#64: Nat Eliason — Viral Book Marketing and Crypto Confidential

I was getting so sucked into the TikTok, Instagram, YouTube algorithm world. My wife and I, we had one kid, uh, then, and we were balancing childcare because she was off from preschool. I only had an hour or two a day to get any work done. I realized after the holiday was that I was using all of that time to make these videos and I wasn't using that time to write. I was like, wait, this isn't the goal. I started doing this to do this other thing, but now I'm not even doing the other thing. Creator economy is interesting because I think what's attractive about it from the outside, people getting into it, is that it has this promise of potentially very fast success and very fast riches. You see people who start on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, and then a year later they have hundreds of thousands of followers or subscribers, and it looks like they're making all of this money. and they've gotten famous overnight. It's this incredibly attractive thing when compared to the alternative of working a normal job and having to like grind up through your career and get promoted and, you know, move to a new company like that just seems so slow and so inefficient. But there are all these downsides. And really one of the biggest downsides I think is that a business in the creator economy or a creator economy persona, influence, whatever is really fragile. Really, really fragile for a few reasons. You know, one being just how quickly these platforms change. Uh, before my work now, I was really focused on SEO and I, you know, had really, really nailed SEO for a while. And like, that was my thing. And I was doing it as a service and building these sites and it just worked and it was easy and we could start a site and we knew that it was going to be at hundreds of thousands of visitors, uh, per month from Google within usually less than a year. And that could spin out into products. And it was this really cool, like, ha, we've solved it and figured it out. And And then the algorithms changed and then those tactics didn't work and you're kind of like always struggling to keep up with them. And the same thing has happened on a lot of these social media platforms. So I, I remember when people were putting all this energy into Facebook pages and trying to get like a million likes on their Facebook page and get all these Facebook followers. Like nobody uses Facebook anymore. I mean, like our parents do.

Um, just AI art.

Yeah. Now it's just all AI art. And I think we can expect similar things to happen with like Instagram and with TikTok and You know, some are certainly going to last longer than others. I mean, if we were going to pick one right now, it'd probably be YouTube. That seems to be the most durable. And that's probably because making good YouTube videos is the hardest to do of any of them. Um, but even within that, you see people come and go, rise and fall, right? People have their moments and then they start to fade away. And it's often hard to get like that, that second wind. It doesn't have that same durability that. Being a lawyer does, right? Like, yes, the ramp up to making that much money as a lawyer is much longer. But as a lawyer, probably not going to have one year where you make $2 million and then it goes way back down the next. And now you've like built this whole business around you that you can no longer afford to maintain.

The Kardashian case or something.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, you get to partner and you're just a partner now. Like that's a A version of that money is happening basically every year. So everything that hap— that can happen really quickly can also go away really quickly. And so I'm much less interested in doing this work with this really quick startup because I know that you're just always kind of like walking that razor's edge that possibly going away just as quick.

Dude, I love that. I have an article called 10+ Years Losing on the Internet. You know, I've been creating stuff since I was 11 or 12 from YouTube videos to blogs to Were you on GeoCities?

I think that was like the first thing I did on the internet. GeoCities?

No, no, I wasn't.

How old are you?

No, I'm 26.

Okay. Yeah, that might have been. I mean, I'm only 31. I'm not that much older, but you might have like just missed GeoCities. That was like the first WYSIWYG website builder, like one of the first big ones. And yeah, I mean, it was just crazy.

Yeah. Blog, Blogspot or Blogger.

Yeah, Blogger.

Yeah. I had a baseball blog. I sold a lot of stickers. I was known as like the sticker king in high school. I sold like $40,000 worth of Grateful Dead stickers. I would just get—

That's sick.

Like, that was like, I've always been making stuff, right? And, um, you know, now like things have really started propelling and it took years, right? It took so long. And, um, I, I think, you know, whatever algorithm changes, whatever happens, like, as long as you just keep making stuff and putting stuff on the internet, like, you're going to survive in some aspect, I think. And your business might fluctuate, sure. But like, you'll still, you'll still survive and make cool stuff.

I think that's really well put. As long as you were doing something that can continue to exist and do well and survive independent of the algorithm gods, then you can have that durability. But when your whole business is dependent on these algorithms continuing to favor you, that's kind of a scary position to be in.

Yeah. Let's talk about the algorithm gods of TikTok.

Yeah.

CCP algorithm gods, if you can say that without getting banned.

The algorithm party.

Yeah. The algorithm party. Oh, that's good, dude.

That's kind of good, isn't it?

Oh yeah, that's good. Unincorporated Man right now. I don't know if you've ever read that. No, no, dude, it's so good. It's like Palmer Luckey's favorite sci-fi book, and it's okay. Future society, everybody has like, uh, companies have equity in you, so you have to work your entire life to gain equity of yourself. And get full equity.

Sounds kind of like crypto dystopian. I like it. So, The Unincorporated Man.

Yeah, yeah, it's so good. It's, it's like Atlas Shrugged if it was like 600 years in the future, is how I'd say it. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, it's pretty good.

Um, so let's talk about the algorithm party, algorithm gods of TikTok. Um, I was really just blown away by the fact that you were able to grow your TikTok while writing so much. Um, as a writer, like, I find the two to be very opposite skills.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I think a lot of writers, knowledge workers would probably feel the same. Like, how do you get deep work done and manage a TikTok? So would you be able to talk a little bit about that? From reading your pieces a while ago, I remember you did a lot of batching, batch recording.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'll give a little bit of the backstory here. So I was working on, on, on my book Crypto Confidential in the end of 2022. And I had— well, actually for a lot of 2022, and I'd spent most of I spent a good, like, 6 months of that year working on it from June through December. And I finally got it to the point where I felt like I had a good enough draft to sit on for a little bit. And I'm, I'm a big fan of Stephen King's On Writing memoir and his, like, you know, all of his advice in that book. And he says something in there really interesting. And that was kind of counterintuitive to me when I read it, which was to do your drafts pretty quickly. To do them in these concentrated sprints and then don't look at them for weeks. And what he says in On Writing is he says, uh, write 2,000 words a day, every single day, including weekends until the draft is done. And then don't look at it for 6 weeks, like put it in a drawer and go fishing. Like don't even think about it. And I was, so I had this draft finished. It took me longer than 3 months because, you know, it was first time doing something like that. And I really just, I mean, it, it was done, but I was like, this is not very good. I need to like go take my mind off of this. And honestly, like, been in this internet business creator economy world. I mean, similar to you, I started doing stuff, I guess in my teens, not business stuff, and then got into the entrepreneurship in college and been doing it for 8 years. Like sitting alone in a room and working on a book was just a miserable experience by comparison. I, I'm sure you, you felt this way as well, where it's like you're working on this thing every day and you don't get to publish anything. You don't get any feedback on it. You don't get likes or comments or emails. There's nobody telling you how smart and insightful you are. You're just alone with this thing and it sucks. And so I put it in the drawer to not look at it. And I said, okay, I, I didn't say this consciously. What I told myself was I should work on something to help me market this book when it comes out. I think what I was really doing was I need to feel good about myself and I need to feel like competent. And the thing that I've always been kind of good at is figuring out what these algorithms are rewarding and then serving it and just like juicing the shit out of that for fun and games. And I had heard that BookTok was really big, that like it was this new thing on TikTok. People were recommending books and it was driving a lot of book buying. And so I said, well, let's, let's go play around with that. And so I had the draft aside and I basically spent 24/7 on TikTok figuring out the BookTok algorithm and how to succeed at it. And the thing that I realized was that there were a few people in fiction book talk who were doing this thing where they would like strategically hide the covers of the books they were talking about to create this like bait, you know, this like hook technique. You hold the side of the book up to the camera and say like, this book, but you really loved Atomic Habits. And I was like, okay, but nobody's doing that in nonfiction. So I can use that in a new niche, which is always a good tactic, right? Like find something working really well in one niche and then use it in a different one where it hasn't been exploited yet. So, okay, that's working really well. Clearly rewarding daily videos, clearly rewarding, um, the, the way the algorithm worked at the time. I don't know if this is still true, but the way a video would get recommended to you was often if you liked another video that talked about similar topics, even if it wasn't in the description or in the hashtags, because they're creating a full transcript of each video and they're probably using that for their, their matching. And so one of the things I realized was like, If you want a video to rank for a book, you have to mention a book that somebody has already liked a video on, because that way the algorithm will feed them more videos related to that book, because that's part of how it's matching this content. But if you just talk about the same books that everyone's talking about, people will stop watching your videos because there's no surprise element. So you have to kind of like find this mix of, okay, we got to mention Atomic Habits, Psychology of Money, 4-Hour Workweek, like all of these big nonfiction books that everybody knows, 48 Laws of Power. But then we have to slide in ones that they don't, because then you're differentiated from all the other creators on BookTok. And I thankfully had the other big advantage I had is I've been taking notes on all these books for years and years and years because I just, I love doing it. So I had my notes from 200-some nonfiction books and took all of those. I took all of the videos, all the books that were doing the best on TikTok, and then I just started kind of like mixing and matching and figuring out like what kinds of videos are probably going to do really well. And I said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to do this for 10 videos. And if I can get one of them to go viral and if that video can move the Amazon sales rank of the book, then I'll keep doing this. And I made a few of them and I think it was like the 8th or 9th video. I basically said, if you really liked Atomic Habits, so I started off showing Atomic Habits. I said, you're really going to like this book. And the book is turned so you can't see what the book is. And then I talk about it a little bit. And then at the end I reveal it's The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. The video got like a million, 1.1 million views in within the span of a few days, it just completely popped off. I got, I want to say, 8,000 followers from that video. I went from a couple hundred to 8,000 basically in a couple of days. But then I was watching it on Amazon and the book rank went from— it was something like 70,000, 80,000 to top 8,000 or top 7,000. So this massive spike in the book's rank and I was like, oh my gosh, this is really working. and then a couple other videos hit and I saw those books jump up the rankings too. And that was enough for me to say, okay, I'm, I'm going all in on this because if I can strategically move books up the rankings on Amazon, I'll be able to do that for my book. And this is just going to be an incredibly useful tool to have at my disposal for, you know, anything else in the writing world. So I kept doing it, kept working at it, but eventually what I realized is what you alluded to, which was I was getting so sucked into the TikTok, Instagram, YouTube algorithm. The world, I was putting all of this effort into growing those audiences. And then over Thanksgiving, I had a pretty constrained schedule. My family was in town. I was entertaining them. Uh, my wife and I, we had one kid then. And so we were balancing childcare because she was off from preschool. And so I only had an hour or two a day to get any work done. And what I realized after the holiday was that I was using all of that time to make these videos and I wasn't using that time to write. And, and, and so I, I basically said—

awful feeling.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's, it's a—

I was like, wait, this isn't the goal. I started doing this to do this other thing, but now I'm not even doing the other thing. I'm doing the thing that's supposed to support— and like, this is a recurring story in my life. Like I've done this a few times. And so I just said like, I, I just got to stop doing this. It's too distracting. This thing of too much mental bandwidth. I'm like replying to comments in the middle of writing sessions and it's breaking them up. I just got to focus on the writing. And so I kind of let it go. I basically quit all of it shortly after that. Thanksgiving because I realized how much it was just getting into my head and getting in the way of the actual writing work.

Or have you been back at all or no?

Not really. I'll post little updates on Instagram, but if you look at my TikTok, I've hardly posted anything since last Thanksgiving.

That is—

and I got it up to 120,000 followers that year and I got my Instagram up to 180,000. So, I mean, it worked really well. It works great, but it was just too distracting, man. And at the end of the day, one question I really like to ask myself is if you want to be an Instagram influencer, nobody's a successful Instagram influencer without posting on Instagram. But if you want to be a successful author, 99.9% of successful authors do not make book videos on Instagram. So that is not a necessary ingredient for your success. It might help a little bit, but there are huge BookTok influencers who have published books that haven't gone anywhere. And there are tons of authors who have never made a BookTok video and they've done great. And, you know, I kind of said, I realized that I realized I was doing it because I liked seeing a number go up because it made me feel good. It made me feel like I was doing something and I just decided to quit.

So you got the book deal before TikTok?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. All right. That's interesting. Did— are you able to tell, did BookTok, BookGram, whatever it's called, did that help Crypto Confidential sales as well?

Honestly, I don't think it helped that much. That's a tough thing because I didn't do as much on TikTok, but I did a big, big Bookstagram campaign. I mean, almost all of the big nonfiction Bookstagrammers posted about it. And relative to the other stuff I was doing, like going on podcasts, mentioning in my email list, people mentioning it on Twitter, I couldn't say that any Instagram post drove a meaningful number of sales relative to that. And so it was actually really good that I quit because if I had kept— if I continued to spend the next 8 months that it would have been on getting my Instagram as big as possible, and then it barely moved the needle, I would have wasted thousand hours of work getting good at something I didn't actually care about on imagining it would lead to some result that it just didn't lead to.

Dude, I feel that the same way. My book sales have all come via the nerds on Twitter, LinkedIn, my newsletter, my friends' newsletters. That's it. I looked at your approach on BookTok and said, how can I do a different spin on that? And I made very, very silly BookTok videos essentially of me reading very provocative books on the subway. You might have seen them.

Yeah, I did see these.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My Instagram Instagram was Subway Reader at the time. I've switched it back to I Am Jason Levin, but, you know, 20 million views of me reading a book called How to Live with a Small Penis, right? And so it was like, how can I— yeah, yeah. So how can I do book talk in my kind of style, right?

Yeah.

And, um, you know, I didn't see any sales. Maybe a couple, maybe, maybe a few. And I had done ones with my book of me reading it, like me in a suit reading Memes Make Millions. What are these finance dudes reading about memes? Like, oh yeah, yeah, meme coin traders, whatever. And all the sales just came from Twitter and LinkedIn. And it's like, all right. I mean, it makes sense. Like, are TikTokers really reading books?

I don't know. Well, they are. I mean, they, like, I definitely saw it have some effect.

Yeah.

But it, you know, it, maybe it's just a certain type of book. Um, it, I mean, it's definitely like, you know, romantic and that whole genre is huge on TikTok and very actionable self-help is really big on TikTok and Instagram. But for every video that did well, there were 10 that didn't do well. And only certain books hit that TikTok algorithm, it seems. So, you know, spending all that time building that audience on the hopes that you'll be able to use it for your book is kind of silly, especially when you can hopefully just get the influencers on those platforms to talk about your book for you. And they're the ones who are putting in all the work already. And so you may as well leverage their audiences instead of relying on your own. Something I've really come to believe a lot more is that way too many people are focused on building an audience when they should be focused on getting really, really good at something so that they get on the radar of the people with audiences. Because I mean, then you're actually, you know, you have this skill set that you're focused on, that you're leveraging, and there are 100 people with bigger audiences than you could possibly build in 2 years if you were fully focused on it. And you might be able to get on 20 of their radar, and have them be mentioning you to their audiences, which comes off better anyway than if you're selling yourself to your audience because they know you're going to be selling yourself. Like, it's always going to be less effective.

Yes. One of my best friends, he runs a, you know, a SaaS, $120K MRR, has 300 followers on Twitter.

Yeah.

And just pays influencers on Twitter and TikTok. He has no TikTok, never shows his face, totally bootstrapped. Like, the dude just moves in silence, you know, like when there are other influencers, you could just you could just pay them. Like, uh, so right now, you know, I'm building a SaaS, you're building a SaaS as well. I'm building something called Meme Alerts.

Yeah, go ahead.

It's a side— it's a hobby too, right? Yeah. So Meme Alerts, uh, it alerts people of new viral memes, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Mix of AI scraping, human as well. And, uh, basically like Google Trends for memes, right? You're a— you're a Google Analytics guy, right? And so I was like, huh, like I've got a sizable audience, but there are meme pages with a lot bigger, like I don't need to go start a second meme page and distract myself on Instagram. I could just pay him a few hundred bucks. Like, you know, it's the same thing, right?

It's, it's like I've got a friend doing that in like the fitness industry, you know, and he, he started off trying to become a fitness influencer to try to like build his audience that way. And then he just realized he could give all these people affiliate deals. And I mean, I think his business is going to do $20 million this year. Like 40% EBITDA or something crazy. He's got like 2 employees and he's basically just offline. You know, he's just letting the other influencers do the work.

Right.

And like, I'm not saying don't be an influencer. If you want to be an influencer, be an influencer, but don't become an influencer to serve some other business goal because there's probably a much better use of your time. I love that.

I love that. Absolutely. You know, it's similar. I have this saying, which is It's totally based, but it's like, don't trust journalists, use them. You can't really trust a journalist, obviously, but you can use them very well. Totally. It's the same thing with influencers. I feel like maybe they're a little more natural. Most of them are, at least our friends, our circle are like, yeah, yeah. I trust them a lot more than, uh, than, than journalists. But, um, yeah, you don't have to necessarily become one. You can just, everybody has an email, a link in bio, a way to contact. Most of us respond to DMs. Like most, most creators just kind of respond like And it's tempting to think that you need to do everything right, and you don't.

You should probably just focus on doing like 1 or 2 things super well. And the other mistake I think people make is that they see somebody with a successful business who has a lot of influence, and so they think like, oh, the way I build a successful business is by building a lot of influence. And it's the reverse. They have the influence because they built the successful business, right? Like, Musk isn't fucking around on Twitter all day because that's what got him SpaceX. Like, he built SpaceX and all this other shit, and that's why people listen to him on Twitter. It's the same for a lot of business people. Obviously, there are creator-led businesses, but you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that every CEO or founder with a big audience built the business off of the audience. It often followed from the work that they did.

Yeah. So let's, let's talk Crypto Confidential a little bit. For reference, I was a reporter at The Defiant.

Oh yeah, I knew that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a staff reporter there. A lot of adventures in crypto territory. 2021 went to a good time. Goblin's Party. If you're there in New York, I wasn't there. I heard about it.

Yeah.

People dressed as goblins jumping in your face. A lot of art galleries, a lot of theft writing about. Yeah.

Yeah.

You write a bit about hacking and stuff like that. Can you regale us with some crypto stories?

Yeah, I, yeah. So, you know, I saw the crypto mania like so many other people did at the end of 2020, beginning of 2021. I'd been exposed to it a few times before. I messed around with meme coins in 2017, 2018, and then kind of let it go and didn't think about it too much. But I had stepped out of my marketing agency end of 2020, was looking for something new to do, started learning programming in '21, and then said, you know, like, all this crypto stuff is happening. It seems as though a lot of other people are getting rich on this thing, you know, maybe I can too, which I think a lot of us thought, seeing the craziness that was going on. And so I dived into it headfirst. I had this pretty crazy experience where I was obviously doing all the degenerate gambling, trading side of it, but then learning Solidity programming, learning how to write smart contracts, how to build stuff on Ethereum, got hired by this gaming company, did their token, got paid in tokens. And then for this, you know, very brief moment, that token, like fully diluted value, was worth over $1 billion. And my paper net worth was over $10 million. And like, I thought I never was going to have to work again and just like work was done, ready to run off into the sunset. And that obviously didn't quite happen. And, you know, going back to this theme of like doing things to serve the other thing you want to do, like I've always enjoyed writing, you know, I've— well, no, I haven't always enjoyed writing. For a long time, I've enjoyed writing and I want to try to find a way to focus on it. Full time. And when the market crashed after Terra Luna, really, I was kind of in this position of, okay, I could either go all in here, try to join a VC firm, or really double down on Solidity, try to work with a team, wait for the next cycle to come back and go all in on crypto work. And I thought about that pretty seriously. Like, I really, really love crypto. I really love the industry. I think it's fascinating technology. I think the The, like, the vibes and the energy of the industry are fascinating too. But it was also this moment of like, well, if I don't get, if I don't try to focus on writing now, I don't know when I ever will. And kind of made that decision of, okay, I'm just going to like cut off all of my other work and try to 100% commit to this thing. And I had this cool story from being in that period as both a gambler, speculator, and a builder, seeing the inside of the fundraising and, you know, working with anonymous teams and doing all this stuff and shopped that idea around as like an insider's account of that era. And it got picked up by Penguin Random House. And I got to go through that whole process, which was really, really cool and like incredible learning experience. And then that came out this year. That's what I was working on for the last 2 years, really, aside from the like TikTok, Instagram shenanigans and all those things.

What was that process like going through the book deal? I've experimented a little bit, dipped my toes in. I'm talking with a couple of publishers about a new one. Any, any tips, any advice for landing one and, and negotiations and stuff like that? Is— I'm a meme lord, man, you know? Yeah, that's not my strong suit.

Yeah. I mean, the tough thing, I mean, the good and bad thing is that they very highly index on older signs of influence, right? So being published in these big media outlets, right, you know, New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Time, whatever, uh, being somebody very credentialed, somebody who's done a lot of original research or has been, you know, a leader in their field. Or if you don't have those things, then it's your email list. They, they don't really care about Twitter followers or LinkedIn followers or meme pages or things like that. Those numbers don't mean anything to them. I had this really funny experience in the proposal process talking to my agent because when I, when I filled out my like marketing section, basically explaining here's all the people I can reach and how I can reach them and how big all of my audiences are. The first line on my, on my list was my website that got like 2 to 3 million visitors a year. And he said, I just don't even include that. I was like, what? He said, you can include it, just like move it further down the list because they don't care about website visits. They don't mean anything. To them. And I was like, okay, well, I've got my Twitter. That's pretty big. He's like, yeah, they don't really care about Twitter either. It doesn't really mean anything. And so the leading thing was my email list, which was 35,000 people or something, which is a good number, right? Like, it's a lot of people. Um, but in my head, a website getting a million visitors a year seemed bigger than 35,000 email subscribers. And he's like, no, like, that's the thing you lead with. So that's what I tell anybody who wants to try to get a book deal. Who isn't one of those credentialed, widely published people is— God, this sounds like such boring, tropey advice, but start an email list because that's what they're going to look at and that's what they're going to judge you on. And if your book is within a certain range of acceptable topics to these publishers, your advance will largely depend on the size of your email list and how much competition there is for your book. And so that, that's really a lot of it. It's like kind of boring advice, but if you have people who are reading your stuff every week, you can get a book deal. It like, it doesn't have to be a crazy number. Even a few thousand email subscribers might get you a foot in the door for a smaller advance.

That's crazy because that's exactly what Jack Raines told me, uh, about a year ago. And my newsletter is up to, you know, over 20,000 readers. And it's great, uh, doubled down.

It's a book deal.

Like, that's a book deal. I know, it's, you know, it's happening. And, um, for me, like, I've imagined this since I was a little kid. And then talk about Crypto Confidential as well. Like, it's been cool seeing your book in the wild. Like, I thought Nat was just the Twitter guy that like, yeah, yeah, cool. And then I opened Spotify the other day, you know, recommended audiobooks and Crypto Confidential.

Really? That's cool. I didn't know it was on Spotify. That's awesome, dude. I was like, that's so fun.

Did it just check my calendar and I had a podcast with Nat?

That's great. That's almost creepy, right? I love that.

Yeah, I wonder how it knew. I, I don't know.

So cool.

Maybe I listen to a lot of tech podcasts.

Could be. Yeah, yeah. Overlap people who listen to, uh, yeah, people who listen to like crypto adjacent podcasts. Yeah, get it recommended to them.

I don't know, man. I don't know. So what's, what's kind of been the publicity process now after the book is out? I know obviously we're doing this podcast, but you're doing a lot more, I would imagine, as well.

Yeah.

So again, balancing that with writing, like, dude, it's tough.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, leading— it's been a lot lighter now, which has been nice. Leading up to it, that was the only thing I was thinking about. For publicity planning started 6 months out. Basically, the thing that I was focused on was to just get it in the hands of as many people as possible because I like— it's a good book. It's entertaining. It's educational. I think it captures the vibe of that era really well. and I knew that if people picked it up and started reading it, they would enjoy it, even if it didn't look like a book that they might pick up otherwise. Uh, we had challenges with figuring out how to like package it and market it from the start. Um, but I, I, I figured like, okay, if I just get this in people's hands, that's going to be the main thing that does a lot of the work for me. And something I looked at a lot actually was how fiction books do their marketing. Because when you have a nonfiction book that's like, How to Start a SaaS Company. It's a, it's a little bit easier to market because the, the promise is very clear, right? It's like, if you want to start a SaaS company, you read this book, right? If you want to— yeah, if you want to lose weight, you read this book, right? Like, or my book promises to teach you how to train your dog. A lot of nonfiction is very outcome-oriented like that. Or it's a historical book and people are interested in that period of history, or it's a political book about something happening in the news and people are interested in learning more about like that event. And with this, we kind of like didn't have any of those particular things because it wasn't coming out around a crypto news event. It wasn't promising to teach you how to get rich in crypto. You know, maybe could have tried to write that book, but that's not what I wanted to do. Like, it just felt like, ugh. And, and so it was really just like, okay, this is a really fun story that you're going to like happen to learn some things along the way. So we just got to like get it out to people. And so that was a lot of what my, my publicity focused on was going through every single person with even a modest reach on Twitter especially, and reaching out to them. And literally all I asked was, can I just send you a copy of this? I think you're going to dig it if you get a chance to read it. I didn't ask anyone to post about it. I didn't ask anyone to like feature it in their newsletter. Didn't really ask anyone to have me on their podcast. Like It was no ask. It was just, can I send this to you? And, you know, that's an easy ask, right? Because it's like, yeah, sure, I'll take a free book. And then the thing that I did differently that most people don't do is most people do that so they can send it during launch week so that, you know, like the book is coming out Tuesday, everybody gets it the Tuesday before, and then they can post photos of them like getting the book. My problem with that, and I knew this was a problem because I've done BookTok, was that a lot of people are getting a lot of books. And everybody has a reading list that's like months long. And so the idea that somebody is going to get your book on Wednesday, read it that week, and then post like a positive thing about it when you launch next week is ridiculous. Like nobody's going to do that or very few people anyway. So I started sending it to people 2 to 3 months before the launch date. I was sending out ARCs. Uh, that's smart. That's really smart. These cheaper paper printed versions of it that say like on sale 7/9 and like they don't have the blurbs or anything on them, you know, it's cheap paper.

Dude, that's really smart. I love that.

Yeah.

A few months in advance.

And all I did was just send it to them. I just started going through the list and I would try to, I would try to DM or text like 50 people a week. That was the goal that I set for myself. I would just, they'd say, yeah, and then the publisher would send them out. And then I got in a fight with the publisher about how many I was sending out and they eventually relented and they just sent a box of 150 of them to my office here. And so I started sending them out, which is actually great. Because then I could write little notes to everybody in them that they couldn't do. And, and so then people were getting them and my plan had been to just wait until launch week and then to ask people to post if they liked it. I would wait and see if they messaged me and said they enjoyed it. And if they did, I would ask them to post it. But then people just started posting it like without me asking. And so we were starting to get these tweets about the book 2 months before launch date, people really enjoying it. And I think what that did is one, it made it way easier when I reached out to other people because they would've already seen somebody on Twitter say that I really enjoyed this book. And so I started after like a month, I started getting replies saying, oh yeah, I already saw that, you know, so-and-so really liked it. Like, I'd love to read it. So it was kind of like pre-qualified. And then when the actual launch week happened, I got just an incredible number of these really positive really emphatic reviews and recommendations to read it because people had time to read it. They had time to see if they actually enjoyed it. And I think that made a huge difference. And I got a lot of really positive feedback from people saying like, never seen a book get like this much hype on launch week on Twitter. And literally all I did was just send a lot of copies to people. And I think that made all the difference for, for getting it that kind of reception. It was, and like, I'm being 100% honest too when I say that I only asked like 7 or 8 people to post it. Of the, you know, like probably 150+ who post something nice to Twitter, pretty much all of it was just organic from sending them an early copy.

Dude, it's crazy when people like your stuff, they just post it, you know? Yeah, people post Memes Make Millions, you know, every now and then there'll be a nice little post around, you know, when it first came out a lot more. But something else that I think people should think about is like you don't just prep for the launch and send out books. Like I'm still sending out books.

Yeah, never stops.

Yeah, dude, I still send out books to friends and influencer, publisher, comedian kind of people that I want to still send it all the time. And, you know, for, for community members, like I run like a newsletter paid community, like I send it to people there. Like, you know, it's just like a nice little nice gift as well.

It's the best marketing. It's the best marketing by far. And You know, I think it's most effective when you're sending it to people who aren't influencers. Yeah, because influencers are getting stuff all the time. It doesn't really mean anything to them.

Yeah, I'm not an influencer, but I have so much soap in my apartment.

Soap? Why soap?

Because a brand offered to send me soap. I also have a box of Dude Wipes. Nice. I eat Dude Wipes.

Sorry, sorry, dude.

We're talking about them.

We're still talking about them though.

I don't like the feel of dude wipes. I'm going to be honest, man, but I just have a box sitting there and I don't know what to do with them at this point.

Yeah.

So if you need dude wipes, drop a comment. I'll send you a box of dude wipes.

Maybe they'll hear this and they'll send me a set as well. But it's true. It's like if you get to a modest amount of influence, you just start kind of getting sent stuff, especially books. But there are a lot of people with, you know, followers who respect them and with a friend network that might be interested in your topic. And, you know, you don't obviously don't do this in like a scummy way or shady way, but you have a good interaction with somebody about the book or they seem interested in it, like you just send it to them, right? Like it costs you $10 and you never know what that's going to lead to down the line.

Dude, also bringing it along to meetings. Like when I fly to SF, I just pack a bunch of books because I know I'm going to be hosting events. And if I see somebody, if I'm talking to somebody, oh, let me grab you a book. So I did that at an event, at an AI demo, and I meet this guy who made a meme app. I never met him before, right? And my book's about memes. I'm like, oh, let me grab this real quick. We're still friends now. Like, you know, he posted it, which is great, whatever. But like, we're on the phone literally last night, right? And he's helping me with my meme SaaS that I'm building now.

That's great.

Like giving that book. Like, it's the little things like that that are really special around books.

And I think too, it's like, you know, having gone through it, we both discount the process a lot. It's like, oh, like, yeah, I just wrote a book, right? It doesn't feel like a big deal to me anymore. It probably doesn't feel like a big deal to you anymore either, right? It's just a thing that I did for that period. And, you know, obviously very proud of it and, you know, great accomplishment and all these things, but it doesn't feel that special or different or like amazing in our heads anymore. It's hard to remember what it was like before we did that. And like, you do treat somebody differently if they've written a book. Like, it has a big, like, none of these words sound good, but like authority or status or seriousness that comes with it, where it does make it like kind of a cool gift or a means of connection with somebody else.

Yeah. So I had Erik Jorgensen on the podcast, and he's written two amazing books, Almanac of Naval Ravikant, Anthology of of Balaji. I really think it's just crazy how they let him rhyme that.

I know, it's insane.

And, uh, you know, he's like, a book does not have to make money to make you money. And I think that is just a great line, um, especially if you're thinking about self-publishing. You might not get an insane amount of book sales, but the amount of clients that you could bring in, like you said, like sending out the book to potential clients, the authority that it brings, all that kind of stuff. For, for self-publishing and all that kind of stuff in general.

Yeah. It's pretty invaluable asset to have.

Yeah. Let's talk Prolific, man.

Yeah.

I just downloaded it.

Cool.

I remember you marketing a bit as Strava for writing.

Yeah.

Yeah. So using it.

Yeah. I mean, I use it basically every day. Genesis of it was while I was working on Crypto Confidential. And again, I'm sure you felt this too. I didn't realize how screwed up my sense of like progress progress and accomplishment and achievement with my writing was in terms of tying it to external accolades and recognition, in the sense that when I was working on blog posts or especially working on tweets, you get to hit publish and then you get likes and people see that you did something, right? It's, you know, what did Nat do last week? Oh, he published this great article, right? He had these banger tweets, like I did something. But when you're working on a book, it, you know, Crypto Confidential was almost 2 years in the dark of publishing nothing. Related to it. And it was really, really hard for me emotionally. It took me a long time to settle into that rhythm and to be able to sit down, work on it for 3 or 4 hours and feel like the day had been a success, even though I didn't publish anything. And the thinking that like, one, I think there are a lot of people who are focused on Twitter writing or blog writing who should be writing books because all that stuff is going away. Like nobody references tweets from a week ago, let alone a year or two ago. Blog articles disappear almost as quickly. Like they just don't have that same longevity. But if you write a good book, people could be reading that in 10, 20, 30 years. That's not abnormal. And so if you were going to dedicate 1,000 hours of your year to writing something, one book is probably going to have a higher ROI than 1,000 tweets. But it doesn't feel like that in the moment. It really doesn't feel like it. You know, playing the long game is really hard. Yeah. And so I, I was hacking it while I was working on Crypto Confidential. I had a spreadsheet and every day in the spreadsheet I wrote down how many words I wrote and then I could see over time like, oh, look at all this progress I'm making. This feels really good. But I kind of got in my head like, it would be fun if there was a way to like show off in an unannoying way how much writing you're doing, even if it's not public. And I really love this article, Proof of X by Julian Lehrer. Which is basically about this idea of how do we incentivize more positive behavior through social media instead of just mindlessly scrolling. And in the article, he gives this example. He says there should be more Strava for X apps. There should be Strava for cooking. There should be Strava for woodworking. There should be, you know, Strava for whatever thing you want to learn. And we kind of hack that with Instagram, right? Because You know, you take photos of what you're cooking on Instagram. There should be a Strava for writing where you can just log your writing sessions each day. And then it goes out to your feed and you can see how much writing you're doing over the year, but other people can see it too. And if they want to follow along on your book journey, that's where they can do it. It's kind of like a public journal. You can see your progress. And it's cool. If you go to my profile in Prolific, I think I'm going to, by the time this podcast comes out, I have over 200,000 words logged this year. I've written on a couple of different projects. And that's neat to see. And it feels good logging it each day. And so I had that thought. And then I was also seeing all of this stuff around how good AI tools were getting for programming. And, you know, I'm a hobbyist programmer. I can hack things together. I can pick stuff up as I need it, but I've never really like built a full app before. And so I said, you know, Crypto Confidential is off to the publisher and they're putting it together. I wrote this first draft of this sci-fi novel I was working on, and I put that in the drawer to let it sit for 6 weeks. So I said, what do I work on? And I didn't want to do TikTok stuff again. And, you know, I didn't want to like accidentally create a job for myself. So I said, you know, I'm just going to try to build this app for fun, see how it goes, see if it's as easy as people are saying it is. And if it works, then I'll have this app and I can use it. Maybe other people can use it too. So I literally built it in 3 weeks, the first version of it. I like, I downloaded Cursor, I had ChatGPT open. And I just kept asking questions like, you know, how do I start building a mobile app? What languages do I use? Okay, I have the environment set up. Like, how do I get it working on my phone? Okay, how do I like build a screen? How do I set up the database? And, you know, it, it probably wrote 80% of the code for me. And I knew enough about how to like debug and fix things and ask the right questions. And 2 or 3 weeks later, I had it on my phone and I could start logging my sessions and it was pretty freaking cool. It's on the App Store. You can download it and, you know, you can log your writing sessions and I'll comment on your stuff and cheer you on. And like, it's really fun. Fun for me. Like, I love having it.

Nice. You are the fucking GOAT. That's so cool. I love that. Like, you do the cycle, write in the book, make apps. Like, I could kind of imagine where like, that's a repetitive thing.

I think so.

Yeah. Write the book, get 6 weeks, put it down, code an app. Boom, boom. And just like keep on building shit.

Yeah.

I'm excited, dude. I downloaded Prolific and, um, I, I, I want to start logging stuff as I'm, as I'm working on a second book.

So it's really motivating for me. And, you know, some people don't track their writing every day or whatever, but I, I feel like tracking your writing is so helpful because it is a skill, it is a muscle. And I think of, of all the analogies we could make, it's probably closest to endurance running, where if you only go out and run 3 miles a week, that's all you're ever going to be able to run. But if you, you know, study how to train, study how to recover, study how to push yourself, you get into the progressive overload, you figure out your your best windows of the day, your like supplement stack, all of that stuff, I think you can really push yourself a lot further than you think. And if you want to make it as an author or really any kind of writer, shots on goal is like the most important thing. The, there are hardly any Harper Lees who write one book and it's a mega bestseller and then they never write anything else for 20 years or James Clears, right? Like they're by far the anomalies. Almost every single other person who's making it as an author has put out 5, 10, 20 books, and like one of those has hit, and then it's brought their whole career up. So I mean, you just gotta keep writing, dude.

Even Seth Godin, the marketing genius, right?

Yeah, he wrote 15 books.

Yeah, one of his books, I bought it off eBay because it's hilarious. He wrote it like very early 2000s when he was probably our age, like somewhere around there, 20s, early 30s, and It's called Email Addresses of the Rich and Famous, and it's just a list of email addresses of rich people. That was Seth Godin, right? And this is like, this dude's probably worth tens to hundreds of millions, right? Whatever he might be worth at this point. And that was his book. That was the entire fucking book.

I mean, Seth Godin's a pretty— he's such an interesting guy with this stuff. It's like The Dip is— I've got it on my shelf here somewhere. I mean, that's a great book and it's like 60 pages.

It's tiny. Yeah.

I mean, how big is this thing? Right. But I've got it like very sticky tabs. Yeah. I mean, 70 pages and a lot of the pages are just like a single quote, but like, if you have a good idea, like, yeah, you can do it like this.

Speaking of books, let's talk books. It's actually really funny when you Google 48 Laws of Power, your notes come up.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I guess that's that SEO juice, right? But yeah. And just adding the notes. But yeah, what are, what are some of your favorite books, man? And what have you been reading lately? What do you recommend?

Yeah, I mean, lately I've been reading all fiction. I was like a nonfiction maximalist for 10 years probably. And I did, I kind of started at this point where a lot of the self-improvement, self-helpy nonfiction started to feel very repetitive. Wasn't really learning anything new. A lot of it just like doesn't replicate or is very cherry-picked. And, you know, you kind of realize you're reading a lot of that for the feeling of reading it and not necessarily that it's like making a huge impact in your life. There's very few that I could point to that like, oh yeah, that book was a little bit of a Zero to One moment. Like 4-Hour Workweek, I think, was sort of like the canonical one for me. Deep Work also, just like another very simple but like really excellent book. Mastery by Robert Greene is actually much more my favorite than 48 Laws, but in nonfiction realm, The ones that always come to mind, definitely Antifragile, definitely Mastery. Just like, look at my shelf here. I feel like I've got a lot of them highlighted. Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is like super interesting. It's a more recent one.

What is that? I've never heard.

It's, it's a book about Tibetan Buddhism, but presented in a very secular-friendly lens by a really, really influential Tibetan Buddhist monk. So it's like, if you're that kind of spirituality curious, but you get turned off by a lot of the very woo stuff, it's sort of the perfect book for exposing you to all of those ideas in a very palatable way, including some of the more like woo ones, like reincarnation or whatever, in a, like, again, just like much more palatable sense. It's really, really interesting book.

What about fiction? Let's talk fiction. Did Nathan get you? Uh, has he converted you? Is that what's—

Nathan's a great friend now. We connected over Twitter and we write together once a week now. He— so I switched over shortly before I met Nathan. I think it was like, you know, the right friend at the right time where I started thinking about this more. And then like Nathan and I appeared in each other's lives because there aren't— man, there aren't many people from our world who are trying to do fiction.

Dude, it's because—

few and far between.

A lot of us start as fiction writers. I wrote a novel in college. I wrote like a lot of screenplays. But the problem is it's very hard to get a fiction deal if you don't know anybody. And I knew no one. It's a lot easier to just like make money with nonfiction, writing articles, writing blogs, writing a book. And then you do this, you do it for so long, years and years. I personally like now when I try to write fiction, the muscle that I had in college when I was a little stoner with all the free time living in the woods, I could, I could just spit out stories all the time. And now when I try to write, it's like that muscle is just dead. Yeah, because I don't have the time anymore because I'm busy responding to tweets and VC blah blah blah blah blah money money money, right?

And it's such a different part of your brain too, because if you've been in the online writing world, there's all of this reward around actionality, actionability, and concision and directness. And a lot of those things actually make fiction writing worse, right? If if you're too concise in your fiction writing, then people can't get lost in the world or the characters or the story. And it just feels too choppy almost, right? There's, you have to like unlearn a lot of things and not to mention learning an entirely new skill set that you just never practice with nonfiction writing. So it's this real beast. And you're right too, the money side of it is so much more challenging because there's not really like a small version of it the way there is with nonfiction. Like you can have a newsletter and courses and maybe a paid newsletter. and you can do, you know, like freelance articles, right? Fiction's really all or nothing.

Back in like the '50s, '60s, '70s, whatever, Vonnegut was, you know, he's making money selling short stories to newspapers and articles. And I thought I'd be able to do that. And like, there is not a market, not really a market for it. That's not a thing. Like, maybe like if you're some like fancy researcher or something at Harvard and you could sell something to some fancy fancy paper, but like, yeah, the average Joe, like, yeah, the short story fiction market has really gone away.

Self-publishing was a big opportunity, but a lot of the self-publishing money goes to like professional self-publishers now. You know, it's really hard to compete with them. They're like some of the best ads people on the internet because they know exactly how to play like the Amazon ads algorithm to get their books in front of people. I mean, it's like, it, it's really hard, but if you you pull it off, it's like maybe the most lucrative solo career in the world. It's like such an interesting business in that sense, because, you know, you can't really build a business alone. I mean, I guess like Peter Levels, right, is maybe the exception here. But there's very few like one-person businesses, and they all require like maintenance. You can't really make music alone. You can't make a movie alone. You can't do a lot of these other things alone, but you can write a novel alone and send it off. And then if it's Fourth Wing and it sells 5 million copies that year, I mean, you're making a good chunk of money, right? But most books aren't Fourth Wing. And whereas nonfiction has a little bit more of an even distribution in sales, fiction is really just crazy power law, like again, all or nothing. So it's a tough industry to break into. And on top of all of that, they don't give a shit about your audience. So like you can have all the email subscribers and Twitter followers and whatever in the world. And they won't care if the story doesn't seem like a banger that they think they can move copies of. They don't care that much about your newsletter size. So it is this pretty wild industry in that sense.

So why are you entering it?

A couple of reasons. One, there's no reason you can't do both. And my agent actually said this. He said, you know, a way— because I told him I wanted to do both and he was like, well, most people don't, but if you're going to do both the way you should think about it is that nonfiction is your day job. That can make you predictable money. You know, you can go out and you can sell a book deal every year or two for, you know, within this range. And you might have a home run, but even if you don't have a home run, you can make a good, like, call it $150K, whatever base salary as a nonfiction author. And then fiction is the moonshot, right? He's like, you know, when you turn in a fiction book, like, odds are nobody's going to pick it up. if they do pick it up, it's probably going to be for a low advance. You're not really going to make anything. Or you happen to write, you know, Ready Player One and you get like a $2 million advance or whatever, and you get a movie deal and, you know, your life just gets insane. Um, so, you know, I like doing both. And the reason I like doing both too is I really just like writing. I don't want to do speaking. I don't want to do courses. I don't want to do, uh, like products or lectures or any of this other stuff. Like I want to find a way to afford to just like sit in my office and write for 5, 6 hours a day and not have to deal with that other shit. Like I know how to do the other shit. I've done it before. I could go build that business again if I wanted to, but it's not like satisfying to me. Like I don't enjoy it. It feels like, it feels like a job. And if I wanted a job, like I'd go be a lawyer or something. Like I make a lot more money being a lawyer than selling courses. So I'm really focused on how do I just make the author thing work? And the problem with nonfiction is you run into a couple of barriers. One, you, uh, you need to become a journalist, right? So you take like the Malcolm Gladwell approach and you go find interesting stories or research or whatever, and you turn that into books. And that's like one way to do it. Another way to do it is you, you're like a historian, right? So, you know, you're Robert Greene, you're Uh, Ron Chernow, you don't like that route. Personally, it's not interesting to me. If you're an ideas book person, the problem you're going to run into really quickly is that like no ideas book person has more than 2 or 3 good idea books in them. They might publish more books than that, but they start repeating themselves. Almost anybody who, who puts out a regular cadence of nonfiction idea books, you're kind of just going back to the same vein once you find something that works, right? Like right? And I can do that, but I feel like I'd get bored of it, right? Like, that's not how I want to have to do the career. And the nice thing with fiction is that there is this infinite area for creativity and possibility where, you know, if you have a good idea for a world and a character in that world, like, you've got a book. If you know how to expand it and build out the whole interesting thing and like maintain readers' curiosity and do all of these things, like, that can be a truly infinite career, uh, without necessarily having to repeat yourself or do all these other things. And so if you want to be somebody who's putting out a book a year or maybe even more, having fiction in the mix gives you a lot more optionality. And so that was the thinking that got me into it. I was like, I should at least try this. And so I tried it and then I ended up loving it, right? It's like you can't do it if you don't enjoy doing it, but man, is it fun.

Oh, dude, it is so much fun. The feeling of making yourself yourself laugh around some fake characters in your head that don't exist.

Or being surprised, right? Like, it's really— you have these magical moments where you're writing something and then you write that a character said or did something and you're like, where did that come from? And you think about it, you're like, actually, that is really good. Like, it's totally what should happen here. You had no idea that was going to happen, but then it just appears on the page somehow. And it's just such a special feeling in that sense.

So It's a beautiful feeling for sure. I, I wrote this novel in college, which I would love to get published one day. It doesn't, you know, who knows? Who knows? I think it could be like a funny TV show for sure. But it's about an obituary writer who starts killing people to fuel his career.

Oh, that's great. I love that. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it'd be so funny and just like, you know, this like angry satire. I wrote it when I was a kid in New Jersey. Yeah, it's like, you know, I think it'd be so funny to do.

Yeah, kind of like, uh, what's the, uh, what's the Jake Gyllenhaal movie? Nightcrawler?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking almost— have you ever seen Wilfred? Like, just like that. Oh, it was so funny, dude. It was just like—

was it the TV show with Elijah Wood?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, with the dog. Like, just very dark and weird. Like, that is how—

yeah, yeah, I imagine it.

I think it'd be very funny. But yeah, I, I really like that idea. Somebody like Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene, whatever, like they're able to put out so many books, but the ideas are very similar, at least with, with Holiday, you know. It's— yeah, like, no shame on him. He is one of the best— I mean, writers of all time, or not, he's one of the best marketers of all time.

I mean, and he's built an incredible business around his books, and he's really nailed the stoicism niche and basically like created a religion, which is kind of crazy to see.

Um, but that being said, every book is basically the same at this point. But that's why also, like, he releasing a lot of books that aren't about that too. Yeah, I think that's important is like you don't, you don't want to get too bored.

You don't want to get too bored. And obviously you can do that in fiction too. Like I wouldn't want to, and you know, again, incredible amount of respect for James Patterson and like what he's built, but I wouldn't necessarily want to go that route either where you've like nailed a formula and you can now like hire people to run the playbook on your formula to like your books turn into Warhol. I know. Yeah. Well, it's tough. Like so many creative things become businesses and there is always this struggle between do you write the thing that you want to write or the thing that is going to be the most marketable. It's a tough balance because like you got to make money, you got to feed your kids, but you also don't want to get bored or lose the creative energy that got you in there in the first place.

100%. I feel like as I've been writing my blog more and more, um, when I write the things that I really want to write, that's when it hits the hardest. This week, um, I wrote an article on Sunday called Sexvertising. And I was very nervous about writing about this. Sex is like a weird topic, right? And, um, but I thought it needed to be talked about. Like there's, there's like a lot of, a lot of marketing is around sex, right?

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Like sex appeal and stuff like that. And you don't see any marketers really talking about this stuff. It took a while and it was like, and, and it hit, right? A lot of responses in the newsletter, a lot of the comments and stuff. Yeah, I really want to write another one actually inspired by our mutual friend Jack Raines. He was not a fan of it, but it was like being a digital nomad is overrated, essentially.

Oh yeah, no, I totally agree with that. Yeah, yeah.

Like start settling down, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Like I knew that would piss people off, but it was like, I believe it fully. I'm in New York. I got a wife and kid, wife and dog. Like, you know, that's what I want to write. And that's— yeah, I love it. I mean, that's the good thing about a newsletter too, is it's permissionless. Nobody has to give you—

yeah. Permission is on low stakes. You get to run a lot of experiments, which is great with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Books are much riskier experiments.

That's true. That's true, dude. This was a fantastic podcast. I really enjoyed it, man. I've been looking forward to chatting for a long time.

And so, yeah, dude, and like I said, let me know when you're in Austin. It'd be fun to hang.