanted to crack the code of continuous process engineering, of changing the way the world works. That's always been my core.

So here's the question of the times, of course, is the use of ChatGPT in writing.

Right.

So it's not cheating.

I think it's ridiculous to.

No, I'm not calling it cheat, but.

No, but I think a lot of people have been saying that. I don't get it.

I think, listen, if you say to ChatGPT, Write me a book on this topic, and it spits out, you probably can get it to write you an outline and then say, please flesh out chapter one for me and then flesh it out again and you can probably get a book written.

And what's wrong with that?

Well, a question is, is it your thoughts versus the consumed thoughts of the Internet?

But what's wrong with that if the intention is to be of service to a community? You know, you and I had played the other day with some really interesting prompting theories. Prompting is a clever thing to do.

Sure.

And if you get really clever at sequentially asking better and better prompts, which get ChatGPT to write a better and better book or a better and better. Whatever. And look, maybe your point is, and you should say co authored by ChatGPT.

I think at a minimum you should disclose that.

I have no problem with that.

I mean, for me right now, and I've seen long form content generated by ChatGPT and it was missing.

But that's another thing, which is if you create a book with ChatGPT.

Yeah.

And it gets out there, you have to suffer the consequences of a mediocre piece that hasn't been fully fleshed out with your own ideas. Right.

But at the same time, one of the challenges people have is staring at a blank page, which is a great way to start. And I find ChatGPT as a mechanism to say, okay, you know, give me ideas, you know, what you're going to write about in this chapter, conceptually. And if you can outline like you did, here's the key points I want to make. Can you provide some content on top of this? It can break a log jam and give you an ability to get started.

I want to take you and the viewers into a very terrified moment I had less than a few months ago where I hadn't been fully immersed in the prompting within ChatGPT. I knew it was there. I hadn't the time to really play with it. And here I was right in the middle of my. My major book, my tone, my legacy of high performing teams. This is going to be the most important book that I've written, perhaps aside.

From Never Alone, thus far.

Thus far I'll get many, many more. You do, and we'll talk about the pivots. But I got scared shitless because I sat there and I thought, wait a second. I didn't ask ChatGPT what it has to think about this book that I have now structured and formalized and ready to ship. What if ChatGPT could make it fundamentally better? I'm feeling castrated by the fact that I didn't co author it with ChatGPT. And it scared the shit out of me because I thought, damn, I've done an injustice to the world, publishing my tome without the universe of all writing in it, as with my partner of ChatGPT.

Fascinating.

And so I actually, I put a pause in the book. I said, we're not publishing the book. We're going through a rewriting process that will think about, you know, remember I was, and here's something I did the other day. I just said, I've always, again, I'm all about high performing teams. I always thought, well, what would it be if I had actually read all the great works of philosophy, not philosophy, but of psychology, Freud's great works, et cetera. So I started asking ChatGPT, what does Freud have to say about high performing executive teams? And it gave me some very interesting stuff. And I said, what does young have to think about high performing executive teams? And then I asked more questions and more questions, and it made me realize there is a body of knowledge that I can give to my readers that was not there before.

The way I think about it is as a writer, as an entrepreneur, as an executive, you only know how to think the way you know how to think.

Yeah.

And having ChatGPT in the conversation can give you massively different perspectives and especially if you properly, in saying, you know, take on the mantle of Freud. I'm an author trying to write about this. How would Freud look at it? And then the ability to prompt it and say, make it more compelling, make it more data driven, make it more whatever.

I had played with this idea by talking to a bunch of shrinks over the last five years about their perspective on executive teams.

Barely.

Barely.

And in three hours I got this deluge. And then I started doing the same thing. Like I chased after the woman who was the coach for the women's soccer team that won the nationals. I got to sit with Coach K, asking him questions. So now then I did a whole separate thing about, you know, successful sports teams, coaches.

Right.

So all of this, again, is, is powerful. Now the, the question you were asking is chatgpt and book writing. I, I think they're, they're going to be massively integrated.

So the question, so listen, at the end of the day, if there are, you know, 10x or 100x more books going out into the market because it's easier, because an individual can now use AI to write their book. The question becomes, what distinguishes your book? And is the future of books going to be this hardcover or soft cover or digital?

Aren't those two different questions right?

They are, because I think at the.

Core, how you differentiate your book from other books, obviously the quality is going to be important. Both Abundance and Never Eat Alone were extraordinary books and they had viral appeal such that when somebody read them, they wanted to pass them along.

Yeah, I mean, the number of times I've heard, and I'm sure you have, I bought 100 copies and gave it out to all my teams.

All I've been doing is getting your book out, and I've been doing it for 20 years.

Yeah.

So there's that. You got to write a great book, and we know that ChatGPT will write a mediocre book. You've got to write a great book. But then the next question is the brand. Peter Diamandis has how many followers? Keith has how many followers? As a result, our books get seeded into the world in a different way. So if you really want your book to differentiate, then you need to build a media company. And you and I were talking about this the other day. You need to build a media company around who you are now, your media. If you want your book to inspire inspire your employees, which is perfectly fine.

And a great purpose for a book.

And a great purpose for a book, then you probably don't need a media company. If you want your book to have ripple effects around the world and change a state of the universe, then you probably need a media company associated with it.

Yeah, you know, I'm super passionate about longevity and healthspan and how do you add 10, 20 healthiers onto your life? One of the most underappreciated elements is.

The quality of your sleep.

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Let's dive into a few of the other fun subjects we talked about. Writing Process I'm Every day you're On Fridays, I used to. One of the things I loved in writing with Steven Kotler is the back and forth. I would write a chapter and he would write a chapter. We'd exchange them and edit them. And then the thing I found really powerful was we'd get on. Back then, it was Skype. We would get on with every morning, and we'd read the chapter out loud. And reading the chapter out loud really is, for me, the way to take a chapter to finish, because it's got to sound compelling and not boring to you. And when you read it, it's very different when you speak it.

So I think we have, again, we have a very different way. You seem to write from the beginning with an expectation that what you're writing is somewhere in the direction of final. I do not.

You explore.

I write in a radically agile process. So I expect my chapters to be rewritten 20 times, significantly rewritten 20 times. So first thing, as I said I did is memory. So think about how I'm writing books. I'm writing 10 sentences to 10 paragraphs, right? And I'm iterative. Iterative. And every one of those is a. Is a turn. Once you get to a chapter and you've got the first paragraph, now it's. For me, it's throw up on the page. Anything you would want. Freeform. Freeform writing. Anything you'd want to think about in this, then what I do. Because I'm not expected to be the expert in writing where you. It's the difference between you and me. You went out and said, teach me how to write. I went out and I said, tal write this.

Right.

So I abdicated the need to be the writer. I have a writing partner. So my job was to throw the stuff on the page that I think was important and then recognize that my writing partner knew how to read that and restructure it. So that's the way I do it. And I think that's what Tony Robbins does too. USA speaks to it. He's gonna write it.

Yeah.

When Tony and I wrote Life Force, it was an unusual process, to say the least. And we had like five or six authors on the book.

Right.

And it was. I wrote my own chapters in rewriting, but Tony works with a team of writers that will shape what he says and put into content. Let's talk about how you go from your idea to getting a publisher and a publishing deal. So did you have a literary agent when you went out with your books?

I have. I've had three literary agents over my four book Trajectory.

Okay.

And my first one was exceptional. One of the things that I look for in an agent is somebody who cares about the content. And my agent, my agent number one and my agent number three have all been richly interested in the content and hands in the content. In fact, my first agent sat with Tal and I for many days in his office in New York and helped combat and structure.

You remember?

I don't remember my first agent. I don't think he's in the business any longer. But I do remember the other ones.

Yeah.

I had John Brockman as my.

John's great.

John's amazing. His son, Max Brockman has taken over Brockman Inc. At this point. And I met him at ted, and he approached me one day, says, when you're ready for your book, contact me.

Yeah.

And then I did on abundance. It's interesting. Right? So an agent will typically take a fixed percentage of the deal. And so they're motivated. And that percentage can be like 10, 15%.

Oh, higher.

I think 20%.

20, 25.

Okay.

And they're motivated to get the maximum advance from a publisher. Now, interestingly, for a fiction book, if you're. Can I. Yeah, please.

Let me debate that. So my agent now. So my three agents. The first agent was a small, single shingle guy.

Yeah.

And. And he really got in. And every loan wouldn't be successful without him.

Got it.

We ended up not needing an agent because we went with the first person who helped us bird the book. Somebody who just read the article and said, you should write a book. Then we went and got an agent. We shopped it around, but we came back to the person who discovered me, so to speak.

Sure.

Then what I decided to do is I wanted a named agent. After that, I thought, I'm a big shot now. So I went to William Morris Agency, which is now William Morris Endeavor, and I got one of these big named agents. And I remember Ari Emanuel calling me when we hit number one New York Times bestseller. I didn't know we were was. I didn't know his. I'm not an entertainment guy. He's like, who's got your back, baby? I'm like, who is this? He's like, google me. What do you mean, who is this?

He literally said that, I know Ari. And it's like my experience of Ari is being in his office having a conversation and him having a conversation on two different phones at the same time. I'll call you right back. And I just like, for those who.

Don'T know, Ari Emanuel, he's the guy who was the Ari in the series Entourage?

Yes. Yeah.

Anyway, but.

But what I found out about that whole thing, interestingly enough, was that person didn't care about my book. Yeah, that person was.

It was all about maximizing, maximizing the.

Income for the book. And frankly, because I was a business book and business hadn't gotten cool on. There was no Netflix, et cetera. There was no tale, there was no movie for Never get alone, that sort of thing. So I think today, by the way, there could be. I think there's a genre now emerging. Like, you see, Brene Brown has her TV series and all that kind of stuff. But anyway, but today, Esmond Harmsworth, he is a gem. He works in the detail of the content with us. And what I was going to say is, he. In my last book, he agreed. We went with Harvard Business School as a publisher. And this is important. Most publishers don't matter. Harvard Business School does. Harvard Business School has a category around the world that if your book is published on Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business School people know that it has had peer review, it's had some degree of academic pressure to it. And as a result, there are. There are business people in China and Vietnam who will go to their catalog and use their book. And as a result, speaking engagements go up on an international basis because you've got a Harvard Business School book. So I just wanted to put that out there. Esmond took probably a quarter of a million dollars less on that book because he knew long term it was better for me to have a Harvard Business.

School book as compared to if Simon's sister.

Right.

So a few data points here. So a literary agent is not necessary, but if you've got a great literary agent, they will maximize your income potential by. And so what John Brockman would do is he would have an auction. So the proposal, I was amazed. So if you're writing a fiction book, you typically have to write the entire book and turn in a complete manuscript. On a fiction book, on a nonfiction book, you write a book proposal. You write a book proposal. A book proposal is typically an outline of each of the chapters, what it's going to mean and. And how you're going to market it. And it may or may not include a chapter.

It should include a. Well, these days you don't. But abundance did.

Yeah. No, abundance did not.

Did not.

Did not. Rodman did not want a chapter.

Interesting.

And so he went out to bid, and Simon and Schuster won the bid for $240,000, which was like, wow, it was like, amazing amount of money for me back then. And by the way, when people hear about your advance, just to be clear, that number 240,000 is split over three payments.

Right.

So you get a third up front before you start writing, a third when you deliver the manuscript, and a third when the soft cover comes out. So it's not all upfront. That was my deal.

Yeah, they're all different. I mean it. Most of the time it's a third, a third, a third and a third. Third has something to do with the success of the book or some delivery of some aspect of the book. But let me go back. I think what's important for our listeners is, number one, if you. If you want your book to be a big success out in the world, having an agent is one path. And we'll talk about another path, which is self publishing. Yeah, but having an agent is one path. But please make sure that you find an agent that you love and they love you and they love your ideas, they love what you're involved, and they want to get their hands dirty. That's my big recommendation. The next piece then is what is a book proposal? You should write a book proposal which is you write the introduction, which is telling somebody what the book's all about. And again, in a sense, that's the first chapter. You write about the book and then you write a structured outline of the book with half a page per. Now, that's one version of it. And I've often been told that you need one or two full chapters because they don't know if you're a good writer. They don't know if.

Yeah, maybe in my case, you had Steve. Stephen Kotler was a known writer.

Right.

And I was a known marketer, promoter, entrepreneur.

See that you could structure a chapter. That's pretty good. So they want to see that on paper, and that's what you're selling. What a lot of people think they have to do is they have to go out and write a book and then sell a book. Only in fiction do you do that. Yeah, in this case, fiction or a biography. I suspect a biography, write the book. But in the case of a book proposal. So that's your next step, is write your book proposal proposal and your edit. Your agent will bust their ass to make sure it's a good proposal. My agent has rewritten my book proposals. So me and my co writer, how.

They earn their money, that's how they earn their money.

That's. And then what they have that you don't is they have the network of the 10 people that they're going to go pitch your book to. You do not know the 10 publishers that would buy your book tomorrow. They do. And so that's the idea that they're out pitching your book to people that they know who they are.

So you're going to sell a book with certain rights. And one of the things to think about is there's audible rights, there's the spoken book and there's international rights. And when you sell your book to a publisher, they may say, we want US Rights only, we want global rights.

Usually try to get it all.

They do.

And I've in both ways sold it just US rights and then had bids for rights around the world in translations.

Right.

So like abundance, this is where your agent coaches you.

Yeah.

And the agent's incentivize to maximize your income. It was always fun to get like, oh, here's another language. I like abundance in all these languages. So you write the proposal, you submit it again. Whether you're going with a known publisher or a press or Amazon entered the business and disrupted the business in some interesting ways, they're now buying.

So Leah, let's talk about that. So the publisher piece is first, you. I'm sorry, agent and going direct to a normal publisher that's there. Why do you want to do that? Well, you want to do that if you think you can get an advance which allows you to pay for your writing partner, which allows you to pay for your marketing.

Right.

And you also want to do it similar to why you. Some, some entrepreneurs want to bring investors. You want accountability, you want to have a third party giving you some pressure. You know, they've invested in your book so they're going to be expecting shit back from you. And you also might want to do it because there's a group of people coaching you. Just like an invitation, like if you bring in an investor, your investors, you're now your coaches because they put money in you and they're going to tell you what they expect from you. So there's a lot of reasons to do still traditional publishing, but every author knows that it's a very challenging and vacuous process in many ways. The publisher does not do much for.

Can we put a giant exclamation point on this? You think the publisher is going to promote the book and create press and really drive sales. And in the final result, they don't.

They do their best. They do, but they have a thousand books, et cetera. So you are going to drive your success. The reason people love Farozzi is because when I came out with Never eat with who's got your back? The reason it was number one New York Times bestseller was I had a successful book. They gave, you know, 240,000, I think they gave me close to a million for my second book because off the back of the first one they're expecting this, you know, this go, go to the next level. And they give you a year to do it.

Yeah, right.

The first book. How long did it take? Well, my first book took me 35 years to write because okay, it was, it was the book about my life.

It took abundance, took about 18 months to write. The futures bull took about a year and futures faster. About a year. But it's interesting, once you turn in.

Your book, then it's a year, it's another year. Problem with going with a traditional so.

I mean, don't think you're going to get it published the next month.

That's the big problem, if you like. I'm worried about my team's book because for the sake of my business and where I'm going right now with scaling my business, I want my teams book in the market now.

Yeah.

And I know that the teams book is going to take once I'm done with it. It's going to take another fucking year.

If you go with a publisher versus self publish.

Right.

Which is the next side?

So let's talk about self publishing, which you know more about than I do.

So just to be clear, I went with Simon and Sister for the first four books. The fourth one was Life Force with Tony. We got a multimillion dollar advance. It was huge. And I didn't pocket a dime of it either, did Tony. That money was spent on writers. It was spent on promoting the book significantly. And we donated millions of dollars to health and longevity research. So it was great. I loved it. The book I just published with Salim Exponential Organizations 2.0, we decided to self publish.

How was the process?

The technology is a lot better. There's a gentleman by name of Cary Oberbrunner who runs a company called Igniting Souls. He is a complete turnkey self publication. So he has writers, promoters, translators, everything on staff and it's just a lot faster.

Does he get distribution in Independence and bookstores as well as on Amazon?

He does to some degree.

Not as much as a publisher would.

And also he does have international outreach and so forth.

Probably not as much as a publisher.

But at the end of the day it is a fixed price with him and all revenues from the book come to the authors yeah.

Right.

So that's.

And by the way, when you get in advance, when you get in advance a quarter million dollars or a million.

Dollars, you got to earn that up.

You have to sell a million dollars.

Of profits, which almost no books do.

Yeah.

Very few books earn their advance. Earn their advance. Did.

Did.

Abundance. Abundance.

All the books have so far.

Yeah.

And so did, so did mine. The. But that's a big deal. And then you don't have to give the advance back. That's important to know. It's like you get a quarter of a million, you're pocketing that. And that's the bet that the publisher has made on you. And if you don't sell a quarter, when, when you say you don't sell a quarter of a million dollars for the books, you're getting 15, 20% of a book. I forget the math.

At most, right.

When a book sells for $20.

Yeah.

Or whatever. $20. Right.

You get a nickel.

It's 25% something ridiculous.

And that's what gets credited to your advance.

Right.

The piece that you got, not the 25 bucks, but the piece that you got gets credited to your advance. You have to sell exponentially. That many books earn a quarter of.

A quarter million books to earn back the quarter million dollars of advance.

Right, Right.

It's crazy. And so the, the challenge, I think, you know, so the math on that is a little bit weird. And then you get, you get Spiffs for international publication, but you don't get advances on, you don't get royalties on those. Like if you, if every time your book gets published in Vietnam you get 5,000 bucks.

Okay.

It's a one time thing.

They buy the rights.

They buy the rights and they buy them outright. And that goes to you as cash in your account somehow.

But that's what you see.

That's all you see. You don't get the tail.

Yeah.

Now. And most books don't have tail. You know, most books don't have tail. The, the self publishing is very interesting because to your point, you're paying a one time fee of X tens of thousands of dollars to this person.

Yes.

And every bit of the book that you sell, you set the price. 20k. 20. 20 bucks. 25 bucks. That's all coming to you.

Yeah.

I'll tell you the thing I love most isn't that it's the speed.

Yeah.

I get this.

And when I'm writing about exponential technologies and entrepreneurs, I can't publish this thing. It's a year out of date. Is like ridiculous.

Look, you and I both take our full advance and we pour it back into marketing and then some.

Yes, right.

You and I pour it back into writing partners, research, and then some. But there are some people that, watching this that could think of this as an income stream. And, and, and if you do self publishing, you could probably do a better business that way, particularly if you've built your media company. And that's the point, which is if you go self publishing, you're getting nothing from the publisher. So we, we, we, we don't give the publishers too much credit for doing a ton, but they do some. Now, it's all on you.

Right?

It's all on you. If you self publish.

Yeah.

You have an extraordinary book list. You have an extraordinary presence. You snap your fingers and your team lines up 20 of the most important podcasts that you're going to go hawk your book on, and as a result, it sells. I just want to make sure that we're balancing for folks who are watching who don't have a media business.

Yeah, the books don't sell themselves. You have to sell them. You have to sell every book it becomes. It's packaged.

Now, which I want to talk about putting your marketing plan together for your book. I have a good old school from back in the time when I publish a book, a binder with tabs, and here's a tab on podcasting, Here's a tab on, et cetera, doing your book. We could probably do an entire podcast just on the book. Marketing.

Absolutely.

That's an entire thing.

And it's critically important. I'm gonna hit a couple of other things here. The title and the COVID Oh, my God.

Yeah.

So important it is. And battles, and battles and battles.

Oh, yeah. I literally, the only time I lost my cool in Never Eat Alone was over the COVID of Never Eat Alone. Funny story. So Never Eat Alone comes out, the book's done. So here's the thing. Make sure that you write in your contract.

Yes. You have control.

You have control.

Yeah.

Because most of the time you do not. There's a lot of times in the book contract, the publisher owns the control. I didn't realize international covers are different. Are different, and they're controlled by the local. They're not. There are publishing, there are title. There are book covers out there that look like crap, and I have nothing I can do about it. The English book title for Never Eat Alone, I hate. So the book cover was a guy's hand with a business card on, on top of a white plate, as if, like, I'M handing you a business card at lunch. Now you laugh because you know that that couldn't be further from who I am and what I wanted. Like, I looked at that and I.

Should have been a credit card.

I flipped the fuck out. I was like, are you kidding me? That is transactional networking smarmy bullshit. I'm all about authentic, generous relationships that are life changing for both parties. And I said, and so I, I puffed and puffed and said no. And said no. And said no. And the publisher got so pissed at me that they said, well, fuck you. This is supposed to be out tomorrow. I'm like, I said, I'm not going to promote it because I didn't have any rights. Yeah, I didn't have any rights. They could do it if I. And I said, fine, then I'm not going to promote it. I said, you want to fucking have rights over my book cover? I'm not promoting it. Fuck you. And so they said, well, fuck you, here's your book cover. Some guy had gone in the back of the room and just taken an ugly orange color and wrote Never eat Alone on it. And they said, fuck you here. And I'm like, good, it's done. It's better than that other thing. And so that ended up being the COVID for Never Eat Alone.

That's hilarious. So I basically fight over or spend countless hours on the book title and then on the imagery on it. Because it's like when it's. The movie poster is the same example, right? You've got one image and one statement to capture people's attention. And it's important. One of the things I would do is do ab testing by Google Ads of different book names and covers and see what people would click on.

But to your point, the reason we both care goes back to the very beginning of our talk. It's your brand, it's who you are, it's how you represent yourself. It's your heart, yourself in the world.

Yeah.

If it really is a book that is meant to represent you, every aspect has to represent you. Let's talk a little about the marketing. So to get to a New York Times bestseller list, I'm going to give some numbers here that my team researched. So right now, to get onto the New York Times bestseller list, not to get to number one, is you have to sell between 5,000 and 10,000 books in your first week. That's the current rough number.

I would be surprised that that's enough.

Okay. But it's just on the list. And so there's many lists. There's fiction lists, there is nonfiction lists, there's children lists, there's monthly lists. And by the way, when people say I've got a best selling book book, there's a thousand lists out there. Were you in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, all of that stuff.

It's funny, I was looking at somebody's bio the other day. I had set up a call with somebody and I was looking at their bio and it said bestseller. And when I finally got underneath it, it literally was nothing. It was they one day on Amazon they had hit the top 10 of their category which might.

And by the way, you could be in a subcategory of atomic physics as part of physics.

And you were number three on atomic physics within. And that, that. So I think what's important is we spend a lot of time and have. Both of us have spent a lot of time sweating.

Yeah.

This idea of our bestseller lists.

Yeah.

And I would argue very ego driven.

Yeah.

And the question is, does it matter? I mean at the end of the day, one of the realizations I had a while ago was I'm never going to put on the book number two New York Times bestseller.

Right.

You're either on the bestseller list or your number one.

But you even just said it right now. You didn't even say New York Times, you just said bestseller list.

Yeah.

So for the. I really think the answer is if you don't hit number one, none of it matters.

Right.

Because you will always be able to say bestseller best with some moderate degree of integrity because you're not putting a predecessor. You're not saying Wall Street Journal bestseller or Joe's blog bestseller.

Right.

You could probably say that you're a best selling author no matter what in some subcategory. Some subcategory with some degree of integrity. And if you're not number one, then you're probably doesn't matter. And then just look at the amount. Look at the net present value of the energy that you and I put into being number one.

Crazy. And the favors you qualify and the.

Money and the favors, etc.

I just don't know. For those who.

And the likelihood, nothing.

But for those who want to go for the gold ring, let me hit a few data points and please add to them. So if you want to hit number one, the number of pre sales are probably in the 50 to 100,000 in the first week to get somewhere on the list. The number is 5 to 10,000. You might be number 10 on the list. You might be On a secondary New York. This is the New York Times, which is for some reason the list everyone cares about.

Well, let me also suggest that I have seen people get those numbers that you're talking about and not make the list. And the reason they don't is because the New York Times finally has an arbitrary ability to say, I don't trust your numbers.

Right.

I think that you don't have the pedigree. I mean, there is no open algorithm.

Let's repeat that. It's editorial, it's subjective, it's not objective. You can hit those numbers and not get in the list. And one of the things they also do, if you look at the list and you see a double dagger next to a book, if you look at what that means, it means that this book reached the number of cells, but it was in a fashion that doesn't represent public interest. It was some individual got tens of thousands pre sold to their friends, which is what you do to get on the list.

Yeah, no, I think where, by the way, I want to hear more about this double dagger where I think it is unethical and I've heard of people doing it. I don't know anybody directly who's done it, but people who are rich and buy 50,000 books and they send them to their warehouse and now they recognize that the way there's a very intricate process which is probably inside baseball. But if you go on the Amazon and you buy five books. Yes, it counts as one. So Amazon reports a transaction of a book purchase.

Yes.

And so what was happening for a period of time is there were agencies that were created.

Yeah, I remember them. I hired one and it would be your. Like I had friends of mine who had companies that wanted to 100 books and they would buy 100 books or 500 books and the agency would take the money, would buy the books individually and ship and then ship them to the employees of the company.

Which you know from that. Actually, I actually don't mind that because that feels a degree of integrity. There are a hundred people getting your book right now. They didn't individually buy it, their boss bought it, but they're getting your book. I'm talking about people would buy 50,000 books, go to that agency and have it shipped 50,000 times to people who never got the book. Right. So that's I consider low integrity. And there were some people that got caught doing that and some articles were written about them.

The challenge is that the only way you get to tens of thousands of sales in the first week is if you're, you know, President Clinton or if you are a famous actor and it's on the shelf and people know you and they want that inside story.

I. What I was about to share. Yeah, what I was about to share again, this was back in an era when what I cared about was the list.

Right.

So when I was trying to make the list, I went out and found a partner back in the day. You remember University of Phoenix?

I do.

I was doing something. Yeah, sure. I was doing some, some work with University of Phoenix and they really believed in the book who's got your back? Because I was helping them design peer to peer coaching groups. Young kids that at the university would be in small peer to peer coaching groups as a part of the learning experience, and alumni that would be in peer to peer coaching groups in support of their career development. And so when who's got your back? Came out, they're like, that's an amazing book. We should get it for all of our students and let's go on a book tour around the country. And so I ended up raising $2 million with University of Phoenix to just support my book launch.

Amazing, right?

And it got number one New York Times bestseller.

It's, it's, you know, non traditional marketing and thinking. Yeah, that's. That's fascinating.

So, yeah, that's the point. Which is book marketing isn't just your advance, it's not just your own money. It's partnerships working with. Partnerships with.

I'll tell you what I did, what I did on Bold to drive it again to number two. And both for abundance and Bold, it was sequel to a fiction book, sort of like, I think it was 50 shades of gray was like hitting number one.

Oh, I thought you were like, bold was like 50 shades of gray. I'm like, I gotta go back and reread that. I don't remember that in the.

No, it was like the follow on to 50 Shades of Gray that was number one. It was like, no way I was gonna beat it. I mean, I don't care how many I sold. But what I did with Bold was I did something unique and interesting. I went out to my community and I had built a community through Singularity University and through xprize. And I said, I'm going to create a program. It was called the Vanguard Program. And I said, I'm looking for 200 members of my community who are going to go out and sell 100 copies of the book.

Yeah, that's great.

And if you do that, I think.

Gary Venterchuk did something like that recently was big deal.

If you do that, I will give you an invitation to come and join me and Ray Kurzweil for a day to talk about exponential technologies at Singularity University, either by remote viewing or in person. And it worked great. And so I had a small army of people who cared deeply about exponential tech and entrepreneurship who went into it. So that was an interesting thing to do.

Yeah, I want to pause on that because. Because I feel like that philosophy, which is, I think if you are really gonna go big on a book, you need to think of yourself as a movement leader.

Yes.

And if you think of yourself as, again, this is the difference between you doing it all yourself and a movement leader. Movement leaders realize, there they go. I must follow them, for I am their leader. That was the Gandhi phrase.

Right?

You need to marshal volunteers. And as a movement leader, I start to marshal volunteers in the writing process. I go out to people who care about what I care about because they've been following me and I ask for case studies examples. I ask for volunteers for people who are curious about a topic that they would go spend a month doing research on the side for and deliver it to me. So I get people involved.

That's what happened in Exo 2.0. Salim had built OpenExo as a large community of thousands of entrepreneurs. And they contributed ideas, they reviewed chapters, and then they were there to promote the book. And we did. The day we launched the book, we did a five hour free global webinar teaching everything that was in the book and then offered the book at 99 cents on Amazon for the digital copy for two weeks. Really, for those individuals, it really is about getting creative these days. And you have to care about the book content because you're going to spend a lot of energy. It's not a financial transaction. It's something that represents your heart and your soul.

Let's talk a little bit about a lifetime of book writing. You and I have done that now. We both started and we keep going. You seem to have these short, agile sprints of writing book. A book might take you a year or two to be done. I have a long tail perspective. I've been writing one book now for 10 years.

Need some help?

I have had help. I've had lots of help. But it's a pivotal book for me and I'm not worried about publishing it right away because to me it's about the learning. And I keep rewriting it and I keep reworking it and I'm not ready to let it go into the world yet. But it's a beautiful ongoing learning path that I've had with two writing partners. And so I just want people to think a little differently about it. And the other thing I want you to think about is the pivots. So when I wrote Never to Loan, it was serendipitous. There was an article about how you had your career be so successful. Would you write a book about how other people can be successful?

Sure.

Never Eat Alone about networking, relationships.

Great.

But that's not what I wanted my brand to be.

Right.

All of a sudden I had this amazing success of a brand around networking that I was, I was actually pushing away from because in my head, you know, my friends were Peter Diamandis, who was a thoughtful scientists changing the world. My friends were my CEO friends who were changing major corporations. I didn't want to be the networking guy.

Yeah.

And. And so I never captured the momentum of Never Eat Alone.

I feel, I feel that you had a trajectory that if you held on to that could have been game changing. It's.

Well, in different ways. I mean I would have. It would have been different. I mean this was back in a day, Province 3. Tim Ferriss.

Yeah.

This was a day you could have been the ultimate podcaster from. From day one.

All of those things. I chose not to.

I had to let go of space, which I had spent 20, 25 years developing all the relationships building companies there.

Yeah.

When I switched over to exponential tech and sort of abundance thinking. And it's really about constantly reinventing yourself.

Right, right.

Which is a fun thing to do.

Yeah.

And that's what I've done with my books.

Yeah.

So if you look at my books and it's interesting because I may now come back around to that self help space. It's a space that I abandoned at a time when my sense of self and ego and other things didn't want to be all in. I didn't want that to be my brand. I wanted to be respected by presidents and CEOs and thought leaders.

And you are. And you are.

And ironically I am. And they still respect me for the networking thing.

Yes.

I mean, I've helped presidents build their networks during campaigns and it's ironic that people want to keep pulling me back into that core. And I had fought it for a while.

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And learn more. Now back to the episode. So you're going to get to a point. Your book is published. You get the galleys. You're going to go out there and look for book blurbs, right? So what's a book blurb? A book blurb is getting someone on the back of the COVID who has some notoriety to say, this is a great book. Buy it.

Right?

Which probably the author has written and handed to the blurbert.

And it is 100% what happens, right? I mean, yes. It's like you don't actually send them the full book and say, can you read it and send me? Give me two sentences.

People do. They do, and nobody does.

And nobody. When someone asks me for a book blurb, you know, if I know the person, I will do it. I will still ask for a summary of the book because I'm not going to have a time to really just slot it in and read it.

You just want to make sure it's.

Not weirdly and what's its purpose? And then how does it connect to me? Right? And then I will say, then write me three or four draft blurbs and I'll modify one.

Are you abundant with your blurbing of other people's books? Because I know some people. I can say their names, but they are very stingy with it.

And then there are others in the middle someplace. I have been careful not to just accept everybody. But there are those people who I know through Singularity or X Prize, who I respect, but I'm not that stingy with it. But I probably get 100 requests a year and I'll probably accommodate 20.

My view is I don't get the stinginess because it's not like any human will have seen the 10 things that you've blurbed.

I just want to make sure it's authentic for Me.

Right.

Authenticity in that regard. So you get the book blurbs, you get your book jacket, you get your final hard copy, and you're going to have a launch event of some type which used to be in person. My first abundance launch event was Steve Forbes threw me a party and Arianna Huffington threw me a party, and that.

Was Ari has the best book launches. She threw me mine too.

Right.

And then you're on a press tour.

Which, by the way, first of all, I think a book launch party is. Is useless.

It. It doesn't. Doesn't do anything other than makes you feel.

It's like a birthday.

Yeah, it's like a birthday.

Like, hey, listen, do I have a party or do we not have a party this year? I'll have a party. Okay? That's as, that's as important.

Don't. Don't spend any money. It's not going to drive anything. If you want to celebrate like a decade of work and your friends are there, have a party for that purpose.

Great, great.

And then you start your media. Then you start your book marketing.

Yes.

And at high points, it is eyeballs. It's getting on NPR is probably the best thing you can get on, you.

Know, and that changes. So when Never Eat Alone came out, I had a relationship that got me on the New York Times, on the Today show. And at that time. Not Today Show. Yeah, Today show, the morning TV show.

Right.

Today show made number one. That was it.

And today Oprah will make you a number one.

Does it anymore?

Well, maybe these two. I mean, like, I mean, does she even have a book club anymore? I don't, I don't.

We don't know. We gotta be careful. We don't say that.

That.

I'm not sure. Well, she. I don't think she has a show anymore, Peter.

Oh, come on.

She's had. She.

Oh, we'll find out anyway.

Anyway, regardless.

But you're the pr, you know, but.

But I, I think the. Look, what are the categories? This is any media person. There's. There's the newspapers, which do do reviews, and I don't think they matter as much anymore, except for New York Times. Doing the review is a big deal still. I think you've got the morning shows, you've got radio, which still has impact. Bob Pittman keeps reminding me, who owns iHeartMedia, how important radio is. And I really think it is. But I think the biggest issue are podcasters.

Yeah.

You know, so it is today. It's going on a podcast tour. It's really speaking about your Book. And you know, people are like, I don't want to give it away. Bullshit. What do you mean? I mean, you want to talk about it as much as give everything away. And then a lot of people will buy the book just to have it on their shelf so they can refer back to it.

Well, you know, what portion of books that are bought or read.

Oh, God, what do you have a number? Less than 10%. What?

Less than 10%.

Wow.

I mean, the reality is you're. Anyway, I'm not even going to go there. I was about to be. We're about to take this whole reason for watching this podcast and flush it down the toilet because no one reads it anymore. Well, that's the big question. It's like, what's next for books?

Well, I'll tell you what's next. And we did this with EXO 2.0. We basically trained a GPT4 model on the book and all the research. And you're talking to the query.

Is that the thing? I was talking to Peterbot.

That's a different version. And Peter Bot is trained on all of my books. And you can ask it concrete questions like how do I develop an abundance mindset or an exponential mindset, whatever it might be, or how do I. I'm in a cement business in Sao Paulo. How do I turn myself into an exponential organization? And the book will give you context and a reason.

Your books. I hope my books deserve to be read, beginning to end from people who really believe in what we're writing about. If somebody wants to. I am about to write the most important consummate book today of high performing teams. The last team's book was 20 years ago.

Wow.

Things have changed. Which was Pat Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which everybody still refers to, but think about what's changed in 20 years. So my book that we're about to publish is going to be very meaningful and important in the world. Most books don't have that gravitas about them. And you know, you need to ask yourself again, do you? What are you writing for?

Sure.

I'll tell you. One thing that I've done recently is as I'm writing a book, I will release chapters or portions of chapters as blogs.

Right.

And I ask them and I ask for feedback.

Yeah.

And I develop an audience on that way.

Right.

Andy Weir, who wrote the Martian and wrote like my favorite book of the decade, Hail Mary, both fiction books came out of no place. And he wrote his book the Martian and released it as chapters on the Internet for feedback.

And people get afraid that if they do that, they're giving it away and no one's going to buy the book. It just doesn't work that way.

No, Abundance works in this regard. So give the information away, get the feedback, develop people who want the next chapter in. In that regards. And I think that's really important.

What do we have to say in summary? It feels like we're getting there. Yeah.

Let's wrap this up. One last thing. Do you read your own books on Audible?

Oh, great question.

Yeah. And so when abundance came out and they chose the reader and I listened to it, I was horrified. I was like, oh, my God. I could not listen to this person for. For a chapter.

You'd rather peterbot read it?

Oh, my God. So I ended up reading with Stephen Red Bold and Future is Faster.

You like the process?

I do. I enjoy reading it because I can put the inflection into it. It takes a day and a half, two days to read a book.

I hate it.

I know. Well, the thing that's interesting is you don't have to actually read it perfectly.

You can, like, have to read it three times.

You read a sentence, and then you fubbed it and you read it again.

I mean, I'm getting. My skin is crawling thinking about it. So the answer is, I've not read any of mine.

Okay. Well, I'll tell you, we just trained up my Voice model on 11 Labs, and it feels really good.

And I'm sure not with the inflections.

But not with the meaning.

Right.

Of the personal story that goes like, oh, my God, you know, when you really. When you convey it in that regard. But it will get there.

Yeah.

But in the meantime, here's what I say to reading your book. I think it's a beautifully generous gift to give your readers that I've never given them, because when I've tried, it drove me crazy. I sat. I said, okay, you know what? This next book, I'm going to do it. And I sat there and I started practicing, and I realized I have three days of this ahead of me. And I said, no. What I did do is I interviewed the readers.

Yeah.

So I got my publisher to give me three potential readers, and I listened to all of them, and I found one that I thought was good. And then I had a meeting with them.

Interesting.

I said, listen, let me explain to you. I'm going with you instead of myself. I'd like you to understand why this book's important to me.

I love that.

I want you to Understand And I want to talk to you about some of the stories I want to tell you. I'm going to tell you with the inflection point that matters to me. I coached them.

Yes, nice.

And you know, I think it got better as a result of that. But I agree, I should be a more generous, better human and let. And read him.

Well, I'll tell you something that is interesting, that David Sinclair, when he wrote Lifespan and he had a co author on that, in between the chapters, not all chapters, but in between the chapters. When on the audible there was a conversation between David and the author about the chapter, about the content of the chapter, like how that was amazing and how fast it's changed and that gave a level of intimacy. So at a minimum, if someone else is reading your book, getting into an audio and recording, having a conversation with that person about the chapter, I thought about that.

So we, of course, when I'm working with my co writers, I had a co writer that I did two books with. His name is Noel Weyrich. Amazing co writer. He was great. He and I would get into some really like knockdown, drag out fights. Like he'd be like, you know, that doesn't make any sense. I'm a book writer, I know what this. I was like, but that, but you've turned it into mush. And like we're yelling at each other and I would sometimes just laugh and I said, we've got to publish this as a part of the book.

Right.

Know all the soup that you know, the ingredients that go into the soup that makes it. I think we will by the way, see books that are written in this multimedia fashion, where the making of the book is all recorded, the, the filmed, even perhaps when, when they, when they're together on zoom, talking about it. Imagine the richness of that.

Sure.

You've got the book and then you've got all the stuff that went into it. I mean it would be powerful.

So, ladies and gentlemen, where do we go book writers here? Keith Farazi, author of Never Eat Alone, who's Got yout Back? Leading without authority, competing in the new world of work. Keith, which social media platform are you mostly active on these days?

I'd say LinkedIn.

LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the right place.

And you're. It's at Keith Ferrazi. At LinkedIn.

At Keith Ferrazi. But wait, before we. We can't just close.

We can't.

We gotta say something poignant. Okay.

I thought we, I thought we did.

I don't know, we were just. No okay, we had an hour worth of poignance.

Bring it in then.

So, like, both of us should give a reflective comment about the wrapper of the book.

All right, so you want to do yours? No, no, you go first.

Okay, that's fair. Don't think of a book as this crazy Mount Everest thing that only special people do. Think of a book as your heartfelt ability to sit and be contemplative about what really matters to you, who you are, what do you want to project to the world. And it doesn't have to be something that you're on deadline. It can be something that you evolve. But it's a forcing mechanism, an accountability mechanism to focus on your brand and what you have to say to the world. And then I would also recommend that you get a coach, and that coach could be a co writer or something so that you keep on and you work it through and you get to.

The end, and you get to the.

End and you've got something for your legacy and the minimum your grandkids will love to see.

Yeah, you know, that was my point. That was beautiful. That was beautiful.

I felt the need to do something.

Giving birth to that. Understanding why you're writing the book is really important.

Right?

I think the why is is key. And I remember the difference between I'm going to write a book about space because I'm the space guy, to oh my God, there's this incredible truth in the universe about technology making everything more abundant and where humanity was going. And I want everyone to know about it. And the level of emotional energy that drove that was night and day. So hopefully folks listening can find that book inside them that really has this. We're emotional entities. Right? You need that emotional drive. I found the book writing process incredibly meaningful and creative. And it's artistry. And, you know, it changed my life. Abundance as a book launched, launched me in a brand new direction, as did Navrit alone for you. And at the end of the day, it's going to become easier to write a book. Use the tools. I think we had an interesting debate and discussion about using ChatGPT. Use the tools, but make sure that if you're using ChatGPT, that it isn't plain vanilla, that you're adding your own stories, that it is what is on the page there is meaningful to you. But at the end of the day, we're going to see a lot of books and people say, I'm going to write a book to make money. Well, guess what? That's not where you make your money. You make your money in the speaking business if that's what you want to do. And that's going to be the subject of our next podcast we talked about. You're on LinkedIn. Eithferrazzi, two Rs, two Z's. And what if they want to reach you for having you speak or coach their executive team? Where do they go for that?

The company is called FL Farazi Greenlight. So go to Farazi Greenlight and you can get in contact with us there.

Awesome. Thank you, brother. This was fun.

Always.