105: “Don’t write the wrong book!” with David Moldawer (Part Two)

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Welcome back to Part two of my Conversation with David Moldauer. If you haven't already, make sure you go back and listen to part one, episode 103, where David shared what makes it across literary agents desks, the kinds of books that get book deals, big idea books, how to package your idea, all kinds of great stuff. If you're here for part two, I'm so excited he's going to jump right in to the second half of our conversation on what it means to write the wrong book, on the long view of marketing and how to take tiny steps toward creating tipping points. His thoughts on ghost writing and why, contrary to what I'm always harping about, he doesn't want to be on the COVID of the books that he helps write, even if he's the one doing most of the writing, typing, structuring, how he partners with his clients to structure their books, and considering the business model behind your book, especially if you're writing nonfiction. Without further ado, here's part two with David Moldauer.

For me, you know, in this word thought leader. I've never been a huge fan of that term, but there's a public discourse and there are these different areas of expertise, like habits for just one of many examples of habits and or investing or investing in crypto. Or pick any topic where someone might be interested in learning more and the book is an opportunity, sort of unparalleled, to state your claim as an expert in that area, so that when there's a story on TV and they want to talk about this particular new diet or whatever, they're going to use books as the sort of Primary compass to figure out, well, who can we get on to be our expert? And of course, to a certain extent there is social media and blogs and other ways that people can establish their expertise. But a book is really a way of saying, like, here's what I think about this topic. Comprehensively fixed in stone. I can't go back and delete a blog post from three years ago where I said something else like, this is my opinion crystallized on this topic. I'm staking my plane in the ground here. It's my area. This is the book on X. And that's very, very powerful. Now if you don't want to be the person on X and people will come to me and want to write a book as though it's going to put it behind them, like, I did this and now I want to write my book about xperience so that I can go off and do something else. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, you're starting it. You're starting your road here. If you publish a book, you're beginning this time as the expert on X that everyone associates with X. If you want to put it behind you, the last thing you should do is write a book on it. And if you're going to do a book, move forward on that. That's your thing.

Now I have to share on that because that's kind of what I did with life after college. I started writing in 2008, got an agent in 10, the book was coming out in 11, and I was done with the topic and I ended up seeing it through just to put a cap on that phase of my career. But it's too much work to do that. So I just. That was a loud second. Sorry to interrupt you on that.

But it also becomes. It also stays with you whether you like it or not, you know. And Tim Ferriss, who's still the four Hour guy, right, forever, I heard him express frustration, you know, with that, that the four Hour thing, which was just a title among many and not really central to the book. So you have to really think clearly and be strategic because I say to people like, look, most books fail, fail. I mean, even an unsuccessful, traditionally published business book can still have enormous, enormous benefits for your career for speaking, for consulting. Even if 5,000 copies get sold ever. But most books don't sell a bunch of copies. But I find it much more useful to think about what will happen if this book works really, really well. That's where the strategy matters. If the book sells a few thousand copies, maybe it wasn't all that important what the book was about. But if the book is successful and it's the wrong book, that can really be almost catastrophic, you know, in a lot of ways, I mean, just in one simple and obvious way, if you were less than scrupulous in terms of your references, in terms of your data, you can destroy your career. And that's happened a number of times, as I'm sure you know, with the replication crisis in the social sciences. You know, many of these big business books were kind of based on research that didn't hold up. And it's very embarrassing. But in many other ways, you're kind of putting yourself out there as the author of the book on X. And if that book becomes an enormous phenomenon, that's going to kind of dwarf everything else that's going to dominate. Just like an actor who's in a kind of a big movie. You know, Adam west on Batman in the 60s, like his whole career was sort of pinned by that success. And I'm. He wanted to be taken seriously as an actor for other things. But a book has the potential, like few other things, to become phenomenon. So really think it through. Like, if this book works, if this book soars to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and stays there week after week for months or years and I become inextricably attached to this idea, will I be happy about that? And people have not thought that. People have not have that thought until I raise it very often, yeah.

It's so important. I know I always have to ask myself too, after learning with the first one, can I live with this for five years as front and center? Like, I will not be talking about anything else for five years and then the rest of my life. Can I hang my hat on this idea? Or as you said, or am I going to go back and start to disagree with my former self? Which isn't a great look, you know. And it reminds me too, what you said about people like Joan Allaire and Amy Cuddy. Even Amy Cuddy's book presence was based on some of that. And then people ripped her to shreds. But that's also a commentary on society at large right now, which we will not get into.

Here's a question that I've been dying to ask you. Maybe dying is not the right word. You sometimes coach people with the actual book writing, and then I think sometimes you actually ghostwrite. I personally, as an author, I feel a little sad for ghostwriters when their name is not on the front cover. Like will Smith with Mark Manson. I feel very glad when the author puts with and the person's name on the COVID especially if they've done a tremendous amount of the actual heavy lifting. So I'm just so curious from you, David. I don't know if you still ghostwrite, but if you do, do you care if your name is on the COVID or not, or acknowledged or not? Are you okay with being a true total ghost behind the scenes? And where do you fall on this?

I'm always ghostwriting. I've been ghostwriting continuously for six or seven years, however long I've been doing this. And I don't ask to have my name on the COVID of the book. I would certainly be a little bit stung, just like when, as an editor, whenever someone would turn in the acknowledgments, I would always check to see if my name was in there. And a couple of times it wasn't. And it definitely is quite hurtful because it can't really be anything else, but it's sort of like an Oscar thank you speech. I think someone famously forgot their spouse. But generally speaking, if you're not included in the acknowledgments, it's on purpose. But I'd like to be in the acknowledgments. As a ghostwriter, I don't, of course.

Insist on it, but do they say thanks to my ghostwriter, thanks to my writer, my co writer, David? Nothing.

They dance around it in a way that it's quite clear what I did to an agent, to an author, to anyone who cares, to everyone else. You know, sometimes they'll say collaborator. But, you know, there's always that discomfort around it. And it's understandable because these are books of ideas. And so the notion that I'm helping, it almost suggests that I contributed ideas and that it's not their idea. So there's this question of authenticity and originality. And that's fair. You know, I do contribute ideas. I don't think it's as important, though, as some people think. The fact is, all the stuff in the book can be traced elsewhere. It's an accumulation of intellectual influences in every book. And really what I'm doing is helping them get to the finish line structurally and understanding how to communicate this material, which is very different. Like knowing how to write a book is very different from knowing how to strike it rich in the stock market or whatever the book happens to be about. And I don't know why anyone would expect an expert to be able to write a book on top of Their expertise. So I'm very comfortable with it. As far as me being included. Again, I don't see what I do as authorship. And so I would actually find it a little bit creatively stultifying if I was going to be putting my name on something, because suddenly I'm in the place where the author is. Now. I need a coach because it's like, can I put myself out there with these ideas? Creativity flows much more easily when I know that this is their thing and I can throw stuff out there, but ultimately they're the filter. When I suggest calling a book something or let's add a chapter on X, they can say no. And I get very uncomfortable when they agree too easily. If I'll say, like, you know, we should do the entire book in reverse order. You know, just like, I'll throw an idea out there, something strange. When they say, sure, I'll be like, oh, no, no. I just was playing that idea. You should think about it. Like, it should be from you. I don't like the idea that they're just letting my, you know, my wildest ideas kind of end up on the page. I like that there's a filter. It's their book. I'm giving them fodder for thought sometimes, but it's their book and they're putting their name on it.

And what's the spectrum of the light lift when you're hired as a ghostwriter? To the heaviest lift? Like, do some people truly just here, David, you write it. Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, they kind of approve things quickly. It's like wherever you want to take it. Or is it always a really heavy collaborative. Lots of phone calls, process, or do some people draft and then you clean up? Like, just. I'm so curious because I've never done it this way. And so I appreciate even hearing your take that you don't even want to be on the COVID necessarily, and accountable for the ideas, because it's not what you're hanging your hat on. You're helping shape, as you said, the architecture of it.

That's right. I generally create the material and it's extracted from conversations like this one. So if we were working together, I would ask questions and give you prompts, just like you're asking me questions and giving me prompts, and then digest and then write what I think you would say. And that's pretty much my process, you know? And I know that that's not how everyone works. My dream. My dream, like you talked about my career, my pivot is to become one of Those people who works at the Chateau Marmont working with some burned out celebrity by the pool. And that's a whole different thing from what I do. That's not about ideas, that's just about stories. And where I've talked to people who do this kind of thing. And, you know, they have a recorder, they get everything transcribed, and then they're kind of working from this pile of transcriptions, which is a lot more like editing, really. And what I did as an editor at different publishers, what I'm doing is figuring out how to take ideas and express them in this particular format. Because it calls for a very particular approach to how these books are written. And if you don't, if you're not really deeply immersed in them, even if you are, it may not come naturally to communicate in that way. Many of the people I work with are bloggers or have a newsletter or have a YouTube channel or whatever, so they can write. And I say this to reassure them, it's not about their ability to write sentences, but it's really about understanding how you write this kind of a book. And so it's much easier and faster for me to just write it. And the people who are very concerned about voice, not always. Most people don't really care. They don't have any ego. But when there is some ego attached to creativity and authorship and those kinds of questions, they'll be very concerned about voice. Like it's not my voice. But inevitably, after one or two passes, it sounds like them. I ask them, I say, imagine this is the audiobook and you're reading it. You know, which is often the case. You read your own audiobook. Would this feel weird to say this? Try saying it out loud. Would it sound like not you somehow? And of course it doesn't. You know, the odd. Sometimes I'll get a little too colorful with the phrase and they'll say, I would never say that or use that turn of phrase. And there it goes. And it's fine. Because generally speaking, this is not stand up comedy, this is not poetry, this is not literature. There aren't supposed to be jokes in it, or whatever they think, whatever their ideas are, this isn't novel with style. The reader wants to be told what to do. Tell them what to do. And you know, the metaphor I use is, if you had a really, really smart friend from college who wrote to you and said, hey, I know you're an expert on such and such, can you just explain this thing to me? This is a good friend of yours. They're smart, but they don't know the first thing about whatever low carb diets. You would write three paragraphs and really clearly explain what that person needs to know. You wouldn't repeat yourself endlessly because you know they're smart. You would be clear and direct. You're not there to like waste their time. You want to kind of convey it so that they actually take your advice and don't just skip through it. That's the tone of a book like this. That's the easiest way to get into the mindset. I'm writing an email. This friend of mine is really smart. I don't have to bang them over the head with this information. But at the same time they don't know anything. So I have to explain all my terms. I have to start from square one. That voice, that's your voice and it sounds very similar for most people.

That makes sense. So fun to hear how you think about this.

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I read a great quote from Ryan Holiday in his book Perennial Cellar, which I highly recommend to anyone doing anything creative, but especially book writing. And he said that when you finish writing your book and your book comes out on launch day, it's as if you've finished a marathon and somebody walks you over to the next starting line of the next marathon. And I know at that point you probably hand things off. The author needs to take it and run with it. I'm just so curious your thoughts just as somebody up close in this industry, what advice would you Give to an author who's just starting their next marketing marathon, Especially from someone like you and like me, who also eschews a lot of the personal branding mishegoss out there in the world in terms of how.

They should think about marketing their book.

Yeah. Or just acknowledging the next marathon that begins. And even the emotions at that stage in the journey of once the book is out. Because actually the creative process is so intense but rewarding in a very deep, worky kind of a way. And then sometimes it's anticlimactic. The book comes out and there is some fanfare. And then a week later, you're looking at it and you're like, oh, God, it's just you and me, little book. Like, now we really gotta work. Now it really starts. So I'm just curious what you counsel your authors. Yeah.

These books are so curious. You know, I've always had short stints at publishers. I'll stay for a couple of years, acquire a lot of books, edit a lot of books, and then kind of go onto some other opportunity. And then I would find out years later, I would run into somebody who's still there. I'd be like, are you still at that imprint? And they'll say, boy, you know, you made us a lot of money with such and such. I had no idea. I always felt like I was failing at the time.

What are some of the books you acquired that you're proudest of? Just to give us an idea or two?

Well, there's a book, the Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman.

Josh is a dear friend, prior guest on this show. I'll put in the show notes.

There you go.

Love, Josh.

And that book is one of. Talk about a perennial seller and a resource to so many people. I've done all kinds of books. They've always been nonfiction, with one exception. And some of them have done quite well. But it is a slow build. It's a slow build. And the fact is, when a book blows up right out of the gate, it's not because of the book. It's because of the platform, obviously. So it's very rewarding when a book, you know, sells 50 or 100 copies the first week and then 50 the next week, or even 15 the first week, and then 50 the next week and then 50 and then 50 and then 50, and then you look up and five years have gone by and people are still buying that book. And it. Boy, it adds up.

I would say those are. Mine are a slow, steady, quiet roll, but they keep going. That's kind of My passion.

Exactly. And it's because people recommend your books to other people.

That's the main reason.

Exactly. And that's a sign that you've actually made a good book as opposed to a platform driven only book, which is that distinction I'm always trying to make. You know, I worked on the proposal for a book called Atomic Habits. And that book, James Clear had an audience, he had a newsletter audience, he had a platform. But that can't possibly account for the success of that book. I don't think I've ever seen anything I've been involved with recommended as frequently in every arena. Every social media, on Facebook, a parents group, on Reddit, just boom, boom, boom. Anytime anyone has any sort of problem that could be addressed with better habits, that's the book that gets published.

Which is so interesting because there's tons of habit books that have come out. But I looked today and his has 18,000Amazon reviews. Like it's surpassing probably it's one of the most even reviewed books of all time. It's wild.

It's wild. And it's been on the bestseller list all this time and the top of Amazon's listings and Audible's listings. And so this is clearly. It's that combination of finding a great perennial topic, a chronic problem that never goes away, never will go away, but again, within that sphere. And as I said, we always look at that competitive analysis when we're working on a project to figure out where does this fit in. You know, he has managed to stand out, I think in large part because of quality more than any one big idea. There are ideas in the book that are sort of distinct, but I think it's a lot less to do with. There's some like one thing like Lean in, you know, it wasn't one thing as much as it is quality. And you know, what struck me about James reading his newsletter at the beginning of Working Together is that this is a guy and I write a newsletter and lots of people write newsletters. He had footnotes in his newsletters. I mean, that just speaks to his work ethic and his devotion to quality, even when there's no larger objective that he would go to that length and write a long and detailed newsletter and just put that value out into the world. You can only imagine the kind of effort he put into creating a quality product in terms of his book when it's actually on the line.

And I just have to give an aside. How many reviews do you think Girl Wash youh Face has compared to Atomic Caveats?

I mean, she has quite a devoted audience.

Almost 27,000.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, she has a. She has a very devoted audience.

And it's also partly now with Audible, a lot more people are reading and listening on Audible, and Audible makes it really easy as soon as you're done. Same thing with Kindle, the reviews pop up. So it's also. Newer books tend to get that. But I have totally derailed you from. You were talking about platform book and a good book and then how that impacts the marketing plan.

Oh, yeah. So what I was going to say is that the slow build book in James Key, that was not a slow build either because he had that big, big newsletter audience. But when you have that slow build, so many authors shrug and move on to their next thing. And frankly, I think it's like a marathon. If you go into a marathon thinking that you're going to run a 10k and then at the 9k mark, someone taps you on the shoulder and says they decided to go for the full marathon, you would fall to pieces. Even if you're capable of running a marathon, the emotional hurdle, when you've prepared for one kind of job and then you're told, actually this is a much bigger job, that's hard. And so understanding from the beginning how to pace yourself that this does not end with publication, you're at the halfway mark at best. Many authors go in not understanding that. I would try to my own office, I would try to explain that, but they don't understand that. And so the book comes out and they don't become overnight celebrities invited on the Today show or there's a little flurry of publicity, but then it's over, they walk away. And that is the biggest mistake, because if you really believe in what you've written and it is actually a valuable resource, they just haven't found out about you yet. You have to keep banging that drum week after week. And the authors who do that. There are many books that no one ever heard of, and fiction and nonfiction, where rather no one had ever heard of them when they came out and did not sell well for even years.

Ironically, even the Tipping point took two years to have a tipping point.

There you go. There you go. And so those authors just kept talking about it, kept doing talks and tying the talk to a purchase of a few hundred copies. There's all kinds of specific techniques. And by the way, your spreadsheet of bookmarking template is something I give to practically everyone I work with to this day.

That's amazing because I say to them.

I was like this, you may not do everything here, but it shows you the scope. It shows you all the different things that can go into the marketing of a book. Again, just to have that picture in your mind to understand this is not about the book succeeded or failed. The publisher, by the way, has that mentality. The publisher, they have to move on. If the book blows up, great. If not, they're going to move on. And often they will be surprised. They will be surprised. The author will reach out six months or a year later and say, hey, like I seem to have sold a lot of books. And then the publisher's like, oh my God, we have to get behind this book. Like they really don't look at the numbers. Or at least during my day, that was a real chronic problem. They don't keep track of things. So those slow books, they will just get forgotten and then they sell a lot of copies and then suddenly they'll remember and say we should do a 10th anniversary edition or whatever. So you've got to keep pushing it forward if you think that this is valuable because the people are there, they just haven't heard about you yet, period.

Yeah, it's such a good reminder and it can be hard.

It can be hard.

Ah, yes. Yes. I love mbs. Michael Bunge Stanier, right when the coaching habit came out, he said, I'm on a five year plan. And he wrote this great article. It's so awesome to look back. It was how he sold 150,000 books, which is a phenomenal sales number. That's probably the top 1% alone to have sold that many. And he said, I'm giving this five years. This is the only book I'm going to write and promote for five years. Sure enough, he did that, that steady drumbeat corporate bulk sales and now he's sold over a million copies. And that article on the first 150,000 is just as epic. I'm going to put it in the show notes. And it worked. He got it over the hump. Phil M. Jones, he as well has sold over a million copies in large part again thanks to bulk and corporate. That makes a big deal because if you could sell to one client 500 books, it is a whole lot easier than just selling one ups.

It really came as a revelation to me because when I got into publishing, if you talk to the other people, and again because of the contraction in the industry and because of the low pay and all these other factors, a lot of the institutional expertise in book publishing had gone even by the time I got into it in 2004. So there weren't a lot of people around who kind of understood publishing. There was a lot of people in their 20s who hadn't seen much, and the talk was all around bestsellers and didn't make it on the list the first week. And as I've read memoirs of people who were editors or publishers, which is one of my favorite little subcategories, you discover so many of the books that still people talk about, sort of famous, famous books of the 20th century, did not sell at all at first. And it was the ongoing effort of a book publisher for months, coming up with all these different ideas, always looking for opportunities to tie the book to something in the news or to an emerging trend, trying different marketing techniques. They saw it as a product, as a product on their shelf. Just like Mars has candy bars, the book publisher has this intellectual property, and they would look in an ongoing way to make it work. And of course, with a book, the beauty of it is once it crosses a threshold, it explodes.

Yeah.

And if you just keep pushing, you never know when a book crosses that line. And suddenly, yes, that snowball that you've been pushing up the hill suddenly starts rolling down the hill, and then it can go completely crazy, as we've seen.

With atomic habits, funny enough. I mean, even James Clear talks about the ice melting and that the ice cube looks solid until it doesn't. Until all of a sudden it's melted. And then you see it, and the water's fluid, and it's everywhere. It's like. But for so long, while it's melting internally, you don't see it as such. And. Oh, you brought up such a good point just now and then, it completely slipped my mind. What was I gonna say? Hmm?

Well, while you think about that, you know, I just think about. I worked for a person at St Martin's Press, Lisa Sims, who was largely responsible for Sudoku becoming a publishing phenomenon. And, you know, it was a popular puzzle. But, I mean, those books, those Sudoku books for years were such a cash cow for St. Martin's Press. I mean, they just sold an enormous amount with Will Shorts. And that's one of those things that it did not happen organically. People have to understand that these books are made. And anytime something does appear to be organic, you know, if you dig deeper, you discover it's not organic either because there's already a platform which in itself is built over time very strategically, or because the publisher made it happen or the author made it happen. And I watched her work. They had a novel called Saraskiya. It was a Holocaust novel and it sold nothing. And I remember her talking about how she was gonna call Walmart and she was gonna do this and she's gonna do that. And in my mind, because I was an arrogant little ignorant editor who did nothing, I was kind of thinking like, come on, we have so many books here, we have so many novels. Who needs another Holocaust novel? Like, why are you wasting your time on this one book? But she loved the book and she made it a bestseller and he turned it into a movie, you know, And I watched her do it. And that is an extraordinary thing to see it happen. Because we've been taught that success is like lightning or because of talent or something like the talent. The cream rises to the top. Nothing could be further from the truth than the cream rises to the top. That is an absurdity. And that is true of businesses. It is true of books. It is true of music, film. Nothing rises to the top. Everything is carried to the top.

Ooh, that's a Maven game. You've probably already written that one.

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Josh was on this podcast of the first 10 episodes, number 12 in fact, talking about this sales system behind selling books. So he Phil mbs all the people that I've mentioned so far, they actually engineer a sales system to sell their books like they would to sell any other product as you mentioned. So it's not that books are somehow this system standalone ephemeral magical entity that either do well or they don't. That a lot of these people have been very intentional about building system and process behind it to keep putting the word out. It's built into the welcome Autoresponder series of a newsletter. It's built a lot of people I know now, they book a speaking gig. It comes with a hundred books, whether you like it or not. It's almost like the organization would have to turn that down. But I go, oh, you're hiring me to speak? Great. It's 20,000 and it includes a hundred books. Bam. I've just sold a hundred. And I didn't really give them the choice. Whereas I've made the mistake the last five years where I just say, would you like to also purchase books? And it's a different thing. One sells a hundred books instantly and the other one doesn't.

I blame English teachers. No offense to the English teachers in the audience, but the fact is, in high school, you read these classic novels and they already start conveying this mythology, you know, about these tortured artists. And here's the reality. Even Vincent van Gogh, his brother Theo was essential to his being noticed. And he never would have been discovered by anybody, ever, if it hadn't been for his brother. If you're not the business person for your book, for your anything, but you succeed, it's because someone in your orbit is. And often it's a spouse who never received credit. Nabokov, I think, comes to mind. But many, many, many others, there's always somebody who is treating this thing like a business. And this idea of artistic purity, it's like so and so would never have, you know, Shakespeare was a businessman. Everything you've ever heard of that ever got your attention is because somebody treated this thing like a product. Somebody out there treated this thing like a product. And as an author, unless you're going to put this on your poor spouse as their responsibility, you have to treat what you've created, your noble, pure, artistic creation, as a product. And you have to get out there and sell it and think about it as a product. And that you got to get over that precious attitude towards your work. By the way, some of the most precious creators out there that you would never believe would have a plan, a marketing plan or a way of getting noticed. Oh, believe me, believe me, yes. And you'll ask them that. They're not keeping it secret. But we had this idea like, well, so and so just goes into the cabin in the woods and writes it. And then someone found it and it was so brilliant. No, no, they went out there.

I love how Chandler Bolt, he has a fantastic podcast. Self publishing school. It'll go in the show notes. He says they call it best selling author, not best writing author. And that's so true. It's like you gotta put the selling into best selling. That's really how it works most of the time.

That's it. And I've seen many wonderful books forgotten first by their authors.

Yes.

Before they were ever forgotten by the public. And it's very sad to me because they didn't want to do it. It was too uncomfortable to them.

Yes. And also the one thing I wanted to say about bulk sales with speaking, you said, let's blame it on English teachers. Also, I can blame it a little bit on the way the advanced royalty structure is set up. It's actually kind of strange. But sometimes it's not in the author's best interest to take a pay cut for book sales because they're not going to see any royalties anytime soon. So I remember with pivot, a lot of times my incentives were not quite aligned. I was usually right down the middle because, oh, okay, they pay me less, but they buy 200 books. Well, I'm still, to this day, I don't get royalties. So that's a pretty far away marshmallow to wait for, you know. So I would always balance the two. But I wasn't always prioritizing just the quantity of book sales because I was juggling cash flow.

Well, I'll tell you, every category is different. Books are the same shape, but they are very, very different products. Sort of like, you know, lots of things come in jars in a supermarket, but they're pickles. They can be, you know, all kinds of things. And so with business books, if you don't have lightning rods out there to capture the attention and interest of your audience, financially separate from the book, you're really leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. The book really needs to feed into other things, whether that's consulting or speaking or whatever. And then when you do that and you hook up that connection, it becomes a tremendous source of new opportunity. And so from that perspective, looking at the book sales as a source of revenue is really, I think, the wrong way of approaching it. These are all lead magnets. These are all free advertising you're putting out in the world. You know, every time you sell a copy, there is a small but very real chance that the person who reads it becomes your most devoted fan. The person who buys all of your training or all of your courses or who tells 500 other people. And if you read the Tipping Point, they talk about this. These kinds of mavens and super connectors and whatever and salespeople, they getting it in that one person's hand can transform your career. And you don't know which person. It's like the 80, 20 rule. Even though you get 80% of your results from 20%, you actually can't figure out which 20% it is.

I know, so true.

You never know that one speaking gig that you did and 300 copies went out, like one of the people at that event took that copy home, read it, changed their life, and then they start a company, built a whole company around the principles that you talk about in your book and on and on and on. And I've been in this industry long enough to see that ripple effect years and years later and think and say, oh, wow, like you can trace everything, that company or this cultural phenomenon or whatever, all the way back to this one person buying this one book.

Absolutely. I mean, just the other day I was hired for a TikTok virtual keynote because that person had attended a Pivot session at Google that was occurring years after because Google has licensed Pivot. I mean, it was just such the coolest chain. Okay, two final questions. One, we've talked a lot about platform, getting an agent, getting a publisher. Is there any hope? I mean, now with all the consolidation in the publishing industry, it's just even harder to get a book deal because like you said, we're in a little bit of a winner take all situation. The houses are so big that there's less competition for books, there's less bidding wars. It's okay to get a small advance, by the way. It's not a bad thing. It's easier to earn it out. But what would you say to somebody who doesn't have a huge platform? Is there hope for them? Should they even bother trying to get an agent and a publisher?

Platform is an interesting question, because what is platform? And one way I talk about it is if you are going to write because people have like a big ego and a small ego at the same time, you know, and they have these very odd notions that I have to help them deconstruct. It's like, if your stuff is so important, you know, why don't you just like, write a blog post about it? The world needs to know. Just go on medium and like, write a post and like, you're done. Right? So we start from there. Like, okay, your big idea, you write it in A blog post. How many people are going to read it today? Now, this is your big idea. You think this idea is going to solve global warming and bring world peace. Like, this is a big deal and everyone's going to get it. So when you explain this idea, people are like, oh, my God, I'm never going to eat meat again, or whatever. And you're going to effect this change with them. If you put this up right now for free, how many people would read it? And so suddenly people get deflated because they realize, like, oh, God. Well, it's true that I did post that thing the other day and I couldn't get anyone to click on it. Like, take 1, 1000 of that. That's your book readership, right? Who's going to buy the $27 hardcover or whatever? So platform can be anything that gets people to that page. If you are best friends with some bestselling author and you could say to them, like, do you mind, like, putting you talking about me on your blog or sending an email to all of your followers? That's platform, right? Because they would say, you got to check out this blog post that my friend wrote. And so your network of influencers is platform, your own social media platform to a certain extent, although it's mostly useless for selling books. Twitter's useless. Facebook is mostly useless. But if you can't get people to a blog post today, you're not ready to write a book, even one that you self publish. If people are not already paying any attention to the stuff that you have to say, the work for you is elsewhere. And of course, let's say you're a famous person, you just did something. You're Captain Selly. You landed on the Hudson. No one was paying attention to Captain Sully. He wrote a book. So in that case, who you are or you happened to have some sort of feat that you had accomplished, you founded a big company or whatever, that's also a platform because you're notable. You could put up a Wikipedia entry and they wouldn't delete it in 30 seconds. So that is also a kind of platform. But again, if you haven't done something notable and nobody knows who you are and you can't get anyone to read a blog post, you need to build an audience before you build a book.

So well said, David. You're the best. If you could give business owners and specifically aspiring authors permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I think that it is so valuable to go through this process of building an audience. No matter what your business is. And there's a company that is called 37signals. We branded to Basecamp. Now that's 37signals. Again, they make software, but the two co founders do a lot of posting as themselves, as the founders, and they had some very pivotal things to say and published books about how businesses run, not even necessarily about their own products, but they kind of put their thought leadership out into the world. And I think it has a circular effect. In other words, the more you talk about how you work, how your business operates, why you run your business the way you do, and then you get feedback on that in terms of the audience responding to it, getting excited about it, that feeds back into how you run your business, and it can have a very positive effect. You're sort of. You're thinking out loud, you're developing a philosophy. And regardless of whether it ends up as a book or only 300 people in your industry read it, simply talking through, you know, like, this is a craft, whatever it is, you're an entrepreneur, it's a crafter, you're a manager. You're doing something, you're trying things out, you're trying to grow and learn. Writing about it is just an essential part of that process. If you're not writing about what you do, you. You're leaving this huge opportunity for growth on the table. And I think you should be doing it regardless of whether your ultimate goal is a book. And of course, there is always that chance that you find an interesting vein to tap and more and more people are attracted to it. And at a certain point, people will send you that email, they really do, and they'll say, you've got to write a book about this. I love the way that you talk about sales, and I think you should write a book about it. And that's when you should start thinking about a proposal.

I love it. And then that's when they call you.

If they're lucky, they hear about you on your podcast.

Exactly. Well, thank you so much, David. I love hearing just your view of the whole industry and all aspects of this. Having worked in the houses now independently, and before we hit record, David told me his favorite size. Delightfully tiny team. And he drew a circle around his head. Is one right?

That's as tiny as I can get. I love it. I love it. But I also have to say, while we're on, I absolutely loved free time, and I got so much value out of it. So congratulations. Congratulations.

Thank you so much. Does that mean you don't have a va or anyone there's no one but you.

No one but me. That's right.

Wow. Amazing. Thank you so much. David. Thank you for I love reading the Maven game. I love exchanging ideas with you throughout the years over email, and big thanks to everybody listening and again to our friend DC for introducing us many years ago.

Thanks Jenny.

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