Why book writing sucks (stats), Google Search revenue up 14% YoY, Pinterest shares soar 18%, & more

All right, Eric. So we've been doing a new format. We used to do one episode every single day, like clockwork, even if it was Christmas or New Year's. And now we started doing— or then we transitioned to longer daily episodes of instead of 5 minutes, try to get them to 10 minutes. Then we shifted to 15-minute episodes 5 times a week. And then we shifted to you and I just record one long episode that's around an hour and a half, and we chop it up sometimes into 5 episodes. Have we ever released it as just one long episode?

No.

Yeah, we have.

Okay. So, let me just set the tone for this episode. Those of you watching on YouTube because there's this retention thing, you guys can't hang around for that long. So, let me give you some context here. So, the context here is we've been doing this podcast for 7, 8 years or so and we wanted to change it up because we used to do it every single day. It was 7 days a week, 5 to 10 minutes an episode, right? And right now, I think we're over 100 million downloads. We decided to change things up because we found that the format was getting stale. When a content format gets stale, you have to change it up. So what Neil and I have been doing is exactly what Neil said, and we're curious as to how the results have been. So on this podcast, not only do we talk about marketing news, we also talk about the experiments that we're running too. So it's too early to say right now, but I will say that when we switched to 1 episode a week, all the numbers tanked. So that's why we switched it back to 5 episodes a week, and then each episode's around 15 to 20 minutes or so.

When the numbers tanked, how much did they tank by?

It was just for that one week. I think it probably tanked by like, call it 50% or so.

Okay, so it was a huge tank.

Huge tank.

Okay, and then you haven't logged into the analytics?

I haven't logged in for like 3 weeks.

Well, why don't you just log in and see the stats?

I don't know how to log in on my iPad.

Oh, you don't save it on Chrome?

Uh-uh.

Okay, I don't have it actually. I don't have the—

You don't even know how to log in, do you? I don't know where to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I rely on you.

But I will say from this format though, it's more enjoyable because Neil and I see each other in person and then the conversation's a lot more organic. And the way we do this now is We might have news from business and news from marketing that we're reacting to and those will oftentimes be a backup. Oftentimes, we'll just talk about whatever is interesting to us and we try to carry over some of the private conversations that we have too. Funny enough, I was on the flight back today. I listened to part of your episode with Moneywise and Sam Parr asked you what your net worth is and you're like, I don't know. He's like, what? You don't know? He's like, oh no, I know but I'm just not going to tell you.

So, yeah. So the big lesson for anyone listening is when we went from 7 episodes, we actually went to 5 before we just went to 1, right?

Correct.

When we went from 7 to 5, did we see much of a drop in downloads?

We didn't see much of a drop. And plus I got some DMs from people saying that they liked the new format. They thought they would hate it, but they actually liked it because we went more in depth. Okay.

So 7 to 5, we didn't really see much of a decline. We also didn't see much of an increase either in stats, but going from 7 to 1 or 5 to 1, either way, however you want to put it, we saw roughly, you're saying a 50% drop, right? Yeah. All right. So moral of the story is still producing more podcast episodes based on our experiment, maybe different for you, producing more episodes, even if they're shorter, tends to generate more total views. And the big reason for that is you get a lot of people to listen to multiple episodes, which then helps you also on the ad front because people are You got more total views so you can serve up more impressions.

Yeah. So I mean, look, I think podcasting is still very much a— it's a red ocean kind of. There's a lot of interview podcasts out there. So you have to think about a format that works for you. It's really when you think about YouTube, for example, or podcasts, more so YouTube, it's your idea matters a lot and the format matters a lot. So for example, if you look at MrBeast content, I don't know if you've seen one of his long-form things recently. We talked about it last time, but—

No, I still need to watch that.

Right now his is like 1 versus 100 or something versus this. Last year it was Like $1 boat versus, you know, billion-dollar yacht, right? $1 home versus like billion-dollar home, right? He had this format that he would follow. And then every 6 months or so, or every 12 months, he changes the format quite a bit. And that's kind of what we're doing now. So if you want to keep things fresh, you got to keep thinking about different ideas and different formats.

What was the 1 versus 100? Is the same concept $1 versus like $100 grand or—

No, this one, it was 1 versus 100, and they're competing for a $250,000 cash prize. And so it was from 1-year-olds to 100-year-olds. And there's 100 contestants.

That was the one where they were in the room in the box. You talked about that and we talked about that on the last episode and you broke that down for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, real quick, I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you can be at 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/aoa. Again, that's marketingschool.io/agency, and you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly. And you can, at least the online community, you can cancel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the video. Dude, by the way, I, I don't know if we talked about this, but you and I have both published books. You published a New York Times bestseller. And, um, this, this tweet is from Anand. who did CB Insights. That's his company, right? And so, do you know the economics and the numbers behind the book publishing industry?

No, but it must be terrible.

Okay. Well, we've said before that book publishing, if you're trying to make money from it, generally don't want to do it because it sucks for that.

Unless you're president.

Unless you're president. Okay, like Obama.

First lady or someone like super influential and popular like that, you can get paid quite a bit.

Well, actually sitting on Neil's point for a moment, the influence matters a lot, right? So, Anand says this, the book publishing industry is like the VC business. And some of these stats are pretty interesting. Some of you know already, but— so there's some data from a recent antitrust trial. So, Penguin Random House acquisition of Simon Schuster transcripts were researched and broken down by Ellie Griffin. I don't know who that is. And so, here's what jumped out. Bestsellers are rare. So, it says, in my essay, Writing Books Isn't a Good Idea, I wrote that in 2020, only 268 titles Sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96% of books sold less than 1,000 copies. Okay, that's still the vibe. Question: Do you know approximately how many authors there are across the industry with 500,000 units or more during this four-year period? Answer: My understanding is that it is was about 50. 50. Okay, over a four-year period, 50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four-year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year. Yes, right. So 50% of books sold less than a dozen copies. 50% of books couldn't sell. 12 copies, right? So basically, publishers are like VCs looking for unicorns. So if there's 58,000 titles published in a year, 90% of them sold less than 2,000 copies and 50% sold less than a dozen, right? So basically, no one's going to read your book and it's a power law type of thing, right? In VC, you're looking at only a couple of companies in your portfolio that will have an outsized return. Same deal here.

So he's saying that the book Publishing industry is still a good business for them, but it's more like venture.

Yeah, exactly. So they're going to keep betting on— this is why they give people advances, right? They assume that you have a big audience and they assume that a bunch are going to flame out, but they're happy to give these advances because it's the audience, it's the influence that these people drive that ultimately sells the books. It's really not the publisher and they're admitting it here. It's really not us selling it. It's some of these people are going to push really hard and do amazing. Some of these people have fake audiences and that's what it is at the end of the day.

Dude, some of these publishers are so difficult to work with. So I don't know the publisher that we use for the book that I co-authored. We did hit the New York Times bestseller list, but I remember when we were about to release our book, the publisher, even 30 days before, gets on a call with us and be like, you're not selling enough copies. We have other people. And I remember that our publisher was the same person as Lewis Howes. And I talked to him before. I was releasing my book and I asked him, how many units have you pre-sold? And he ended up telling me that number. And then our publisher was getting mad at me. They're like, other people like Lewis are doing better and yada, yada, yada. And Lewis probably sold more books to individuals, but we had more volume because of 2 things. One, I went to big corporations and I was able to get them to buy like mass volume of books, not like, you know, $10,000 or $50,000. I was able to get some people to write like $100,000 to $300,000 worth of books at once, right? And then the second thing is, is I had a course that sold tons and tons and everyone who bought the course got a free book.

Wow.

And we sold an arm and a leg through there, but they weren't registered sales, let's say through Amazon or anything like that. It was just corporate sales. And they were just complaining to him like, what are you talking about? Just with From my understanding, I don't have their numbers, but from my understanding, we quickly sold— I believe the advance was around $500,000. We quickly sold way more than $500,000 just in the year.

So you covered your advance, right?

Yeah, but it doesn't mean that they actually recuperated their money because there's a cost to creating that book. I don't know what the cost is.

So guess how many books with advances of over $250K actually earn out?

Uh, 10%? Am I right?

15%.

All right.

So, 85% of books with advance of $250K don't earn it out. The parallel nature of the book publishing industry is also clear from the fact that 4% of profitable titles drive 60% of the profits. That's no different than any Pareto principle or any VC, for example. In fact, VC, it's like you're lucky if one of them earns the entire portfolio, right? You might have one or two that handles the entire fund.

But it has. Look at Sequoia, WhatsApp, right? Google, like there are some of these major amazing unicorns like HubSpot. And if they kept the stock, which I believe Sequoia Capital kept a lot of the stock for the portfolio companies, their returns were outsized. WhatsApp, you know, I don't know the return on it, but I believe Sequoia was the only investor in WhatsApp. So it was a massive return. For the book that you published, what was the title of it?

Leveling Up.

Okay.

So we sold like 11,000 copies, 12,000 copies, something like that.

What did it do for you?

Nothing. I just felt like I needed to write it. I wasn't trying to get business or anything because yours was more focused on like— what was your book called again?

Hustle. Hustle.

But only—

I was only focused on saying I'm a New York Times bestselling author.

Yeah. So we did it for different motives. I wrote— I was just like, I just look at life as a game. This is what I should do. Maybe I should have wrote it later, but I just felt like I wanted to write it, right? It was just for fun for me. And so, you know, ideally what we would have done if we were just focused on the business is we would have wrote a what?

A what book? A marketing book.

Exactly. You know, Wiley hit us up a couple of times, right? He's like, hey, you guys do marketing school. You guys should do a marketing school book. And then I was so booked out by that time.

I was like, yeah, I wouldn't do it either. Yeah, I don't— dude. So everyone's like, if you're a New York Times bestseller, you're going to get way more speaking gigs. Did not help one bit. But, you know, the counterpoint to that is I already get hit up a lot for speaking and I did way before I wrote a book. So, you know, and we turned down most of the gigs. So did Did it help? Did it not? I don't know there. 2, can help you get paid more per speaking gig. Didn't help with that either. Maybe because I had co-authors and the book wasn't around marketing. 3, it helps you get customers. Didn't help me get one customer as far as I know. But again, could be because the book wasn't on marketing. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't. But if I did, I would have wrote a book on marketing. I would have not had a co-author.

I think you would have done it yourself.

I would have done it myself. And I would have probably not used a publisher and I would have run ads on Amazon and places like that. And I would have ran the book as a loss leader, like a tripwire in hopes that it gets me more potential customers.

That's a good point. So my book didn't work as a tripwire because it was more like personal growth. It wasn't talking about marketing at the end of the day. And in fact, it was targeted to young— to a younger crowd, to personal growth for gamers at the end of the day. So it had nothing to do with my business. Right. But if you were to do it, I think you'd be fine. I mean, it's a huge pain in the ass. You're probably gonna have to rewrite it like 7 times. I thought people were BSing me when they're like, yeah, you're gonna have to rewrite it a couple of times.

It's true. Yeah, no, I wouldn't publish a book again.

Yeah. So, okay. I mean, there you have it. There's unit economics for the books. And then also, that's a reinforcement that the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle, is still very much in effect everywhere that you see. All right. So, I wanted to take a second to tell you about leveling up. Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount, and we've been doing this event for a couple years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people, and this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not We did this event in Beverly Hills and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders if you want to hang out with amazing people. Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more, and we'll see you inside.

Now, you and I also the other day, we were on the phone and we were talking about the marketing industry, right? So I don't know if you looked at Q1 earnings for a lot of the advertising companies, but you're also seeing the platforms now releasing earnings as well. So Google search revenue increases 14% year over year to $46 billion. Pinterest's shares soar 18% on earnings beat and strong revenue growth. The advertising revenue for 4th quarter, I don't know which— oh, this is for Amazon. Amazon's advertising revenue grew 24% in the first quarter. It went from $11.8, it was actually $11.8 billion. The Street expected $11.7, but nonetheless it grew 24%. And $11.8 billion in advertising revenue is a nice chunk of change because it's highly profitable for them. But yes, when you're looking at all these numbers, these platforms are starting to do better from an advertising basis. We're still seeing at our agency ebbs and flows. You know, excuse my language, but if you want to go back to the second half of 2022, the wording we use is we felt we were getting kicked in the private parts, you know, every single day.

That was your excuse my language?

Yeah.

We got kicked in the private parts. Really? I thought you were going to say something big. Like, what a letdown. Okay.

And in 2023, We felt the same thing. 2024, it's like we're getting kicked there every other day. So some days are getting kicked in the balls. Every other day. I didn't want to be explicit on a podcast, but yes. But every other day. And plus I have kids, so I've learned not to curse or say some of these words. They pick it up fast. And the moment they pick it up and you tell them not to say it, it's like, well, you said it. Yeah. And then they say it and you're screwed. Yeah. Okay.

So, you feel like you're getting kicked in the nuts less frequently now?

Yes, but I still feel like I'm getting kicked in the nuts.

Yeah. I mean, every other conversation we have, it's like, hey, you still getting kicked in the nuts? Yep, still getting kicked in the nuts.

Yeah. It's terrible, dude.

Well, here's the thing. So, remember the guy that spoke at my thing last year, George Gammon? The guy that started off with Macro? Remember that dude? Or no, no, no. You were looking at homes because you were moving to LA. So anyway, So, George Gammon, he's a macro econ YouTuber. We'll just call him that. He's really smart. Highly recommend everyone subscribe to him. And he shared some numbers. So, one, McDonald's is saying there's weakening— there's cracks, there's weakening demand in the consumer, okay? At McDonald's. So, this is on the lower end, right?

Okay.

3M is saying they're expecting less sales. Rubbermaid is saying that they're expecting less sales. These are all consumer products at the end of the day. And so, based on what you're seeing, plus we talked about how I saw a mutual friend this weekend too, or a couple of mutual friends, and then they've all basically said that things are slowing down, right? And a lot of these people, they sell consumer products or they sell cheaper SMB products, right?

Yeah.

And so, you know, well, at the end of the day, you're like, we're seeing our lead flow is slowing down. It started the year strong. Our traffic hasn't really gone down. You and I talked about this on the phone. And so, you know what, we started the year off cautiously optimistic, but I feel like there's more nut kicking going on right now.

Dude, we're facing the same thing. We're not seeing things recover as fast as like I watch the Fed today, Powell speak. I don't know if you saw it.

No, I just landed.

Oh yeah, you just landed from Miami. But when Powell was speaking, to sum it up, they are liquidating less of their bonds or whatever it may be. I think it's bonds. I don't know what they're It went from $60-something billion—

Talking about securities.

Securities. Yeah, they're, they're liquidating their securities from $60-something billion a month to $20-something billion a month. So they're reducing that. They're keeping the interest rates as is, which is the big thing. And they don't know what's going to happen for the rest of the year, if it's going to go down, if it's going to stay the same. They try not to, you know, commit to anything.

You know, Jamie Dimon has said There's potentially— I think he said this, that there's potentially stagflation risk. And there's a couple other people, there's, there's another investor on CNBC, you probably saw this. But nobody's really saying it's gonna be good. And I don't— there's a chance there might not be any rate cuts this year.

So I'm not an economist.

Neither of us are.

Yeah. And I'm not that smart. But someone asked him about stagflation, and he squashed it pretty quickly. And he gave examples of stagflation in the past. And he was giving examples of the stats and what's happening in the last 12 months. And How it doesn't look like it's stagflation, but time will tell. But he was saying at least right now, it's showing that the Fed's changes are having an impact on inflation, just not as fast as people want.

You know where the 2% inflation number comes from?

No.

Okay, so George Gammon said this, it was like completely pulled out of thin air. Basically, I think New Zealand a long time ago, their central bank was like, yeah, you know, well, how about 1%? It's like, no, 1% is too low. How about 3%? Well, that's too high. Maybe we should go for an even number. So, they settled on 2%. So, all of that basically, all to say is like, who cares, right? Like there's no scientific way that they came up with a 2% number. But what does this mean for marketing at the end of the day is what we should get to. Yes.

What it means for marketing is if money costs more money, people aren't going to be investing as much and it's going to be harder to grow.

The cost of capital.

Yes. And but what we're seeing right now from large corporations is they have to spend. A lot of these companies have just so much money on their balance sheets and they've been holding it for a long time. They're starting to reinvest and spend because being a publicly traded company, you have to grow.

Every quarter.

Yeah. No one cares if there's inflation or economy's down. They still expect you to grow or they want you to grow, right? If you aren't expected to grow or you're not growing, your stock typically gets hit really hard for that reason. companies are starting to ramp back up on advertising and you're starting to see it with Google's numbers, Pinterest's numbers, and Amazon's numbers all in advertising, right? Just to recap, Google search revenue increases 14% year over year. Pinterest shares soar 18% on revenue growth. I don't know what Pinterest's was. I'm actually just looking it up. What was it? Revenue jumped quarter 23% from $602.6 million a year earlier. So 23% for— 18% for Google, 23% for Pinterest, and Amazon's revenue growth was 24%.

All right, so that is it for today. And go to marketingschool.io/agency to sign up for our Agency Owners Association. The group is continuing to grow. And by the way, we're upping the price every now and then as we continue to increase the value there. So go check it out if you want to grow your agency faster, marketingschool.io/agency. Don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. It helps us grow. Thank you for your attention. Check us out on YouTube as well.