How to ghost write a book so good that people think it's fake, with Joshua Lisec.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we're going to Columbus, Ohio to meet Joshua Lysak, who is a ghostwriter but also has a new book coming out, and it's called So Good People Think That It's Fake. Joshua, welcome to the show.

It's a pleasure to be here, Jim. Thank you.

Well, thank you, because you have written and ghostwritten, I think, over 80 books, uh, for clients. You've got your own book out now, and you are one of the only people I've ever seen who's got an ROI calculator on your website for people who publish books. So we're going to talk about self-publishing, but how you've made it look really professional and how you've made having your own book not just part of your business card, but actually part of your business. So Joshua, welcome to the show and tell us a little bit about you and how you help with ghostwriting a book.

Yes, yes. So I can begin with my literary journey because that's where most people want to know, how did you become a ghostwriter? Because it's not every day one meets a ghostwriter. Well, most ghostwriters, they enter the publishing industry or they're a journalist or professional writer in some way, and then a client or friend that they work with in the industry will ask them to write their book. My situation was a little different. My ambition since being a youngster was to write my own books one day, novels particularly. I was a fiction writer as a young fella. When I was 20 years old, I secured myself a 2-book independent publishing deal. And fast forward a couple of years and I'm signing books and I'm taking selfies with fans back when every phone was kind of a flip phone and you had to turn the camera phone around and it would take an off-center picture of the book. Something interesting happened during that season of my life. 2 people who read my novels Reached out to me independently of one another and said the same thing. Joshua, I've wanted to write a book longer than you've even been alive. You've done it twice. Can you help? And I said, okay, fine, sure, I guess I'll help you with your book. And I've been saying, okay, fine, sure, I'll help you with your book ever since. And to this day, I get referrals from those original clients. And it started off with mostly memoirs and autobiographies because they wanted them to read like a novel, not a boring Factual regurgitation of their lives. I was born here, but no compelling and exciting. And then I found myself ghostwriting several memoirs for entrepreneurs and business owners. And then the next few authors, well, how about business books? And now at this point, I'm working on the 81st, 82nd, and 83rd books for clients, entrepreneurs, of course. And along the way, people have been asking me, so Joshua, when's your book coming out? And I finally decided, okay, I've ghostwritten several dozen books now. I need to write my own nonfiction book. And hence, So Good They Call You a Fake here has just come out. And we can talk about the imagery of the Mona Lisa with the Groucho Marx disguise glasses and what that imagery is symbolic of and what the book is about, if you like.

Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, those people that are listening, Joshua's book has a beautiful front cover of the Mona Lisa. Piece of pre-oil spill, I've got to say, um, with the Groucho Marx on it. And, uh, so you've, you've made the front cover look, um, exciting to read. It'll stand out on the Amazon and, uh, Barnes& Noble websites, Joshua. But also you've taken an approach that I believe you take with all your books, which is to be a little bit controversial, a little bit, you know, bombastic and stand out. In this day and age where more and more books are being kind of in the market that are almost auto-generated, tell us your strategy for making books stand out so that they're not just another one of those books that get signed and sort of given away for free by the author.

Yes. And my answer goes to the depth of what if the foundational purpose of a book— some people say a book is a new business card. Well, here in the States, most business cards get thrown in the trash. That's not what happened to books. Books will stay on someone's desk. They will stay within eyesight. They will be around. That is what you want for your business or for your brand. You want to be within reach. You want to have 200 to 300 pages worth of expertise, practical step-by-step with no step-skipped wisdom. That demonstrates that you and you alone are the subject matter expert and the uncontested authority in your niche, to borrow some of the language from my subtitle. And so the purpose of a book is to generate higher quality leads, sales qualified leads in particular, that come to you without being price sensitive, without wanting to price shop you, But like I hear from my clients every single day, Jim, people will say, hey Josh, I got a new client. Somebody posted about my book on LinkedIn, this CEO saw it and now we're doing business together and it's worth quite an incredible amount that they love taking a picture of the check for that they got to work with a particular company. And so what you're doing is you are lowering your customer acquisition cost. By authoring a book, because rather than having to invest, let's say, in direct advertising or marketing or public relations, what you're able to do instead is have your marketing be something that people buy from you. And so I have several clients whose customer acquisition cost is negative, meaning they get paid to make— to create customers from it. And with this revenue calculator, what I want to give people is this sense of a book not as an expense, but as an investment. And so I run the numbers with people. I chatted with a gentleman yesterday. We looked at his business, his services business, and what it is that he offers. And in his case, he needs to convert 13 book readers into clients and he breaks even with my services. So I'm not having people think in terms of, okay, how do we sell the most copies at book launch or get on a bestseller list? It's thinking in terms of how can we break even with this by converting readers into clients. And there's a particular type of structure for doing that, particular type of book that does that. And the vast majority of book ideas and concepts just doesn't pan out.

Joshua, I think that's a really good comment you made at the end, that the vast majority of books don't pan out. What would you say makes a framework for a successful book? Because you've talked about narrative, you talked about a perspective, but in your experience, what does make it a compelling read that supports the entrepreneur's mission but also is sort of engaging to the reader? Because they're not always the same alignment, are they?

That's right, that's right. I advise authors, or authorpreneurs they sometimes, uh, are labeled, To to author what we call an authority book, and so an authority book is a book that builds your authority in the thing that's most valuable and meaningful to you and also to your market, your clientele, your space. And when one thinks about what this is, it becomes rather obvious what should or should not be the book idea. So we use an innovation structure called the Jobs to Be Done Theory, a Jobs to Be Done framework out of San Francisco. It's also been written about and used. Quite extensively at Harvard Business School. The Jobs to Be Done theory goes like this: customers buy tools to get jobs done. They choose the tool they perceive as most valuable and most useful for getting that job done. Kind of straightforward and kind of simple, right? But when we apply Jobs to Be Done theory to a space it's not usually in— literary work publishing— we realize that, oh, a book is not your story. A book is a tool that people are trying to use to get a job done. So if you look at the category on Amazon of sales and selling, what's the job being done there? Oh, it's selling more, selling at, uh, selling more, generating higher quality leads, handling objections, those sorts of things. Oh, okay. So when we think about the Jobs to Be Done theory, there is a way to judge whether or not the most important jobs got done or not. And I follow my own advice with my book. And I say on the front cover, the subtitle, Command Attention, Monetize Your Talent Stack, and Become the Uncontested Authority in Your Niche. Those are 3 jobs. I want to be noticed. I want to get attention. I want to stop being anonymous. I want to stop going unnoticed. That's a set of jobs. And then I want to package my expertise into products. I want to maximally monetize. I want to find every revenue center I possibly can inside of my business that I haven't done yet. That's where the second one comes in. And then the third is being that go-to authority. And so the book, of course, teaches how to write a book, among other things. But the authority book is that teaching people how to get the most valuable jobs done that your business does for them. So, about 4 chapters in, you have an overdelivery of functional value, that step-by-step with no step-skipped practical advice that a certain percentage of the readers can say, okay, this is too hard. I'm just going to hire this author to do it for me.

Okay. And that's the key thing, isn't it there that you are sharing your knowledge, your process, your wisdom that people normally pay for? Is that right, Joshua? So, people hire you. for a particular service. You're sharing how you do that. And then you said the client or the reader then says, you know what, I'm exhausted. There's more to this than I possibly could have imagined. I'm just gonna ring the guy. Is that right?

100%. Yes. Yes. There might be ways to work in your stories from your life, a bit of a memoir mashup, you might say. But the structure of the book ought to be How do I give what feels like might be an overpromise? Like someone might see the title and say, no way, that's clickbait, that's fake. I better look closer just to make sure.

And I think you've raised a very interesting point about how you differentiate the book because there are so many books coming out and only more and more because of the impact of ChatGPT and all these other AI writers, the barriers to Writing have come down a lot. So, you talk about making a bit of an overpromise. Joshua, what's the risk of, if you're overpromising and then people feeling that you've underdelivered?

Does that stop people? Yes. So, there is a chapter in my book on this, right? So, early on in my career, I worked with a lot of people in the personal development and coaching space who were exactly as you described. They were bombastic overpromisers and underdeliverers. And the thing is that their advice was always terse and vague. They would be like, in order to succeed in this endeavor, it's all just mindset. You know, just do it. What does that mean? Oh, it's mindset, bro. You just gotta have a growth mindset. Well, what am I supposed to do? Mindset.

Yeah, I hate it.

And yet if we look at, Many self-help books, that's about the depth that they are. Early on in my, not literary career, but my corporate career, right as my books were initially taking off, my fiction books were taking off, I would write standard operating procedures that would be used internally to train new hires so that we could create consistency and predictable results inside of the business. And that People who had no experience in the industry could perform like veterans in a matter of weeks, if not days. And I wrote over 300 of these standard operating procedures and everything was documenting it step by step with no step skipped. And the metaphor I use in the book is like Lego instructions. So in a Lego set, a child— so I have a couple of kids. And so my son, a little fellow, He can build a spaceship or a castle or this functional robot by following Lego instructions. They are designed so that a child could follow them. And this is the, to use that word, mindset I teach to authors that in order to help readers meet what might feel like clickbait, what might feel like an overpromise, There is a step-by-step way to get them to that destination by structuring your book in such a way— step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4— and they might even correspond to chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4. And you lead them to that destination and everything they're gonna— everything they're gonna need along the way. And number one, it shows that you know what you're talking about. You are in fact the— you have depth of expertise. You've been here, you've done that, you're the guide. But also they can realize this is so much harder than they thought. And I hear anecdotes from my authors that I've ghostwritten for where they'll say clients of theirs, some of their highest paying clients got 4 chapters into the book and said, yeah, I'm not doing this. This is too hard. I'm just going to hire this person. And they heard from them within a day of the book coming out. In some cases within 24 hours, hey, I bought your Kindle book. I got 4 chapters in. This is way bigger than I thought it was going to be. But here's the thing. If the author hadn't written that book, that lead would not have been generated. That client relationship would not have been created. So we realize then that thinking about a book in terms of return on investment is the best way to think about it.

I love that. And then in terms of the, you know, you've described the upside. People love the book. But we also know that some people will be haters of a book, will shoot it down for whatever reason. Joshua, that's often an anxiety for people, especially as an entrepreneur. Maybe they feel a bit fragile or they're used to being in control, which is why they are an entrepreneur in the first place. Putting things out there that may be uncomfortable isn't easy. So what's your view on sort of surviving the haters and the criticism, which could be kind of painful as well, especially it's a first project.

Yes, to be an unnoticed entrepreneur is the riskiest path because it's hard to generate sales qualified leads if no one knows who you are. It is better to be criticized and financially successful than to be safe and to be broke. From my perspective, I want to read you the— so there's a testimonial that's taken from the foreword of my book from a cardiologist client of mine who is a rather controversial figure, and that was by design. And the reason we did that is so that he could build his authority and there would be people who equally love him and equally hate him. And that's what we understand about attraction. It's a fundamental property of nature. In order to attract, you must repel. And this is why the look at magnets, the the the the yin and the yang symbol symbols right of that of that proper balance. And we know that in order to have lovers of your brand, you must also have haters. To have haters, you must also have have lovers. And so to do the sort of things that result in cultivating organic hate for your business will result in creating super fans. And so as as I'm mentioning, on the context of Going from unnoticed to the household name of your industry, this excerpt from Dr. Philip Ovadia, whose book has sold 20,000 copies, by the way. He says, what we did to launch my book, my brand, and my telehealth business has brought me visibility, attention, and engagement, and has allowed me to further my mission on a scale I never imagined possible. Few people know how to generate consistent, predictable results so good they start an internet firestorm. that spreads your name further than you could have on your own. And that is the promise and the pitch of the book So Good They Call You a Fake and of the ghostwriting business. And it's not for everyone. It's not for beginners. It's only for people who are confident enough in their results that if 99 people point at you and say, look at this liar over here, you can simply smile and you know the truth.

And Joshua, that's a great place, especially as entrepreneurs have sort of moved through their career and they're starting to think about what they do later on in life. Joshua, you've been an entrepreneur. You've built this business now for over a decade. You've had your own business, I think. So what have you found has worked for you as an entrepreneur to get clients for you? Because you only now, after 80 books, writing your own. So what's worked for you as an entrepreneur to get noticed?

Yes. Originally, completely by accident. Writing my books over 10 years ago, my novels. I didn't realize that, I didn't realize that, that would in fact be an authority book and that people would read them and say, I want my life story to read like this novel does. I didn't realize that that was a lead generation technique at that time. So it worked, it worked well for me. Something else that has worked well is creating courses that are around specific aspects of my knowledge base. And those are also ways for people to avail themselves of video content and tutorials and then get to a point where they say, okay, this is too hard. I just need to hire this guy to do that. So creating courses and these consumable information products that people can purchase so that again, customers acquisition costs become negative, meaning lead generation marketing are profit centers. Like, okay, we're going to launch this new course. With the objective being we are going to convert course customers into clients of ours. We have an upsell sequence in place so that by launching the course or by launching the book, you not just make money from royalties or from course sales, but you're able to cultivate relationship, deeper relationships. And a certain percentage of them are gonna say, okay, this is too hard. I just need to work with this person. And I've had courses out for— I launched my first course in 2016.

Wow.

Just a few years into my business, uh, after I'd kind of ridden the train of my first novels having come out. And I've done relatively consistent with creating new courses here and there. And I've got maybe a dozen and a half courses now on different, different topics related to my core, uh, talent stack of, of persuasive writing and literary work and ghostwriting and, and all that good stuff.

Joshua, that, that sounds fantastic. Just briefly, which platform are you hosting your courses on, or are you just self-hosting as you'd have been self-publishing?

Yeah, one of my favorite platforms that I've found, having, having tried just about all of them over the years, has been the platform called Gumroad. Gumroad, as in like chewing gum.

Yeah.

And one of the reasons I like Gumroad is for anyone who creates an account, it's similar— future purchases are similar to Amazon where you can click the Buy Now and it's one more click and it buys now. If you have a Gumroad account, you don't have to go through this, the setup or appending in your payment information. It can be literally a one-click purchase. Someone sees my course, oh, I like this, one-click buy now. And because their information is saved previously, it's instant, it's an ease and instant purchase.

That's a good tip. Gumroad.com. I think that is fantastic.

Yes.

Joshua, if there's one thing that has not worked, You know, I always like to ask this question without trying to embarrass anybody, but something that you've tried that didn't kind of work out for Joshua Lysak Publishing and ghostwriting, what would that be?

Yes, so it would be low-leveraged types of activities. Low-leverage types of activities. So high leverage would be things that take a little bit of time or they're a single project that produce results outsized, perhaps for years. Low-leverage activities, I did quite a bit kind of during the middle season of my career, and it was regional networking and business events and workshops and attending conferences and things where my physical presence was required. And any, let's say driving down to Cincinnati, for example, and going to a Cincinnati business event, I might in Cincinnati meet 12 entrepreneurs, only 2 of which would really be in my market of book writing, but I would spend an entire day there and neither of them would really be sales qualified leads. Whereas I can write a Twitter thread about books about advanced persuasion techniques like Hypno-writing, and I can get that seen by hundreds of thousands of people in a number of hours. That's a high-leverage activity.

Yeah, yeah, that's very—

As opposed to spending a whole day in Cincinnati. No offense to Cincinnati. No offense to Cincinnati. Or even in-person networking and local stuff. But I've joked that since our son was born, I have only been in a room of just other adults maybe once.

Yeah, that's too funny actually. You're right. I mean, actually physical events are actually very ineffective and very inefficient, aren't they, in terms of ROI, especially if you are focused as you are on the service that you're offering and the kind of customers. Joshua, if people want to find out more about you and the ghostwriting services that you offer, where would they do that?

The best place would be my website, which is lisekghostwriting.com. L-I-S-E-K, Lisek Ghostwriting. writing.com. Uh, that would be about the, the business. But my most, my most fun shenanigans would be over on Twitter. I'm @JoshLeissig. And of course, So Good They Call You a Fake, that is, uh, available wherever books are sold online.

Joshua, that's wonderful. We'll put links to you and to your amazing book. Joshua Leissig joining us from Cincinnati, or rather outside Cincinnati, Ohio. He doesn't go there himself anymore. Thank you for joining me on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show today.

It's been my pleasure, James. Thank you.

Well, brilliant. What a lot of amazing learning there. And for me, some great takeaways, including, you know, being a little bit bombastic, but also making sure that you write a book that includes— and Joshua used the phrase— every step and not miss a step so that you really are comprehensive and get the readers to kind of surrender and decide just to come to you. And that's how you really build the authority. So lots of great learnings there from Joshua. If you've enjoyed this show, do please share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And until we meet again, I wish you the best of good fortune. Keep on communicating and thank you for listening.