How to Write a Book in a Weekend 👥

Welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

With your hosts, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name is Matt R. Flowchart Wolf.

Wolf. That works.

Yeah, Matt R. Flowchart Wolf. And my co host is Joseph Hustle Chart. Joseph Hustle Chart Flowchart. All right, so I'm Matt Flowchart Wolf and Hustle Fear.

And in this episode, this is kind of. This is going to be probably a little quicker than our normal episodes than, you know, when we have a guest. Right now, it's just Matt and I, and on our episodes, normally we interview guests, and our whole goal with each one of our podcast episodes is to pretty much extract some kind of template or process or some kind of system that you can then walk away and duplicate yourself and your business or your life. So our whole goal is to give you at least one thing to do some good work with.

Absolutely.

And in this episode, we are not going to get that from a guest. You'll get that from us. Yeah. Because we have some ideas for you, too.

We can be smart sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah. Today we're feeling pretty smart. We've had a lot of coffee, so we're good.

Yeah. And still drinking more, you know, it.

Actually, you know what, that coffee, Matt, the coffee you turned me on, that mushroom coffee.

Yeah.

That's legit. Yeah, I'm not drinking that right now, but I will be. For other podcast episodes we record today.

That is four sigmatic coffee. And that. That was actually, you know, from Tim Ferriss. He talked about that on podcasts or in his book or somewhere.

But that focus, like, so if you look it up, it's on Amazon. It's like, I don't know, 12 bucks or something for a pack. It's like instant coffee packs. Yeah.

We'll have to do a whole episode in the future on just purely some of the. The things we do to get focused because, I mean, we're. We're pretty systematic even in that way, really, you know, so. But that's not the topic of today topic. We will. We should do a future episode just talking about sort of our nootropics and our coffee and some of the, like, rituals we go through to get into focus. But today what we want to talk about is we want to talk about books.

Books, books, books.

So Joe and I, we just released our evergreen wisdom book. This is sort of our mindset Mental Hacks book. I think I described it in one of my recent emails as mindset tactics.

Yes.

Because typically there's like mindset and there's tactics.

Right, Right.

And I feel like this book is mindset tactics. There's sort of tactics that you can, you know, do with your brain. They're mental exercises and stuff like that to sort of get you into flow states and to get you on the right mental path.

Right.

So that's what this book is about. And then what we want to do is we want to talk a little bit about how we made this book, a little bit about the marketing strategy behind what we're doing with this book. And then I also want to touch quickly on my last book, WordPress Revealed, which is just about to get relaunched. I just finished a second edition of. And we'll talk about how that book was written, because that was using a completely different strategy than our evergreen wisdom book was. So let's start by talking about how we created the evergreen wisdom book.

If you want to go ahead and just sort of give the quick overview of, like, the process we went through to make this book, it's pretty damn simple.

It is. Ye. So it's. For one, we'll preface this in saying that this book is about. I think it's 135 pages, so it looks like a legit book. It's kind of that length. And that was honestly one of the minor goals that we had when setting out to get this, to create this thing is, okay, we want something substantial, but yet we want something that's not too long, that takes forever to read. We want a quick win for you guys when you read this book so you could sit down and read it in probably a couple hours in one sitting or a couple sittings, whatever. So when we sat down to organize this book, we thought of, we have a bunch of content that we've written over the years, Matt and I, in our individual blogs and emails and videos and other podcasts.

That haven't completely maybe hasn't been distributed to everyone we wished it would, you know, to get that value to. So we thought, okay, why don't we start our first volume of books? Because we're aiming for a handful of these this year using the same method. And you can totally swipe this method is we decided that our first theme of a book is going to be mindset, and this is kind of like the, you know, the backbone of everything you do in your daily life. So we said, okay, so let's go through all of our content assets, mainly starting with our blog, and literally get a Google Doc open and list all the Links to those posts along with the name of those posts, just so you can kind of see what we're working with. And we have a running doc still that has all of our themes on there and just a shit ton of links to different blog posts or other docs that we have. And we noticed that, hey, we got a lot on mindset. Why not start there and see how many pages we can squeeze out of this? And that was our starting point. Not saying that that's how everything came, because a lot of our unique content that wasn't actually published and stuff that we wrote specifically for that book was also added in there. But at the end of the day, we were able to get about probably a good half of the book, maybe slightly more, just from blog posts.

Yeah, I would say more.

Maybe more. Yeah. But we reworked it like it was kind of reshaped and re. It was updated to fit the book and the flow of everything.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, one of the sort of issues with blogging and, you know, we're big proponents of blogs, we love blogging. Blogging helps us generate a lot of our income. So we love blogs. But one of the biggest issues with blogs is that it's reverse chronological order, right? So your newest post is always at the top of your blog. It's always kind of the first thing people see when they hit your blog. And your older content just gets pushed further and further and further down. Next thing you know, it's on page two, page three, and. And you know, content that's two years old, nobody is seeing anymore. You know, maybe it gets picked up in the search engines and people find it, but for the most part, a lot of that content, no matter how good you think it is, people aren't seeing it as much anymore once it's older. So with this book, like Joe said, we basically went through and picked out all of this stuff that we felt, man, this is kind of buried in our blog, but this is good shit. This is good stuff. This is stuff we still want, like the world to see. So we went and found all those kinds of blog posts that were specifically focused around mindset, compiled them into a book, right? And you know, I wrote two or three brand new chapters. Joe wrote two or three brand new chapters. So we did add some additional stuff in there, and we did bring all the stuff up to date if there was any mentions of stuff that was out of date and that kind of thing. But for the most part, it was solely built on this. This curated content from our past blogs and on Top of that, we have content on other blogs other than our own blog.

Oh yeah, you know, stuff like Huffington post and influence of.comcapitalism.com third party site. Pretty sites.

Yeah, I've written a lot for my old business, Learn to Blog.

Right.

You know, we've, we've both contributed to a lot of different blogs over the years. And you know, if you were trying to find mindset sort of tactics from us, you may have to search 10 different sites to, to collect them all. And so that is why we made this collection in this book.

Yeah, and so that was how we figured we would get this book out swiftly. Because that's the thing with writing books. People get so locked up in like, oh shit, this is going to take me years to come up with a book. And granted, yes, it could, very much so. But we're not in the game of doing this for years. I mean, at least working on one specific book for years until, you know, we get a topic that we really want to. But so process. It started with basically deciding that we want to compile all of our things in a doc to see what we're working with. So now we know what other themes we could jump to as our next book.

And then from there we could see, okay, do we need to beef up this thing or should I write one more post? Maybe Matt, we can kind of see, divvy up the efforts a little bit after that. That's when we decided I kind of headed this up, but let's compile this thing into a book. So we have a book template basically in a word doc that we were able to shove all this content into, do the formatting and stuff. We kind of did this, honestly, not going to lie, did it a little rushed because I'll just tell you that, you know, in, in the process of putting all the content in there. So taking that from a blog post to a doc, formatting, editing and all this stuff kind of was all done in maybe just a couple motions going through because we wanted to get this out to people fairly quickly, but we already did what a second version of this just a week after that.

So yeah, we found all the typos and all that kind of stuff.

I mean, yeah, there were some typos and we knew that kind of going out, but to be honest, we had a deadline for ourself and that's really how shit gets done. You set a deadline. There was a reason for that and there's a reason why we also edited very swiftly after that. This is like the proof and we're actually live streaming this, but we or not live stream or recording this as a video. But I read through the proof and I made sure everything was solid. So now we already have a second version out which is roughly the same.

And then one thing we actually haven't touched on on this book is so this isn't mine and Joe's first podcast. We actually had a podcast called the Evergreen Wisdom Podcast. That was our very. Well, it wasn't our first podcast, it was our second podcast, but let's not get into that. So we had a podcast called Evergreen Wisdom. It's no longer online. You can't find those episodes anymore.

Pretty much Joe and I have them sort of locked up in our own vault for future use. Well, we went through those podcast episodes and we actually found one called how to Like. It basically taught a step by step process to create your ideal life and then how to map it out and how to actually achieve that. And we thought that was one of our better podcast episodes back when we were doing that. So we actually went had that podcast transcribed and then Joe went back through it and sort of heavily edited it to make it easier to read in book format. And that was another addition that we added right into this book.

And where we got that transcribed was a website that's pretty popular now, but. Rev.com.

Yeah. So I mean, just to recap this Evergreen Wisdom book, we started by basically creating a Google Doc, going through all of our old blog posts, other blogs that we've contributed to, medium.com, linkedIn, Pulse, all the various places we posted content. There's even some chapters in here that were actual emails that I wrote to my list that we thought were good emails.

Email is content that you can reuse.

People don't do those. And that was good content. So we actually made chapters from some of those emails. You'll never know which ones are emails by reading this book.

Doesn't matter.

So that was our first sort of phase, was we created this Google Doc of all of these articles that we've written on this specific topic. Then we went through, we took all of those articles, put them all in a single Google Doc, and then Joe kind of organized them into a logical order. And then the sort of final phase was we took that Evergreen Wisdom episode, had it transcribed, added that into the book as well, and we hired a cover designer, paid him about 100 bucks to make us a cover and we got a pretty legit professional looking book now.

Well, and we have. And so when it gets into now publishing because it's kind of funny. And this is. I laugh at my friends every time, but I've been to dinner with a handful of friends now, separate occasions, and literally this has happened a couple times. It's like, oh, this is the first time I've had dinner with a published author. I'm like, Amazon, self published is what I'm like.

Don't downplay it.

No, I know, I know. And I should just take it as a compliment, which it is, and I do. But at the end of the day, I mean, all of us can publish this. And so the big question, and Matt's actually probably the better one to answer this, but what was. So what's the next best step for someone once they go through writing the book and they have the COVID designed? Where do they go after that?

So this book, we used createspace.com so are you actually asking about the physical steps it takes?

How does it get published and now put on the market and let's just say Amazon.

Yeah, yeah. So if we want to publish this on Amazon, what we did was we went to createspace.com I created a brand new CreateSpace account for our sort of joint business.

You get in there and there's pretty much a step by step tutorial that walks you through it. It says, upload your doc file with your actual manuscript for your book. Upload your cover file. I uploaded the doc file that you spit out from Microsoft Word and I uploaded the COVID file that our guy Francis sent me. Then I just went through and filled out the title and description and author names and all that. It's literally a step by step. They kind of take you by the hand and walk you through the whole process at CreateSpace. And then the last step on CreateSpace is literally. Do you want this on Kindle, yes or no? Yes.

So cool.

And then it magically adds it to Kindle as well and they send you a little proof.

That's actually what this book I'm holding now. And it's yours to basically proof. I mean, make sure it looks good to go. And then you kind of say yes or no.

Yeah.

And after that you're on to selling the book for whatever price you want. Pretty much.

You can pick whatever price you want. Yeah, I was leaning at $500, but Joe said $10 sounds about right.

Let's just go 995. Keep it easy. So I mean, really publishing in a nutshell is if you want to get something done quick, repurpose your content, go, you know, mash that up into A flow that makes sense and make that formatting solid. And obviously edit all that stuff is very important. And make sure that you're giving good value. Don't just mash up content that is a total, like, mess.

Yeah.

Have a cohesive theme. And then obviously tell people too, that this you wrote.

Yeah.

I feel like there's no reason to hide that fact because it doesn't discount the value of what you're giving them. You're pretty much giving them a playbook that they know exactly what they're going to get and they know what to look.

Or there's quite a bit of unique content in here as well. So we did write some new articles. We did put some stuff in here that's been previously unpublished. So there is some of that. We're actually running out of time, but I did want to cover a couple things. Just like rapid fire, real quick, go time. So quickly, I wanted to tell you the process of how I wrote WordPress revealed. So what I did with WordPress revealed was at the time, I had my blog business and blogs, and I wrote a blog post that kind of talked about Amazon and how I was going on this journey to become a professional author. And I was gonna write a book about WordPress. And in that blog post, I said towards the end of the blog post, do you have any questions about WordPress? Because the way I'm gonna do this book is I'm gonna answer all of your questions. I'm gonna make sure all these questions get answered. I mailed my list. I ran some ads to it. I did everything I could to get a bunch of traffic to that. And I just got a list of 7,500 questions about WordPress. And so I copied and pasted every single one of those questions into a Google Doc. And then just one at a time went through and answered every single question until all said and done. I had a book. And then after that, I went and chased up, you know, five or six other WordPress blogging experts and did quick interview sessions with them. They were actually typed interviews. So I sent them six or seven questions. They sent me the responses to those questions, and I. I took all those questions and answered and published those in the book as well to get some other expert opinions on the book.

I like that because it's kind of like a roundup post, too.

It's kind of like a giant roundup post. And that was how the original WordPress revealed got published. And second edition of that is about to be released. I'm just waiting on some Approvals and getting the proofs and stuff. But that one's about to be revealed as well. And we do talk about our entire process for creating books in our EGP letter, issue three, the February edition.

February, yeah.

So in that issue, if you go to our, if you go to evergreenprofits.com products, look at our back issues, it's issue number three, the February edition. We dive deep into how we created these books. So that's all covered in there.

Yeah, there's so many ways to write a book. I mean, it's leveraging other people for their content you can do. So you could kind of be the one that just piecemeals all this content together. You could do it all from podcasts, interviews, all that fun stuff. So, Scott, the limit. And don't think you have to just sit down brain, you know, fart looking at a page and looking at a blank page, trying to write it yourself.

And then, you know, I did, I did mention we wanted to talk about promotion, but we're kind of out of time for that. So real quick, we basically we mailed our list to it. We sort of hit up all of our sort of friends in the industry, asked them to check it out, we sent them free copies and that sort of thing. Asked for reviews on Amazon. We're going to run some ads to it. We haven't done that yet. And right now we're actually running a promotion for this book where you can get it for free. So you go to evergreenwisdom.com by the time you hear this, hopefully that site's still online. We're not totally sure, but evergreen wisdom.com you can actually order a free copy of this book. We're giving away free copies of it. We do ask you pay a shipping charge for us to get it to you, but we're actually losing money on most of our copies of books that we're sending out. That's right. Just to, you know, cover the cost of shipping. So that's evergreen wisdom.com and at the moment that's our sort of promotional strategy. We'll probably dive deeper into it in a later episode and definitely in one of our issues of the EGP letter. But I think that kind of covers everything.

Woo. Speed round man. Well, I think that's all the time.

We have next calls in two minutes.

So boom, bang, bang them out. So yeah, thank you for listening. And we'll, we'll be around with new episodes obviously every week and, and probably some in betweener sodes like this one is sometimes later. Bye Bye.

Hey, thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Now, if you don't know already, myself and my partner Joe Fear, every single week we put together this killer weekly newsletter that's completely free. If you go to theweeklyprophet.com, you can get on this weekly newsletter. And what we do with this newsletter is we scour the Internet, we read every piece of content, listen to blog posts, check out new software and tools, and we distill down the best of the best into a weekly newsletter and deliver it directly to your inbox every single week. So head over to theweeklyprofit.com and make sure you're signed up to receive that weekly newsletter. You're going to love it. Thanks so much again for listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

We'll see you in the next one.

Sam.