Matt Stone: Killing Your Blog And Then "Killing It" On Amazon

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

Hey there. This is Brad Costanzo and yes, you are listening to bacon wrap Business. In case the audio jingle didn't tell you, but I'm happy to have you back with me if you've been listening to the show already. Thank you very much. Welcome you with open arms. And if this is the first time to the kitchen, I want to welcome you and tell you you're in store for a great show. Feel free to go back to itunes and check out the other episodes. Download them. I've got some great guests, great ideas to share with you, and the whole concept behind the show bacon wrap business is that everything's better with bacon. Bacon can make the good taste great and the bad taste well good. And I try to wrap the. I've got my guests here laughing in the background. I'm going to introduce you to Matt here in just a second. The but the other thing about bacon wrap business is to me, it gives me permission to have a little bit of fun with you guys, not take it too seriously, not be too boring business in general. If you don't have a, you know, if you don't have a fascination with all things business and marketing like I do, it can be bone dry. But guarantee that's not going to happen here today. I am pretty honored to have a guest who's been involved in a lot of the same things that I've done in the past. So this should be fun. We're going to geek out over some Amazon and publishing things. We're going to talk a lot about his book, his strategies, some things he's doing now. But I want to tell you a little bit about how I came to meet Matt Stone. Who Matt. I'll let you go ahead and say hey to everybody.

Hey, everybody.

Perfect. People probably think that's one of those little buttons I pushed, like the production button, the okay, so here was a story my friend James Altucher sue, many of you may already be familiar with. He's got one of the top podcasts out there, best selling author of Choose Yourself. We were talking the other day on the phone and he mentioned this book that.

Kind of changed the way he's Looking at his entire blog and everything else. And it is by none other than the author that I've got here on the phone, Matt Stone. Who? Matt. You go by the. You go. Your pen name for the book. I love it. I'll let you tell everybody what your pen name is.

Well, I don't know why you think that I wrote this book, because me and Buck Flogging are just not the same person.

So wait, what's it called? It's called kill youl blog. 12 reasons to kill. To Stop.

To Stop Effing Blogging.

Right. By none other than Buck Vlogging. Buck Vlogging. So I love that. That was so. It was cool. It was catchy. Those are the kind of things that I kind of take notice of when somebody does something a little bit like that to grab attention. Buck Flogging. That's the reason I created Bacon Wrap business. I wanted. If you're going through the podcast, I wanted you to take notice and go, you had me at bacon. Well, you had me at Buck Flogging, by the way. I've been told that before you had me at Bacon. I was like, that's awesome.

So flogging bacon here today.

Flogging bacon. So I read the book. It's something. It's crazy cheap for the advice you give. I think it's like 99 cents on Kindle. And if you are currently blogging for a living or as part of your business, or you're a content creator of some sort, or you are thinking about getting into this business, then this show is really going to hit home for you because you do something. Matt or Buck Matt. That you got a very contrarian approach. When a lot of people are reaching out and hearing that content marketing is everything and blogging is everything, you're telling people to kill the blog. Kill your blog, kill the blog. But there's reasons. And you're not saying stop doing it. You're saying kind of replace it. I want to dive into this, but let me first give a little bit of the.

Let me sum it up as I understood it, because that way you'll know that I read your book and everybody else will, and it helps to solidify it in my brain. But what you're saying is that so many people out there, if they're spending hours in front of a computer and they're typing away and they're putting great content out of this world and one of your niches or your primary thing happens to be like the health niche and you could write health and fitness articles till you're blue in the face. And occasionally people will come over your blog and read them, etc. But you're saying there's a lot of time and energy being wasted by doing that when something much more efficient exists. And that efficiency happens to be one of the biggest companies in the world called Amazon.com that allows you to publish, in essence, really for free, your content, even small content. You can publish a 15 page ebook up there, you can charge for it, you even have the ability to give away for free. And then what your book is telling me is that if I use my blog to build a list and leverage Amazon and tease them that look, you're going to get access to my books, you're going to get access to free stuff, et cetera, then that list accesses my content on Amazon. That propels me up the ranks of Amazon, which allows more people to find me, which allows people to find my blog and opt into my list. And it's a cycle. Did I get that even close to being right?

You're pretty close. You're pretty close. One thing that I will interject on is that I do think that blogging and building a subscriber list, I look at those things as two separate objectives in a sense. Right? Because blogging is giving people away, a bunch of free content, getting subscribers. If you're blogging, people are just not going to really subscribe. People only enter their email address at a high rate if they're really forced to. And even if you try to give them all the free stuff in the world, unless you are just somebody really special with something special to say, you're just not likely to see a high subscription rate. When I was blogging, I had a very successful blog. I was just rocking 10 to 20,000 page views a day and a lot of activity, over 100 comments, sometimes 4 or 500 comments on every post.

Just really doing very well. And I built up an audience and a regular following that people that followed me, I had great exposure, I was getting a lot of podcast invites, and I don't have that much bad to say about blogging because at the end of the day, it did work for me. Work being defined as I was able to start blogging and get to the point where I could stop doing any other source of work for income. So that's blogging worked for me. But I do think that in hindsight, after doing it, I could have done things a lot more efficiently. I feel like I could recreate myself and my success more like in two years and what took me over seven to achieve. And I think building subscriptions is very different. So one of the things that I did is I switched over to an entirely subscription based model and I hid all my old blog content. Actually killed my blog. And even though my traffic went down by 80%, my subscriptions went up by.

20 fold.

Really?

Oh yeah. I went from getting 5 to 10 a day to getting over 100 a day in the first couple of months.

Off of fraction of the traffic. So I knew also at that point that when somebody came to my website, they were going to opt in at a high rate, about 20%, and I was going to build this subscriber list. And then I knew exactly what I was going to do with these subscribers once that they were subscribed, which was I created a 25 part autoresponder series which I called an E course. Giving them all this great free content, giving them free books along the way, doing all this awesome stuff for them, doing what Frank Kern would call shock and awe coolness, really just trying to build great engagement with those people. And I felt like I had an opportunity to, to really make much stronger connections with people once they went to my website, subscribed and went through that process, that step by step process of getting to know me and my views on things and test out certain things that I talk about that I recommend and see that they get results and ultimately build a lot of faith and confidence in me and my honesty and integrity. And it worked pretty well. The problem is that, you know, I used that time that I wasn't having to blog anymore to build some other businesses, which is great. But you know, obviously you got to still give it some love. You got to go out and do guest blog posts to send people back in. You got to go spend time on social media and still let yourself be seen. But ultimately you have to go out and do things to drive traffic to your website. It doesn't just happen automatically. So it did fall to about 50 subscriptions a day passively after about six months. But that still ain't too shabby.

That's still not bad at all. But yeah, and you said something right there, I don't want to gloss over that, but it's really important.

You're guest blogging, you're being a guest on podcasts and other interview shows and you're being in social media and you're letting people have a taste of you there and you're adding value to somebody else's blog or subscriber list in order to get them over to you. But then when they come over to you, you're not just saying here.

Get in, get all my content for free without doing anything. Look, subscribe to my newsletter. This is how you get my. This is how you get my stuff. Plus you get other benefits. You're not just getting an e course, you're getting.

You talk about the books that you also get. And this is one of the, you know, the way that you, you really leveraged Amazon was, you know, I thought was really genius. But can you elaborate on that a little bit more? So if I'm a subscriber to your list and I'm promised, I'm here on your web, your web page right here, happy to give it out. 180degreehealth.com Is that correct?

That's right.

Cool. I asked you if that's correct and I'm sitting on your website. So that was kind of a dumb question, but could have just read it. 180°health.com and you just said, hey, you just found 180°. Whoops. Something just came up. There we go. 180° health. So you're here. Now what? Start by signing up for the free Raising Metabolism E course. It includes a full set of tools explaining what your metabolic rate means for your health. There's a few other things tells you exactly what this. And it even includes five free ebooks, many of them bestsellers. On Amazon's no gimmicks. The choice is yours. Subscribe. Basically. So you're asking people to here join me. So that's. I wanted to explain if somebody's not looking at your page, it's in essence it's a squeeze page. Subscribe to my stuff.

Yeah, it's basically, you know, I think the key term for anybody who is in the website business, the Internet business, is to really identify what your most desired response is out of your user. I mean, what do you really want them to do? And then make sure that your website and everything that you do is congruent with that most desired response. And that could be based on many things like we were talking about before we started recording.

You have to think about what you like doing. I mean if you don't like blogging and you like writing books better, then you should optimize your site for a strategy and a system that helps support book writing instead of depending on blogging in order to get traffic in and build a following.

Right, right. So then at what point and how do you leverage Amazon with this? And this is going to play into Something else besides the blogging. And it kind of goes into the publishing side, and we'll jump in that in just a moment. But tell me about how you integrated the two and took advantage of that.

Well.

The top nonfiction Kindle author on the planet most days, occasionally he gets jousted by somebody, but most days, the number one nonfiction Kindle author is Steve Scott, who authors books under the pen name S.J. scott. And he would tell you just the same as I would that the ultimate tool for success on Amazon is a subscriber list. Because the most important thing with any Amazon launch, above and beyond anything else, is to make sure to get as many downloads on your book as you can possibly get right after you release it.

Yeah, Amazon loves that momentum.

Amazon loves that. They will throw you and they will throw you and your book in front of other people's eyes for ages after you've shown them that you can get a lot of downloads out of the gate. They love that. And it goes, without a soft release.

That book may never sell. You might struggle to get to sell two copies a month, whereas the strong launch will ensure that you'll sell copies every single day.

Exactly. Exactly. And then when you get, I always say this, that success on Amazon is sticky. Same thing as itunes, but it's sticky. So that early momentum gets you up into the ranks. Like right now, my show banking rant business is up on the new and noteworthy section of itunes. So you go there, you're looking for. When people are looking for new stuff, they don't really rank them as much, but they'll put it up there. So the more. The longer it's up there, the more people that will download it, and then the more people that download it, the longer it stays up there. Same exact thing happens on Amazon because if you get to the top of the list, you don't even have to be the number one best seller in your category. As long as you're kind of up on that front page, People will stumble across you when they're looking for something, and then the more people that stumble across you will cause it to rank higher, and that'll cause more people to stumble across you. And it's this beautiful circle, but it's all based upon that early momentum in getting up there in the first place. And that subscriber base is so critical, as I've worked with my clients. That's really the secret sauce.

Oh, yeah. If you cannot get a book, at least, I would say, honestly, probably a thousand downloads in the first 24 to 48 hours, I wouldn't even bother publishing it.

Yeah, I agree. Unless you just want to have a.

Book out there for that powerful launch, that thing's going to perform well. And all the other marketing efforts that you do, all the little things that you do to try to make that book successful, that's the 20%, the 80% is all that launch power. And also getting some reviews to make that book look legitimate so that it makes it more sticky.

Right. And God, I would kill to be able to find this statistic again or exactly where it was so I could quote it more accurately. But if the book, if you're not just making money as an author, but a book as part of your larger business platform. So let's just say you, whether you're a speaker, you sell home study courses, or you have services or whatever, like maybe you're an attorney. I don't know, anything. Professional services.

The lifetime customer value of somebody who finds you first through a book is something like two to three times that of any other or of the second method. So if you're running AdWords to your website and somebody opts into your website.

Versus they find you, they're looking for how to be better at sales or lose weight and they find your book when they find you through the book, when they. And this is something a lot of people may not know, but you, especially in Kindle, you can put links to your website so that they can opt into your list and become a subscriber. Those people are worth two to three times the customer value. So it's so, so powerful to leverage.

Yeah, it's extremely powerful. And it's a reputation enhancer. To be a successful author as opposed to a successful blogger, one carries a lot more prestige than the other. And also you're able to present information a lot more professionally and give it a lot more of a professional sheen than just putting together a blog post, which psychologically, like you said, people are just more engaged and they're going to be reading through that material more carefully and they're going to connect with you a lot more deeply. Reading a book as opposed to a blog, it's a reputation changer. When you have a successful launch and you are able to show your following in social media or whatnot, that you're number one next to people that are household names at launch and they think, wow, this is crazy. This, you know, guy who I'm subscribed to is his book just passed Jillian Michaels in the health and fitness category. So, you know, it's a great legitimizer.

So I've got to share this with you. This is what we like to call a bacon wrapped strategy. Because I thought this was pretty.

Cool. Do you know who Mike Koenigs is? Owner of? Traffic Geyser.

Traffic Geyser, I'm familiar with. Yeah. I haven't read a bunch of it, but I know what you're talking about.

Okay, so Traffic Geyser. Yeah. So Mike is the owner of the company. Traffic guys are instant customer. He's really big into video marketing and that's kind of his forte. And I recently interviewed him and depending upon. Because that's in post production right now before we release it. So this episode will either be before or after. But Mike gave me this idea or this strategy on this episode. And I'll repeat it here for you because I know somebody like yourself could really appreciate this. He was talking about the power of having a book as well, and how you can reach out and actually get in contact with and potentially start a relationship with almost anybody out there, no matter how untouchable you think they are. And he was using business as an example. And he just asked me to think of a. He goes, think of somebody who seems totally out of reach. I was like, I don't know Mark Cuban. I just threw out a big name. He goes, okay, well, let's just use this as an example. And he goes, this is not going to work every time. And it may not work in this case, but let's say you've got a great book on, you know, let's just say it's business. Let's say it's personal development. It doesn't really matter. And it doesn't even matter that it's Mark Cuban. So Amazon has two ability. You have two abilities to publish books. Kindle and then physical version. The physical version being through CreateSpace. So he said, get your physical book up there and it's all print on demand. You don't have to get an inventory. You get it up there and then you buy your own book as a gift. Let's say I want to get ahold of you, Matt, and leave Mark Cuban out of it. I want to get ahold of you. I don't know you. I have a book that you potentially would be interested in. Now, I may not know your home mailing address, but say you're a CEO of a company. I can probably find your company's mailing address. I simply buy the book, gift wrap it as a gift on Amazon. I pay for it, I tell them to ship it to you. In there on the gift card is a little note, a little personal note that said, matt, my name's Brad, I wanted you to have my book. There's an idea in chapter four you might find useful. If not, pass it on. And here's a quick little video of me explaining why I'm sending this to you. He said, record it with your iPhone, stick it on YouTube, stick it on your website or whatever and then send it to that person. He goes, a lot of the effectiveness of this depends upon who you're sending it to, what the topic of the book is and really how appropriate it is for them. But you're not just sending them your book, you're sending them your book with a very specific reason why specifically, like there's an idea on chapter four or something. Now the other parts of this that are so cool is Amazon is delivering it. Everybody loves to get the Amazon package number two. If you're sending it and they have a secretary, the secretary, it's going to come from Amazon and to you, she may not open that box and if she does, it's gift wrapped book. She's not going to open the gift wrapping. In most cases you're going to get it, you're going to open it up. We all like that Christmas feeling of opening a present and then you've got the book with a very personal note and a video. The ease of doing that is crazy easy. You could upload a PDF and do that tomorrow. The other side of it is it shows that person that you've got, oh, this guy's a published author, he's got credibility. He thought of me. There was a specific reason in it.

There's a lot of little nuances that can be done to make this even better. But I love that because I probably wouldn't have thought of that on my own. But if you have a book, if you've got it up there and if you leverage Amazon, you can do things like that. So that's a long winded bacon wrap strategy. But I wanted to share with you because I just thought it was really, really interesting.

No, I mean, I'll throw you back a bacon wrap strategy as well because that's awesome.

You gonna throw me back some bacon?

I'm gonna throw you back some bacon, Brad.

Recently my partner Rob and I built a publishing company called Archangel Inc.

Ink. Archangel Inc. Very clever. We're so clever.

You're so clever. You're so clever, Buck.

So Buck flogging is everything he touches turns to gold. Magic touch. No, but we here's what we did. And this is the honest to God truth, right? And this is a great lesson for anybody thinking about entrepreneurship or Internet based business anything because there are just, there's so much many, there's so much more efficient ways to go about doing things. And that's what I said when I feel like I could recreate my success in two years instead of seven. It's this kind of thing that, that I would utilize to make that happen. And what we did, we spent a whopping $300 to get this website and we made a autoplay video which we ended up just taking. We're actually probably going to take it down tonight. So we're not even using what we spent most of our our money creating. So basically created a website with no money. And our expertise was all the things that we learned about Kindle Publishing, CreateSpace, the print on demand like you just talked about as well as audiobooks.

SEO and all the things that we learned proper launch strategy, how to get more reviews, all the little secret tricks and tactics that making Amazon launching a lot more successful. We decided to put together a publishing company to help people out with that. So you know, we basically put no money into this. And our specialty was, you know, you know, really I got to see the difference when we started adding different formats. Right. We just started out with Kindle and that was great and all, but you know, we started adding paperback and audiobook and we had a couple of powerful revenue streams. There's some advantages to that. For example, if you have a paperback listing on the Kindle listing, it will have a strikethrough of the price of the paperback and then it'll show the price of the Kindle price which is much lower and then it will show the savings. So it actually increases the sales of your Kindle book just by virtue of the fact that the way your price is listed is different and it makes it look like it's 40% off. Oh, I know the price of the paperback.

Yeah, I used to do very similar stuff like especially, you know, this gets a little more advanced if you're not publishing on there. You may not know the KDP select program where you can give your. Amazon allows you to give your book away for five days, I believe over the course of 90 days. So you can just run a five day promotion just giving it away for free. Well, I may have been selling the book for 99 cents or $2.99 just to the general public, but you can increase the price of the book of the Kindle book to let's just say $9.99. And then the minute it goes there, you drop the price on the KDP to free promotion. And now it looks like somebody's getting a free book. $9 off. It looks so, like so much more of a discount because Amazon allows you to do that. You can change the price daily. You can really do whatever you want. And it just gives that appearance that this is so, so much of a better deal. And it kind of goes right in line with what you were talking about with the whole cross through. And that's like, oh my God, that's great.

Yeah, definitely. Little things like that, you know, you could talk about until we're blue in the face because there's so many different ones. I mean, there really are just so many little things. So they're not, they're not game changers or anything like that. But altogether they add up to become quite significant when you put all the little strategies and pieces together. Now, back to what I was gonna. Back to the bacon wrap strategy.

Here.

We're building this publishing company, we're looking for some work that we can do. We know how to do paperback formatting, we know how to do audiobooks. We have a whole audiobook team that we have now. Back then it was just me doing a lot of narrating. But you know, at this point, I've narrated over 40 books personally. Yeah, yeah. So I've got a pretty good narrator resume as well. But anyway, we were looking for some projects to do. And so what I did in an efficient manner. This cost me no money. It took me a total of 30 minutes. I went out and looked at all the people who write about indie publishing, right? How to be successful on Amazon, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of people writing in that niche. And it looked like to me that two of the biggest ones, on first glance, that seemed really appropriate to the type of content, the type of authors we were looking for were Steve Scott and Tom Corson Knowles. And I emailed those guys, they emailed me back, had a phone conversation with Tom. We offered to do a free audiobook for him to say, hey man, you got 70 authors that you published or something like that. You have 30 books that you've written yourself. I see that you have no audiobooks. Let us do an audiobook for you for free and you can put it out there and test it and see how it sells.

And we did it. And he put an audiobook out there and he saw how much money it was making and, you know, he sent us at least 30 projects since then.

Wow, nice.

This was six months ago or so. We did the same thing with Steve. We didn't do a free book for him, but his books were selling like hotcakes. And I was just in complete and utter disbelief that this guy, like I said, he's the number one selling nonfiction author at this point. He wasn't quite that. That high back then, but he was still killing it. He. I mean, his books were just selling like crazy. And he didn't have any. He didn't have a single paperback, and he didn't have a single audiobook. And I just told him flat out, dude, you're missing out on a lot of money by not having your book in these other formats. All you have to do is send us a manuscript over. We'll make it as painless as possible. We'll hammer that stuff out. It won't even be that expensive. You make all the money you spend on it back in one to two months, and then you'll have this other revenue stream for years. And he was skeptical. And a lot of indie authors have heard that audiobook production is too expensive, and there's no money in audiobooks and stuff like that, which is completely outdated information.

And I mean, the dude is destroying it. I mean, he's got like. He's in the same category as James Altucher's Choose Yourself on Audiobook, which does quite well on audiobook, But Steve's got like three books ahead of James's on audiobook.

Wow. Yeah.

Audiobook is thousands of dollars a month just on audiobooks now.

Yeah. You know, it's so funny. I'm personally, although I love listening to podcasts, like I listen to podcasts now all the time, just in my car and whatnot. I've always been a big just reader because I can read and I can go through and highlight and do stuff like that a lot quicker than the audiobooks. And I personally discounted them a little bit as well because I thought, well, if I don't use them, I can't imagine a lot of other people are using them. And I am blown away by not only the statistics on success, but almost every single one of my friends, when I tell them to get the book, they always ask me, is it. Is it on audio? And they use audible.com, which I believe is owned by Amazon, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, but, yeah. So I'm actually, I believe, a minority. I know with my friends, they're all listening to audiobooks, and you can a lot of times you can speed them up. They'll listen to them in the gym when they're doing cardio. And it is, it's one of those channels that if you're not doing it, you're actually missing out on just income. I mean, it's, it's right there. It's waiting for you. If you can get your Kindle or physical book done. Audiobook is definitely a very strong channel as well.

Yeah, depends. It depends on some factors. I mean, just like anything else, you have, you know, your investment that you put in in the beginning and then you have to estimate how much money in sales you're going to make and how long it's going to take for you to get a positive roi, just like any other, you know, business thing. And it just depends on the sales volume. It depends on the length of your book because the shorter the book is, the more. Obviously it's a lot cheaper to produce an audiobook. As the book gets longer and longer, it becomes extremely cost prohibitive. So for Steve, who writes books, 12,000 to 17,000 words that make for, you know, mostly 90 minute audiobooks, somewhere in that range, 90 minutes to two hours, they end up being $6.95 for the customer, which is nothing.

Yeah, it's pretty cheap.

And one of the reasons there's this huge migration to Audible is because they have like one of the best affiliate programs on the planet.

Right.

And a lot of people are promoting Audible as an affiliate. Here's how it works for authors, which is ridiculous. And I don't know if you know this, Brad, but you only get four. If you, if you list your book with acx, which stands for Audiobook Creation Exchange, and that is also an Amazon company, they distribute it on itunes and Audible and give you a listing on Amazon and. And you only get 40% and you can't sell that anywhere else.

Okay, I didn't know that. I am familiar with acx, but only with the creation of it. I didn't know all the other little nuances.

Well, you would think at 40% it's kind of a ripoff and it's a bum deal. And oh man, I get 70% of my Kindle copy. But the way it works is that if somebody becomes an Audible listener member, so you sign up for a membership for Audible, you pay, I don't know, $14.95 a month, something like that. If somebody becomes an Audible listener member and the first book they download when they become a member is your book, you get 50 bucks. Really?

It doesn't matter how long that audiobook is, it could be 30 minutes, 50 bucks if that's the first one that they download after becoming an Audible listener member. So for somebody like myself in particular especially, that had an audience already built, you know, I get great.

I get great bounties from that. One month I had one of my books that retails at $6.95. I averaged $10 a copy for.

Huh.

Because of the bounty program that they have.

That's really cool. No, I didn't know that. That is definitely bacon wrapped. Okay. So kind of repeating that as I understand it. Let's say that I created the book Bacon Wrap Business by Brad Costanzo, the book version. And then I create an audio version of the book. So I publish it on Kindle and publish it on CreateSpace, and then I. And then I do it on Audible as well. And I tell all of my lovely listeners out there in Bacon Nation, and I tell them, guys, go grab this on Audible. That's where it's available. And anybody who doesn't have an audible, let's say 10,000 people rush out and get an Audible subscription and then download my book first. I make $50 a person.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And they get that book for free.

That buys a lot of bacon, Matt.

It buys a lot of bacon. Now, a lot of people, you know, like you said, you're not an audiobook listener, right? So audiobook listeners are still a small percentage of the population. In addition to that, a lot of people who are audiobook listeners are already Audible members. So you're not sure, you know, to get 10,000 new subscribers.

A boy can drink.

Yeah. This new book by Eminem, his tell all about his history growing up or whatever, and he can mention Audible to his, you know, 100 million on Facebook or whatever he has. So those numbers are a little bit outrageous. But like I said, I got $10 per copy on a book that retails for $6.95. So we're looking at 150% royalty on audiobook. And these people get this first copy for free. So when they become an Audible listener member, they get your book for free and then they go on to stay, you know, to be members, and you get $50 bounty for that. So if you have a pre built audience, hey, you might be able to send a thousand people over there and 50 of those people become new Audible listeners, and you end up making $2,500 off of that, in addition to the 40% that you get on the sales of those individual audiobooks.

Ah, I like It. I definitely didn't know that. That is really, really good to know. And I can already think I've got a handful of clients that I've published for and we've even talked about going the audio route, but just haven't really, I guess time wise or whatnot. Haven't pursued it. But that, that kind of opens up an entirely new revenue stream. I love it. Gonna be a new.

Hey man, send them on over. We do audiobooks for cheaper than anybody and they're great. And we have, you know, freelancers all over the place. Our narrators have real recording studios in their homes. I mean we're turning out some of the best audiobooks that money can buy. And we're doing it for the typical rate is 3 to $500 per finished hour.

Okay.

And you can pretty much pack in about 8,000 words into an hour of an audiobook. Right. So if you have a short book, let's say 20,000 words, that's going to be a two and a half hour read. And the standard rate, it's going to be between three to five hundred dollars on that two and a half hour book. And it's still going to be quite cost prohibitive. We do it, our prices come in just under $200 per recorded hour. And we can actually do a book of 20,000 words in length for $500. And then you could turn that thing loose and start making a couple hundred dollars a month and earn that money back really quick.

Okay, so.

20,000 words is roughly. Just to give people an estimate, roughly how many pages. If it was in a. Let' was in a little paperback book, six by nine or something like that.

Yeah. It'd be about 100 pages maybe.

Yeah, perfect.

A lot less maybe.

And that's the other thing, by the way. I appreciate in the past all these Main street publishers or whatnot, everybody thinks a traditional book has to be 226 pages or something like that. Well, these days, number one, the attention span of most people, including myself, is much shorter. I don't want to read a 226 page book. Most of the time I'd rather, especially if it's nonfiction. Get the fluff out. Give me the good stuff. If it's 50 to 60 pages, I'm perfectly happy with that because I can get through it. I mean, heck, Kill youl Blog was short, simple, to the point. There was no fluff. I loved it. You don't have to write a 226 page book to get it out there. And for would you say like a 20,000 word book would cost. How much? If I came to you to.

We charge $25 per thousand recorded words. So 500 bucks? Yeah, yeah. 500 bucks.

Yeah. Ballpark, dude, that is so cheap.

And it's so cheap. And if you have a hundred thousand word novel, forget about it. Like, there's just. There's no way to make that work. And again, everybody is kind of mixed up because they think, oh, I wrote a novel. People like to listen to novels and audiobook. I'll make an audiobook. And then they spend two grand when they can only sell one copy a day at 99 cents on Kindle. And yes, there's no money in audio books, but surprisingly, I think these short nonfiction books that people are just churning out really, really quickly, they are perfectly conducive to making a great profit in the audiobook market. Perfectly conducive for that.

That's great. Now, so what do you say about.

Say it's nonfiction, but if it is a. Let's say I'm trying to brand myself. It's something about Brad Costanzo, and it's, you know, more of a. So it's not just a. It's not an impersonal book. It's more of a personal book. How important is it for me to read the book versus hiring a professional voice?

Well, you know, it's a give and a take. I mean, you in particular, you know, you have a good voice. I wouldn't deter you from reading your own, narrating your own books.

Thanks, man.

But it's a lot freaking easier to have somebody else do it for you where literally you just send over the manuscript and boom.

Right.

But do you find a little money and then, boom, you have an audiobook.

Do you find any of the authors that you've done this?

So that's a piece of cake. But yeah, you can definitely read your own audiobooks. And you know that I've done that with all of mine. That's how I got started as a narrator.

That's great.

Yeah.

You know, I've actually tried in the past, and I personally stopped just because it got so, you know, whenever you're reading your own book, you really have to articulate. It's not. You don't want to be sloppy, and it's really easy to mess up and kind of screw some things up. So if you're thinking about doing it on your own, it can be a nightmare, especially getting the quality just right.

But our narrators that we have, I'm not doing as much narrating now primarily because the narrators that we brought in are better than I am. It's a disservice to our authors for me to be reading when we have more experienced people that are better equipped to do it. And these guys are so good that they literally will send. We'll send them the file in an email at like 10:00am and like 6:00 clock later that night, they send back the finished audio.

Are you kidding me?

It's unreal. Now we go through and we do some editing, we do some final listening. We get the thing really clean, we break it into chapters. We get it, you know, basically perfectly up to ACX's publishing specifications. And that takes some time and some money on our part. But I mean, we got some great people. I don't know how the hell we found them. I just feel like the luckiest dude on earth because. And these guys are talented. I mean, I will say that this guy we have, Greg Zarcon, I mean, he is one of the best narrators on all of Audible. He gets almost only five stars on all of his books that he's narrated. It's unreal. He's really, really talented. I don't know how the hell we found him, but we're able to have this guy narrate books and still come in at that. $25 per thousand words is unreal.

Okay, so what kind of authors do you typically work with? Is it primarily nonfiction?

Yeah, we just published our first fiction recently and we just didn't get the launch force that we needed to make it succeed. So we're postponing our fiction publishing. We hope to get into it later. Fiction is really, really hard to market. So once we build up our launch platform a little bit better, we're going to have a huge leg up. Over 95% of all the other authors in the world who are trying to indie publish as fiction authors. And I think we're going to be really successful in fiction as well, but we're just not quite there yet.

Yeah, fiction is a weird bird. It's where the majority of the book sales are. Majority people still buy fiction versus nonfiction. However, it is really hard to market it because it's like art. It's very subjective. A lot of it happens, word of mouth, a lot of groundwork, building up a following. And yourself and myself, we've got direct marketing backgrounds. We're used to writing a sales letter, making an offer and a call to action and solving problem with our marketing. Like, hey, have you got this? Go buy this. And you can do that in nonfiction a lot easier. And that's one of the reasons I never really got into the fiction side. Although I definitely contemplated it because there's a lot of money there. You know, one time I started thinking and, you know, there's probably still some. There's probably still something to be said about this strategy. So if you want to run with it or anybody else does, feel free. This is one of those. You have ideas and not enough time. But I remember when, you know, 50 shades of grey was just absolutely huge. And still erotica and romance novels are still some of the absolute best sellers out there, especially on Kindle, because women can buy them and not walk around with them. You know, it's in their phone, it's in their Kindle. Right? That was the whole thing about 50 by women.

By women, you mean brand. You mean Brad Costanzo is what you're saying.

I mean me.

So, I mean, by the way, it was really funny when. Just a sidetrack, when I. I was going to Europe and I was with my girlfriend and I was talking to my mom, just saying, hey, bye. Yeah, we're at the airport and we'll have a safe trip. And she said, yeah, put your girlfriend on. I just want to say bye. And I was like. So I give the phone to her, and I don't know, I'm looking at my boarding pass and then I hear her go, what's it called? 50 shades of what? So there was my mom recommending 50 shades of gray to my girlfriend, and I was kind of, like, mortified. But.

I didn't know if I thought it was cool that my girlfriend was going to read it or that it was uncool that my mom recommended it literally in front of me. Another story, another time. That being said, I started to look at some of the stats, like, on erotica novels and, you know, erotican romance, and how many of them are self published. I mean, it is crazy. Self publishing is so, so, so huge right now, and so many people are publishing their stories on Amazon, and I started to look at them and inside the books. So if you're a big publisher, publishers almost never even put a call to action to subscribe to a newsletter in their books until somewhat recently. I've seen Simon and Schuster do it, but you're subscribing to the publisher's mailing list, and that's fine if you're the publisher, but it doesn't help the author that much. A lot of these indie authors, one of the things they were not doing To a massive detriment is they were not putting any links inside their self published Kindle book that says, hey, if you'd like to get more from me, click here and sign up for my list and I'll let you know when the next book comes out. And there are so many of them out there who just publish it. Some of them were killing it. Absolutely doing tremendous numbers by their ranking on Amazon. And I thought, you know, if you just reach, reached out to a bunch of these self published erotica authors, for instance, and just said who you are, what you're doing. The beautiful part about a Kindle book especially is that you can re upload the file and it changes on a dime. So every new buyer gets something. You could literally ask them to include one page. You could probably pay them 50 bucks, I don't know, something nominal to include one page in their book with a link to an opt in form. And you tell them, I'm building up a syndicate, a publishing syndicate of independent authors of erotica stuff. And what this will help you do, I'm paying you to help build this list so that when you write your next book, we are going to email that entire book and let you and let everybody know about it. And it's the power of like a private syndicate like that. And the main reason I thought that could be powerful is because people are having tremendous success and they aren't capturing names, they aren't building a tribe or a following. That kind of brings me to one of the next things that you did and you shared this with me offline is this Buck Books thing. But you were talking about a launch platform. So you know, my little idea, I didn't know if it was a good idea or not. I didn't run with it. But that's just kind of how I think. Like, man, there's all these people out there with unexploited real estate. But what is this Buck Books that you're, that you built?

Well, obviously it's Buck flogging and you'll see his beautiful face.

Is that Buck? That's Buck on the dollar bill. I love it.

Yeah, that's Buck, baby.

That's Buck driving.

Driving the ladies wild.

Yeah. Okay, so this is a launch platform for you. And when you were telling me little details about it, you said you were kind of blown away by how successful.

Yeah, well, first of all, going back to what you said about getting subscribers and like we said originally, you know, you really should be able to get, you know, you want to be able to launch A book and at least be able to get, I don't know, 20 or 30 reviews and a thousand downloads early. And if you have a subscriber list built and you release that book really cheap at 99 cents or in some cases, what I do is actually release it for free, so I'll get even more reviews and more downloads.

It's all the power that you would ever need to be a successful author. It's as important as writing a good book. I mean, it is half the battle is just being able to build a subscriber list of people who like your work that you can directly communicate with when you have something new to come out, when your books go on sale so that you can prop it back up in the rankings with some discounted buying activity. I mean, it's everything. So anyway, we have, you know, this 99 cent launch thing is really powerful, but obviously very few authors have enough subscribers on a mailing list to be able to get those thousand downloads and some of those early reviews. So we, what we've done what Buck has done. This is Buck's genius idea. I can't take any credit for it.

That's all Buck.

It's all Buck.

What we're doing is we're getting a bunch of books and authors together to mark their books down to 99 cents all on the same day for a 24 hour flash sale. And then all those authors using an affiliate link so they can actually get a little affiliate commission to drive traffic to the page. They drive as much traffic to the Buck Books page as possible, which is archangelink.com Buckbooks drive as many people to that page as possible on the day of the sale. So all, let's say there's 12 authors. Each author is capable of driving 1,000 people to the page on the day of the sale. We have 12,000 people that descend upon this website. We also get a 21% subscriber rate.

Whoa.

Opt in right there. Right. So we get a ton of subscribers that we can. For the next Wednesday. We do these every Wednesday for the next Wednesday. We can send more subscribers over to the page on the day of the sale as well. We also have other outside affiliates. We've. And again, this is very new. We started this May 30th.

Oh, wow. Cool. Yeah. And right now today's July 3rd, so.

Yeah, today's. Yeah, we're July 3rd. We've only had two big bundles that we've done and those two big bundles were enough to send seven books into the top 100 in the Kindle store, I think top 100 had over 2,000 downloads.

Wait a minute, top 100 in paid Kindle All?

Yes.

Wow, that's enormous.

Oh yeah. It's ridiculous. I mean, right out of the gate, May 30, we had our first bundle. We had over 7,000 people come to the page to see these 1299 cent books. And all in all, I think 8,000 copies were sold. So people were really just 99 cents. People just snatched these books up. And you have to remember too, that these authors, they're driving their loyal traffic over to the page as well. So they're selling a lot of their own books and then they'll sell a few. All the authors are really working together to help sell each other's books. The strategy works great. I mean, you could do it on your own if you had a big following. You wouldn't necessarily need to rely on other authors to drive additional traffic and our Buckbook subscribers and all that stuff. But why the hell not? We don't even charge for authors to be in it. We're actually paying them affiliate commission for driving traffic to our site to sort of mimic what they they would get for Amazon Associates commission if they were to do it, send people directly to Amazon. So it's really cool. And I think it's going to be just a monster performer for a book promotional vehicle.

I'll bet it is. So let me, let me see if I understand this. So I'm on.

Archangel Inc. With a k I n k.com buckbooks. So as I understand it, you have, as I scroll down here and I see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, there's something like eight books on there with four spaces available at least right now. And then if I click on one of these books, the Fat Loss Bible, for instance, it takes me to Amazon and I see I could buy that on Kindle for $9.99.

Right. Well, you'll see there's a timer on there. That one hasn't started. That's for the upcoming one that we're having on July 9, which is sort of a Fat Loss Summer slim type of themed bundle.

Cool. So you're gearing up for it.

We're gearing up for it. We're filling in the last slots and trying to get everybody all dialed in and ready to go on it.

Nice. Okay, so the next thing you're going to do is tell all the authors who are participating on this, everybody go into your. This is assuming that these are not all people that you published or These are some of them you published, some of them that you didn't.

Oh, no, there's some. There's a lot of outside people in there. I think maybe there's three that we published that we're sneaking in.

Awesome. Okay, so you tell everybody. Let's just say it's all like nine books or whatever. Or 12, whatever it's gonna be. Let's just say nine to make it easy. Wait, three, four. That's 12.

Yeah, we usually try to do 12 unless we just can't find 12 authors to participate.

Cool. So I got 12 books here, and then everybody drops the price to 99 cents at the exact same time, right?

Yeah. Like Tuesday morning, the day before the Wednesday sale, everybody drops just the kindle price to 99 cents.

Cool. Now, if they have a. Hopefully they have a list and they have a following, whether it's social media or an email following. And everybody sends as much traffic as they can to this saying, hey, guys, go get my book and pick up, pick up some more. Pick up 12 books for $12.

Yeah. Basically, they'll say, you know, my book is on sale for 99 cents. Go get it. And instead of linking directly to Amazon, they link to buck books. Right. And if authors are trusting enough to be able to all do that together, working as a team, it provides tremendous cross exposure for everybody else there. And the authors sell a lot more than they would have if they would have sent people directly to Amazon. Plus, you know, the authors that really send a lot of people over, hey, man, let's. Let's do this every week. You know, we're going to be recruiting them to get them in as many bundles as we can. They're the ones that are sending over subscribers. We also have a subscriber list that we're building. We promote books directly to that subscriber list. We did that yesterday and sent a book to number two in its category. It actually passed into Thin air. It's like an outdoor adventure type of book. I mean, nice. It did great. And like I said, we just started. This is what we built off of two bundles. And we're going to do this 52 times a year. So it's going to be a beast, I think.

Yeah, that's amazing. And then what really makes it work, not only does the rising tide lift all boats, I send people over to buy my book there, but then they can buy the other people's books in there and they can subscribe to your email list. You said it looked like something over 20, 22% of people subscribe, so then that builds up your ability to promote. So the next time.

If I have participated with you and I come out with another book, I can make it so that you, you can blast your list about my book. I can do it specifically for your people. I can drop the price or do whatever. And now we're all playing just a really cooperative game and helping everybody.

Oh yeah. I mean, any authors who have a substantial following and are capable of driving traffic that are willing to participate. I mean, we're just going to keep on ripping this thing and, you know, doing as well as we can with it. But it looks really promising. The numbers are great. The fact that we've already sent seven into the top 100. We had two books break the top 32.

The top 30, man. What were you guys, what kind of downloads were you guys getting a day on that?

Let's see, we had.

About 2,500. Now not all of them are sold through Buck books. What happens is Maybe they sell 800 through Buck Books and then that props them up in the rankings and then everybody in the world, that's what I'm saying, browsing for books on Amazon sees that book and sees it at 99 cents and click, click, click, click, click. And that leads to hundreds, if not a thousand or more additional sales. And then right at midnight they switch the price back to 9.99 or 2.99 or whatever the price normally is. Then they go on to get at least a week or two and sometimes much longer. And especially if it's a new book being launched, it's a permanent improvement to what they would have seen otherwise. They go on to get weeks worth of full paid full price sales. Not just getting those 99 cent crummy 35 cent commissions, but getting the full $7 on a $9.99 ebook and really killing it. For example, one of the authors that in one of the books that we've published that we are hyper focused on because he's our number one seller, his book was selling about $60 a day on Kindle before the promo. He sold 2,000 copies during the promo, made it all the way up to 35 in the Kindle store the next day. I think he sold over 100 at 9 99. So he made like $700 the following day.

That's great.

And then after that he sort of settled into the hundred to $150 a day range. And of course he went from having I think like 25 reviews to 70 something now. So it's just, and that was just. I mean, we're just talking about five weeks ago. It's really done amazing things for him. And his sales are still elevated five weeks later beyond what they were the day before that. That promo that we did for it on the 30th.

That is cool. You know, so I was on your, I was on your Facebook page the other day and I noticed you did a post and I'm thinking that you had something to do with this. I see 20 life changing books box set. 20 best selling authors share their secrets to health, wealth and happiness or whatever. Is this something that you had involvement with?

Yeah, this was put together by Tom Corson Knowles. Like I said. I reached out to Tom with an email and you know, like you said you could reach those big people like Mark Cuban. But there are so many people out there that are medium sized influencers on the Internet. They're big enough that they have a following. They have, you know, 5, 10,000 likes on Facebook. They get a little web traffic every day. They got 5,000 subscribers on their mailing list. There are thousands of people like that on the Internet and they're not so big that they'll blow you off. You have to get through eight different assistants before you reach them. They're literally going to answer an email that you send them two hours later. And that's how it was with Tom. Now when I contacted Tom, Tom has TCK Publishing. He's doing almost the exact same thing that we're doing. So instead of treating him like a competitor, I said, hey man, I know you're a good guy. I've read your books. I'm familiar with you. He'd actually interviewed me for a podcast appearance on something health related a couple years prior. So he knew of me and I knew that.

I just told him. All we're trying to do is help authors be more successful. It's an endless abyss of people looking to, you know, basically put out more professional products and sell them better. And we're doing the same thing here. We're not trying to be competitors. And from day one we've been just trying to collaborate together to help each other.

That's great.

So the, the, in whatever way we can. So he, he put, he put this together. I was going to say he put this together. We snuck one of our authors in there. Same author I was just talking about. Golden Boy we call him. His name is Ari Witten. His book's forever Fat Loss and it's just killing it. But we snuck him in there and then I promoted that through the Buck Book subscriber list and also my other subscribers that I built through 180 Degree Health. We sold oh, maybe seven or 800 copies of the book and helped it reach. I think it made it up to around 30, 35 in the Kindle store as well. But again, that was a similar deal but a little bit of a different take on it. You have 20 authors promoting the same book instead of the same page and I think they sold six or seven thousand copies. They were really trying to hit the New York Times bestsellers list so they could all put that on their resume. That was what they were shooting for. I don't know if they're gonna quite make it or not, but they came pretty close and it was still a really fun event. And you know, I try to sneak at least one of Tom's books into our book bundles every week for free as well. That's how brotherly our relationship is. And I think that extension of goodwill has been largely responsible for how easy we were to turn this thing into non existent to very successful in a heartbeat with no money.

Dude, that's. Yeah, that's amazing. I love it. I love what you're doing there. And I'm on the Archangel Inc. Page right now. So let's say somebody wants to publish with Archangel Inc. They don't want to necessarily go with themselves. They want to work with you traditional publishers. I say this, you know, and I'll even start off with this because a lot of folks who will hear me, you know, they know me as an Amazon guy and I'm an expert. I've done, you know, a lot of books on Amazon.

Although, and I, and I have a lot of expertise about this. I've been interviewed by other people for my personal Amazon strategies and then they say, hey, can I, can I publish with you? And that's really not a big part of my business anymore. I do it very selectively for only a handful of clients and I don't have a, like a big publishing business like you have here. And I'm definitely not doing a lot of the things you're doing. So I think this is great. And at the same time, if somebody wants to be published with you, they can either go on their own. Well, I mean they can go their own and try to shop it to a big Main street publisher, which we're not even going to go into the reasons why that's not a good idea in most cases. But let's say they're going to self publish. They're going to either do it themselves or they're going to come to Archangel Inc. With a K.

And work with you guys. Who are you looking for? What kind of authors, what kind of experts, what kind of books are you looking for?

And then.

Just say, I personally, let's say I personally want to come to you and do my stuff. Give me, give me the criteria. What are you looking for?

Well, I mean, the best candidate for us is somebody that's completely juiced full of steroids, has a lot of pictures themselves, spray tanned with abs busting out, and then writing something about losing weight. I mean, we could sell that all day long. But really, ultimately, this is how we make our assessments and this is how we do things.

We will take a look at a project and we'll take a look at the kind of initial investment that we need to put in this thing to get it up to what we consider to be our specifications, Give it a nice cover, choose what formats we think it'll be viable in. All those kinds of things. Keywords, book description, editor, proofreader, we do all that stuff. The author doesn't have to pay for any of these things. Okay? We make the choices about what we think it needs. We try to get it up to our specs, run it through our system, and then we try to estimate what kind of cost that's that we're gonna have to incur. Also, we also make obviously a judgment call about how saleable a book is when we get it in. Now, if we get a book about breeding seahorses, we know it's not gonna be bestseller, right? So we know that if we say it's a 100,000 word book about breeding seahorses, there's no way we're going to send that to an editor because there's just no way. We would never, never come close to getting that money back. So what we do is we make a judgment call. We do as much as we can with the sort of budget that we set for the project.

We set budgets well over a thousand for some authors and some authors. We basically set a zero budget saying, hey, this isn't all that sellable, but, you know, we'll do a few things and we'll help you market it better and you know, you'll do better with us than you would have been going at it alone. We feel pretty confident we can help just about any author perform better than they would on their own. And that's currently our criteria. We'll see how big we get and how much of a headache it is when we get much larger capacity of authors wanting to publish with us. But right now it's, you know, pretty much a thumbs up, you know, for the most part. And we haven't come across too much yet that we've had to turn down, especially in nonfiction. But we set a budget for it and then we do it and get it done. We basically open the floodgates to start. Hey, come on in, publish with us. 70, 30. You get the 70 and we'll handle all the expenses and we'll market it and promote it. All you have to do is send us a rough manuscript. And.

Lo and behold, authors were wanting to publish with us. And what we did is we're spending an average of $500 per project.

And we published. I mean, we ran into a minus $20,000 mark in a month. And we were like, we can't just keep racking up debt. We don't want to go and fetch investors. We don't have any more money that we can throw at this. So what we started to do to remedy that a little bit was have the authors pay a deposit amount up front. Because when you publish on Amazon, let's say we get a book in April, we do a bunch of stuff to it. We pay freelancers out at the end of April, we launch the thing in May, we don't get the first royalties until the end of July.

Yeah, there's. Well, yeah, on Kindle, it's like a 60 day lag.

Oh yeah, it's rough. I mean you get not until the end of July. So we're spending $500 in April and waiting until the end of July before we see our first nickel. So what we decided to do is just secure a deposit from the author that is an estimate of what we believe the expenditures will be on the book and then we pay the author back that in six months. I don't think we'll have to see how it develops over time. I mean, we're always going to be adapting and making changes as we see fit. It would be fun to open the floodgates again once we get more revenue coming in.

But that's probably not going to be until sometime next year. And maybe by then we'll be so busy that we'll, we'll finally be to a point where we have to turn authors away and be more selective and only, you know, kind of kick the breeding seahorses authors to the curb and focus more on our steroid laced Superman type superhero figures that we can, you know, throw on the COVID and Sell them to a bunch of ripe young chubby teenagers or whatever. I don't know.

Yeah, exactly. Now, speaking of that, do you, do you guys, is there any genre that you guys typically prefer that's health obviously and health, wealth, relationships. The big three kind of genres. Are those?

Yeah, those are the big ones for us. Health nutrition is by far the biggest for us right now. But we're doing everything that we can to sort of help balance that out and make us a little bit more of a well rounded publishing company. But because of my own personal connections and my knowledge of that industry and that sector and publishing those types of books specifically, you know, that's our best performing books right now by far. But like I said, we're trying to become a little bit more of a well rounded publishing house, not specialized. Maybe that's a mistake, but we'll see what happens in the future. And how. Well, like I said, we just published an outdoor travel book yesterday that's doing just fine. And so I think we're going to be able to publish a wide variety of things in the future.

That's cool. Well, any way I can help you, let me know. I'm happy to.

Continue this offline work with you, see if there's ways that I can help because I definitely get a lot of listeners and friends and folks looking for this kind of help where I'm no longer in the position where I'm doing a lot of this. Once more, it's only handful of people that I work with. So we, we definitely aren't competing. You can probably help some people that I know very well and I'm happy to push those along.

Well, hey, I think the best thing to help us right now, I mean I got an audiobook team of 10 and I know that we provide by far the best value anywhere in this industry. There is just, there's just nothing is even close. It's not even close. And I mean that's where I'm at right now. Because indie authors aren't even thinking about audio books and we could churn them out for half price. You guys do any think they're going to pay for it? And any nonfiction author with a book that's not, you know, the length of the Bible is going to be able to get their money back on a book really quickly. We have some authors making over $1,000 a month on their audiobook in certain genres, especially that self help, inspiration, spirituality sort of realm. I mean that's just huge on audiobook. We've seen great success over there.

That's not bad at all. Now, do you guys do any ghost writing as well, or do you. Pretty much. They need to write the book, I'm sure. I mean, you guys could probably do ghost writing for a fee if, you know.

We do have one book that we've ghostwritten. We're just finishing up, putting the last little details on it. It's going to come out in a couple weeks, so we are testing that out. I'm hoping not to get into too much of that, because I think, honestly, if we were going to ghost write a book, I don't think we'd want to get only 30% of the royalties on that.

No, that changes the whole dynamic. I mean, that changes the dynamic completely. So.

But I mean, I'm thinking. I mean, certainly it's on my radar. I'm thinking, well, geez, man, if we can make money off of books that we're getting a 30% royalty cut on, imagine if we ghost, you know, had ghostwriters writing on topics that we selected and niches that we thought were very viable, and we still pass it through our editors and did our normal thing and made sure that that thing was sharp. We gave it the kind of COVID and professionalism that we normally give everything all wrapped up in. Geez, what if we did that? But we got 100% of the royalties instead of 30%, so it's. It's on my radar. It does still seem to me to be a little bit sketchy of a practice. I mean, it's not too sketchy. A lot of people do it, but there's just something slightly weaselly about it that I'm not 100% behind.

And ultimately we don't need to. And I like helping out. Real. I'm doing it for. I do it because I like to help people out. I mean, that's fun.

Oh, yeah.

I don't get up in the morning, and first thing I do, check my bank account. First thing I do is check our author's ranking and seeing how they're doing and.

Making sure that we're performing up to the expectations they had for us and what we're able to do for them. Because that's what gets me fired up. And seeing all these authors like, holy cow, man, I'm number one on health, fitness, and dieting. You got to be kidding me. Is this a dream? And being able to do that for people means a lot more to me.

Than, oh, it's a lot of fun.

The money part, because, you know, the money's going to come in when you.

When you're serving people, helping them out, providing value for everybody, consumers and them, the money's going to come so you don't even have to focus on it. The money's going to pop up into your bank account. There it is. Cool. More money.

Yeah. So the ghostwriting thing, I know it would be profitable, but again, profit alone is not enough to motivate me. If that was all I needed to inspire me, I'm sure I would have found easier, more efficient ways to make money at this point. But dude inspires me.

If all I wanted to do was make money, I wouldn't be giving out a free podcast every single week. That's right, Brad, because it's fun. Although, I don't know, I may have to go the subscription model. Make everybody pay me money.

As I said, I do do it for fun. I do it also as a great platform because I get to meet people like yourself and find out what you're doing. And if I can give you a platform to reach other people and whatnot, I think it's a win, win, win for you, for me and the listeners out there. Dude, this has been a blast though. I really appreciate you taking the time to jump on the call and talk about your business and what you've been able to do. Especially. This is cool. You've had just such tremendous momentum with this, even just recently. I like people who take massive action. That is really, really cool.

So if people want to know more about you, go get kill your blog by Buck flogging on Amazon. If you are a blogger, content creator, website owner, et cetera, or even thought about getting into that, you can, you know, you just heard what Matt has said quite a bit about that on the early part. If you've never thought about having a book before, you kind of procrastinated. There's no reason to procrastinate anymore. Get it out there, go to Ark. It's Archangel or Archangel.

It's Archangel. And I apologize for the complexity of the name, but my partner's name is Rob Archangel and that's really.

That's his real name.

That's a pretty baller ass name. That's not taking advantage of taking advantage of it.

He didn't give himself that name. He isn't like, hey, my name's Rob Smith. You're gonna have to start calling me Rob Archangel.

No, no, he wasn't Rob Smith. He's the legitimate Robert Roberto, actually. But is it Roberto Archangel?

Like that's on his driver's license, Also.

Known as also known as Mr. Roboto. I call him and tell me that's.

On his driver's license is Archangel.

Oh, yeah. No, it is on his driver's license. That is legitimately his name. We are not Catholics. We are not.

I just. I would love to be in the car if he gets pulled over by a cop or even carted at bars or whatever. That's got to be so awesome. Go ahead. Give me a. Go ahead and give me a ticket, Mr. Officer, sir. And I'd just be staring him down like, give me a ticket. You're going to hell. You see who I am? God, that would be fun.

I'm gonna tell the big man upstairs about this.

That would. Ah. I just. It's just. I can just see it. That would be so cool. That is the coolest name I think I've ever heard. But so arc a r c h dash a n g e l I n k dot com Archangel Inc. Go by.

Kill your blog and 18180 degreehealth.com if you want to see your, you know, your health site. Subscribe to your stuff. I know that. I've been there. I really like it. I know James said he subscribed to your newsletter as well.

Anybody else, if you are. If you're curious about the stuff we've talked about, if you have your own bacon wrap strategy, if you want to share with me, send an email to askbradaconwrappedbusiness.com Ask Brad @bracon wrapped business.

You can also leave a review on itunes. I read those things every day. Every day we get new ones. I love them. It helps propel the show up the rankings. It helps tell everybody else how much you like it. And the more people that like it, the better we do. The more often I do this. If it falls on deaf ears, I'm just gonna hang it up and go make my own money and keep all this knowledge and nuggets to myself. However, I do like to share with you, so please take a few moments. Leave a review on itunes, and if you'd like a second opinion on anything you're doing, your marketing strategy, your business strategy, if you are looking for resources that you don't seem to have and you've asked yourself who else might know somebody that could help me, send an email Once more, ask bradaconwrappedbusiness.com Matt Buck, whoever the hell you are, thank you for joining me today, buddy. And I look forward to talking to you a lot more.

Thanks, man. That was the perfect exit. I really appreciate having me on. Brad, you're a cool dude. I wish you great success with your podcast and beyond. And keep in touch, man.

You too, buddy. Take care.

Sa.