How To Find Your Tribe and Sell Thousands of Books

Welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Now, if you are an author, you've written a book, or you are thinking about writing a book but are slightly overwhelmed by the challenges of marketing that book, and you've heard, especially with AI, more and more books coming out daily, and you're competing with the big publishers and the AI-generated publishers, and you've got a book you want to get to your audience But you don't know how to do that, today's episode is going to be for you because we're going to talk to DC Poulter, who's an author, but also a longtime tech entrepreneur and experienced investor as well. Joining us from Santa Monica in LA, DC Poulter, welcome to the show.

Hey, Jim, thanks for having me on today. Looking forward to the discussion.

Me too. Well, you've got a book called To Kill a Mockingbird. Oh no, that was someone else.

Not quite, not quite. Not that famous yet. No, no, To Kill a Unicorn.

Tech Killer Unicorn.

Yes.

Great title. DC, tell us a little bit about the book because obviously you want to know the context, but also how are you managing to generate interest in the book and readership when, you know, you're writing a novel about the high-tech industry? So, you know, it's maybe not obvious in terms of how you're going to get that into the New York Times bestseller. How are you going about this?

Yes. Well, I'm waiting for Oprah to call, but so far she hasn't called yet.

She must just be busy.

That would make me famous, but still waiting for that call. So you're absolutely right that everyone has a novel in them. And some people actually sit down and write it and it takes them months to years to do it. And they think, wonderful, I'm done. I got the book, I got the book, I'll put it on Kindle and the world will come running to it. And of course, it turns out Writing the book's the easy part. Marketing the book is a difficult part. And that's no different from my experience as a startup founder with technology products, that building the product was the easy part. Getting the world to know about it, to be aware of it, to buy it was the tough part. And so I always say marketing is 2/3 of the job. The engineers hate to hear that because they're like, I've built the greatest thing in the world. But unless somebody knows about it, you haven't built anything.

Yeah, no, I absolutely hear you. I was at a conference recently saying the same with podcasts and especially now with books where there's so much content that at least 2/3 and definitely no less than half of your effort should be on the marketing. So you've got a great background in high tech and in high tech and in startups. where you're used to trying to cross the chasm from innovation to early adoption and then to mass adoption. And it's the chasm where most people get lost. DC, what lessons did you learn from building startups that you are applying to introducing and getting readers for To Kill a Market— I'm going to say that again.

To Kill a Unicorn.

To Kill a Unicorn.

So surprisingly, I've— the techniques I learned in building a networking simulator product and network acceleration products, very niche products for a particular audience, I've applied to consumer marketing, which seems like it should be completely different, but the techniques end up being the same. If you're competing against Cisco, you're competing against Google, these other giants out there, you can't just stand up there and say, I've got a better product. It doesn't work. You can't compete with them. Their budget just for parties is bigger than your entire company. Their budget for advertising, you know, they can do Super Bowl ads. You're lucky if you can put a billboard up in front of your office. So you have to be strategic about it. You don't have a big budget. You don't have a lot of name recognition, but you have to get your market out there. So on the high-tech side, I did the same thing. The key I thought was finding the audience, the very niche audience that needs your product. And that's what Crossing the Chasm talks about for your early adopters. Get in front of them, find out where they are, and market to them. And so that's not doing Super Bowl advertising. That is finding out what trade shows they're gonna be at, finding out what publications they look at online. And you can't afford $20,000, $50,000 for an advertising campaign on, you know, InfoWorld or something like that. So, you have to get articles written about it. You have to find things that are interesting and exciting to them. I applied those same techniques to the novel. So, everyone says, if you have a novel, you know, go get reviews in the New York Times. Well, New York Times is not going to write about that. It is not going to write a review of a small press book. They just don't do it. Oprah, I'm still hoping she'll call, but she hasn't called yet. My novel is a mystery about the tech industry, about a startup similar to Theranos that's doing some evil things that they're keeping hidden. And the main character is a hacker who's trying to find his missing friend who works at that company. And then he ends up digging in and finds out the real story behind the company. So, I wrote it to be very specific about the tech industry and to be very, in some sense, some extent, it's a farce, but you're not gonna get the jokes unless you're part of the tech industry, unless you know the startup world. So the book is not for your typical mystery reader, the mystery book clubs, the library book clubs. And my audience doesn't read the New York Times. I mean, a few of them do, but they're not reading the book reviews in the New York Times. So I said, where are they? Well, they're building startups, they're building technology, they are looking for investment. Well, these are all places I'm at. I'm in accelerators, I'm in the investment community, I'm writing articles, I'm mentoring these startups. One thing I did that ended up being very successful was I started writing articles about what investors are looking for when you pitch to them. And I published those on my blog, I published them on Substack, I published them on Medium. It took off on Medium. I now have 50,000 followers. My articles get read by tens of thousands of people. And I did that. Yeah, sure, I wanted to help the startups, but I also wanted to promote my own book. So every article, I give some very useful advice. Here's what your pitch deck needs to be. Here's what the investment world is looking for. here's what your marketing process needs to be. But at the end, I said, if you enjoyed this, please take a look at my book. And a little blurb at the end, my own self-marketing, my own self-advertising. And I'm getting in front of 50,000 of the exact kind of people that would enjoy the book, which is not your typical novel audience. A lot of the people don't even read novels for the most part, but if it's about their world, It's about hackers and startups and founders in Silicon Valley that they'll read. So that's been my process.

I love that, that as you say, you've got really a niche product in that sense, haven't you?

Yes.

And you're really taking the classic niche marketing approach.

But the great thing is the niche is big. So when I was making network simulators, our niche was a few thousand companies. With novels, there's something like 50,000 startups being started every year, and there's probably 2 founders and 5 tech people all over the world. And so this is not going to be a New York Times bestseller, but that audience of the startup community, Silicon Valley community, is tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. So it's It's a niche. It's a relatively small niche, but it's a big enough niche that you can do very well with selling a book. Yeah.

And although actually, you know, to be a New York Times bestseller, the volume that you need to sell is not that great. It's about getting the high sell-through rate in the first 7 days. The same with Amazon. It's remarkably low, but you need to get traction very quickly in the first 48 hours to get up the charts, and then it boosts the book if it sees you already doing well. Um, just for anyone that's, that's worried about— and that's why some of these publishers will lay out the, you know, the advance copies so that people review them, of course, as well.

Yes.

DC, you know, you're, you're based in LA, uh, and you have a background as well with Japan, and you publish, uh, under Japonica Publications as well, I think. So With the writing and the style, can you give any guidance on what works for people that are looking at using, in effect, their authority in one domain, which is in your tech and your Japan world, to lead people so that it doesn't seem too jarring? Because if you're talking about investor decks and then go, Yeah. Oh, and by the way, you know, it may be slightly— here's an L. Here's an L. People may, you know, be slightly bemused by that. Yeah. How have you, how have you feel like managing the transition from an editorial point of view?

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So, in terms of the editorial, when I'm writing about startups, when I'm giving advice about how to build a startup. The writer hat stays on, but the novelist hat goes away. Most of what I write about comes out of working with startups in the accelerators. It's the same questions over and over again. It's the same mistakes. It's the same misunderstanding. It's looking at pitch decks and saying, here's what's wrong about it. So all of that information is just like inside screaming, saying, people need to understand this. And so as a writer, It's just natural for me to write those out and do an article, 1 or 2 articles a week about what you need to know. It's just the same things coming out of regular conversations. Then the hard part then, as you say though, is like, okay, so I've written this article about here's what you need to do to talk to investors in 2023 and getting to the end and saying, and if you enjoyed that, read my novel. Right. So part of it is that I don't— yes, they're very different things, but it's the same audience. And I separate them. I get to the end of the article, I wrap up the article, and then there's a blurb at the end saying, if you enjoyed this, here's my novel. So I don't talk about the novel in the article itself, except when I'm writing articles about Theranos and what happened to— what happened there. And then it's a direct tie-in. But for the rest of it, I separate it. It just looks like an advertisement for my article at the end. So, um, it's not— I don't try to weave it into the story.

Okay. And then are you also offering some of your expertise to people that might want you to, um, review their deck?

Yes, yes.

But maybe don't have a budget to pay you for that. How are you responding to that request?

Yeah, so, um, pretty much every day I get 2 or 3 requests on LinkedIn saying, I'm a startup founder, can you look at my deck? You know, you've written this article, It resonated with me. Can you look at my deck and give me some advice? And it's kind of overwhelming because I do want to help out, but it was a lot. And then I said, well, you know, these people want a favor from me. It takes my time. I charge them, except they don't have enough to pay me for it. If they had money to pay me, they wouldn't need my help writing the pitch deck. So I do it on a limited basis, but I have I've turned it into a service that says, well, you want a favor from me. It's going to take me somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour of my time to go through your pitch deck and write up my notes about it. And I want a favor from you. You have to buy my novel. It costs you, you know, the ebook is $5.99. So it's not like you're going to go broke. And you have to write a review on Amazon. Now everyone's like, oh my God, I have to write a review. I'm not a writer. It's like, no, the thing about Amazon is it's about quantity rather than quality. All you need is 2 lines, right? It's just like, give it 5 stars. 5 stars or 4 stars, be honest about it and just say, I enjoy the book, great story about Silicon Valley, something like that. That's all I need, right? Because you just need the quantity. I don't need like a 2-page analysis of everything that went on in the book, but I want you to read the book. I want you to enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy it, that's fine too. Be honest. But you want my time, I want a favor back from you. So I've turned this into a bit of a service of, Yeah, if you want a pitch deck review, read my novel and write a review, and I'll read your pitch deck and give you a review.

Great, DC Paul. And I love the way that you're using your expertise to also introduce people to another aspect of you, which is as a novelist, which must also give people a little bit of a surprise to see that you're a bit of a Renaissance man. In that sense, is there something that you've done with regarding the book and marketing to kill a unicorn? Being very careful with my words now. Any advice on what has not worked with the marketing?

So what everyone says is, you know, if you can get in with the big publishers, great, then they'll do the marketing, they'll get you in New York Times, wonderful. If you get there, Congratulations to you. That's a very small percentage of people. The rest of your choice is small press or self-publishing. As soon as you self-publish, on day one, you'll be inundated with people saying, your book is wonderful. I'd be happy to do a review for you. And then you're like, okay, great. And then they say, and, you know, send me a check, you know, send me Venmo for $100. And you get dozens of these reviews or posting on their blog sites or featuring different places. They can get you some readership. But if you look at the ROI from it, which as a business person, you always have to look at the ROI, it's, it's not going to pay for itself. So if you just want readers, and you don't care that you're kind of throwing some money away, then, you know, that's fine. But if, if you're looking at actually making money from your book, don't waste your time on on people offering you their marketing services for the most part.

Yeah, that's really good advice. I had that when I published my books as well, that people said, as you say, everyone else has this, your book is wonderful, I'd love to help, let me give you a review, and then you get the sting in the tail. So that's fantastic advice there. And I think this idea that you're really focusing in on where your audience are is terrific. DC, so you've got the first book, To Kill a Unicorn. Is there going to be another book coming out?

Absolutely. And I'm happy to announce here on your show for the very first time, the second book is in the same series, is the same characters. This one's more, less of a farce and more of a cyber thriller about government conspiracies and terrorists. It's called Countdown to Decryption. C2D, Countdown to Decryption, and it will be released by the same publisher, Panda Moon Publishing, on March 20th.

Okay, well, that's coming up very, very soon.

Look out for that.

Yep, timing, timing will be perfect for that. So if you've got the same characters presumably in To Kill a Unicorn, the, the company might have been killed, but the, the main actors were not killed off.

So yes, so in the first book, it's about this evil startup like Like Theranos, and the main characters are trying to figure out what's going on there. In the second book, same characters, but the friend of one of the main characters is killed under— murdered under suspicious circumstances. The government says it's a home invasion robbery, and that doesn't make any sense. So the main character is a hacker, hacks into this murdered friend's email, and finds a— the last message that was— last email that was opened was a message from the terrorists saying— and well, and it wasn't random because she's, she's a human rights lawyer working in the Middle East. And she gets this message saying, attached is a file that has the plans for, for a terrorist attack, you need to, you need to get this to the authorities and stop it. And she's murdered 5 minutes later. So that starts the action. And the character needs to figure out how to open this, because he doesn't have the password, how to open this file and also figure out who murdered her. So it's a grand adventure.

Yeah, I can see that. And Oprah surely will listen to this show and be calling you.

It's exactly the kind of book she focuses on.

Yeah, maybe she can ring me and I can offer to broker an introduction.

Yes.

I know you'll be too busy to take her call, so I'll offer to help.

I'll keep that in mind. Thank you for that offer.

Yeah, you're more than welcome. So DC, if there is a tip, you know, one tip that you'd like to suggest to, you know, not just aspiring authors, although you're very smartly taking the experience you've got from the startup world and seeing the book as a startup, what would be the one piece of advice you give to me and my fellow unnoticed entrepreneur?

So, I described what I did that works for me, which is writing articles about startups and getting in front of the audience that way and being at startup events and accelerators and places like that. That's what works for me because that's where my audience is. So forget about what I did. That's not going to work for you. Well, actually, it might work for you, Jim, but for the rest of the audience out there, it's probably not going to work for them because that's not who their audience is. So don't think about what I did, think about the process. And it's the same for whether this is a B2B piece of IT equipment or whether it's a $6 book. Know your audience and find a way to get in front of them that is probably not the front door, is probably not the way everyone else is telling you to do it because that's going to be really expensive and not very effective because there's a lot of noise. You need to find the back doors. You need to find the places where it's people are at, um, in a way that, um, you can do, uh, affordably and still get, uh, and still get them to see you.

And I think it's brilliant advice to, as you say, to see the process that you've taken to find where people are. And you've, say, very, uh, innovatively taken your, your writing and, and also with the offer of looking at their pitch decks to than the review of your book.

It's not the way most people are going to be promoting their novels, but that's what works for my audience with my book. So kind of think about it the same way as you said, you know, lateral thinking. The front door is going to be really crowded. You're gonna have to fight your way through and you have to have a lot of money. You go the back door, it's wide open, but you need to find a way to get around to that.

Yeah, no, that's wonderful. And DC, I'm asking now, people like yourself who are readers and writers, any books or podcasts that you'd recommend that you enjoy that we can put on our list for reading?

So if you like my novel, which is a crazy fun story about all the insanity of Silicon Valley, there's one other book out there that's kind of similar in that way. It's called The Big Disruption by Jessica Powell. So, if you like the TV show Silicon Valley, I think both of my book and her book fit into that same sort of tone. And you'd like both of these books as well.

Okay.

That's The Great Disruption.

And she can use the publicity as well because she has the same challenge I do.

All right. And it's called The Great Disruption?

The Big Disruption. Sorry. The Big Disruption by Jessica Powell.

By Jessica Powell. Okay. We'll put a link to that as well. And DC, if you want to find out more about you and also maybe to get a copy of To Kill a Unicorn or even an advanced copy of your next book, where can they go?

So the easiest description, maybe not the best place, but the easiest description is my website, dcpalter.com. If you want to know more about me, then probably go to LinkedIn, D.C. Palter on LinkedIn, and it'll have my background. And if you have a startup, that's kind of the place to reach out to me.

Okay, that's wonderful. And for those people that are going to be going to the YouTube channel to see this, then we can absolutely put that on the screen so you can see that on the screen. And there is a very nice, uh, image there of a rocket ship going down. And, uh, and you can see you can get the book there from dcpoulter.com. DC, thank you so much for joining us and bringing really an innovative view to this show of marketing with a product that people may not have thought about, how to take traditional startup practices and apply them to book promotion. So thank you so much for bringing us that insight today.

Thanks for having me, Jim. It was a pleasure.

So D.C. Polter, an established entrepreneur in his own right, and now really on a mission to write great novels for a targeted audience. And Really wanted to have him on the show because DC shows us that there is always a way, a method to get to the audience. And often it's an unconventional way, but also that we all have something of value for our audience and we can arbitrage that value. In his case, he's arbitraging his investment advisory expertise in return for reviews. What do you have that your audience needs from you that you can offer them in return for what you need? That would be one of the wonderful takeaways that I've got from today. So thank you for joining DC Poulter and myself, Jim James, here in the UK. And he's giving us a nice wave for those of you that can see on the screen. And for those of you listening, he's giving us a very nice royal wave. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. If you can leave a review, on the podcast player that you listen to this show, because just like his book reviews, podcast reviews are really the way that the players will help us to know what people think of us and to help promote them. Thank you very much for joining me, Jim James, on this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.