Tucker Max — Every Book About How To Be A Writer Is Bulls#!t

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my.

Boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey. Hey. Welcome back to another episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is Joe Fear.

This is Matt Wolf.

Yeah. And on these podcasts, it's our absolute duty, it's our mission to kind of break from this system, this thing that I feel like we're all a part of or a lot of us get stuck in, which is that cycle of a job that you hate or a business that you might have been over time has, like, sucked your soul dry because you're not doing the stuff that you love. But it's kind of our job, or it is our job on these podcasts and everything we do at Evergreen profits to actually show you a new way to live, to work and actually create the vision that you actually want to achieve. So that's what we're going to do here on the episode. And we do that all the time with our advising, consulting our content on the blog. And. And if you're interested in looking at that more, go to evergreenprofits.com consulting. You'll see a whole bunch of cool stuff there. But today, Matt, who do we have on the call today?

We've got Mr. Tucker Max, which is a really fun interview because a lot of people know Tucker Max is the guy who wrote I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, where he talks about drinking a lot of beer and partying and doing a lot of things.

Debauchery.

Yeah, that kind of stuff. But that's not what we're talking about today.

No. So, yeah, Tucker, I mean, you'll. He's got accolades up the, you know, just go forever.

The what?

New York Times bestseller four times over. He's just only about 3 million copies worldwide, you know, sold. New York Times. Not New York Times, Time magazines. One of the 100 most influential men in 2009, which is crazy, actually. Men, I think it's overall, it's the list. So it's everyone. Amazing. Dude. In this episode, we're really breaking down how his company, Scribe Media, used to be called Book in a Box. Probably heard of it. How they will take authors of all walks of lives. We'll dig into it and actually show them and walk them through how to create a book, but also show them everything that comes after publishing as well. It's kind of this brand new model. It's one definitely that Matt and I are going to go down that rabbit hole with him. And it's really cool. It opens Your eyes. If you're even remotely interested in writing a book for yourself or, you know, obviously having these guys help you out. Got to listen to this one.

Yeah. Some of my favorite takeaways for this is why he thinks the New York Times bestseller list is bullshit. Why pretty much every book out there on how to be a better writer is bullshit. And also the time management stuff.

Well, yeah, that's. That was a big resonating thing to me. It's. He'll show you how to buy back your time with a very simple procedure. It's one that I've already done, to hire a lady to help me with my laundry. But that's just the start of many to come. It doesn't sound like much, but I guarantee you it's a life changer if you actually go through this process. So on to Tucker now. Enjoy.

Let's do it.

Hey, Tucker, thanks for joining us today on the show.

Of course, man. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man. Well, thanks for. Yeah, it was actually like, really eye opening. We're in a mastermind. Like a month or so ago, San Diego speakeasy, and you were kind of dropping some tidbits and some bombs through the group, I'd say the entire time, both in front of the group and just kind of in those little breakouts. And I think a couple things that resonated with me personally was buying your time back. And I freaking took action on that immediately. And I fired you. An email.

No, I remember.

Do you. It was badass. I mean, it's super simple. So let's touch on that in this thing for sure. But I think another one you were talking about hiring the right people and all that stuff was just resonating all the right things. Time. So appreciate that, man.

Of course.

Yeah. Like, so for the few that don't know you, I guess give them a quick. I guess a quick, you know, minute or so brief of who you are and kind of leading you up to this point here.

Right. So I. I started out as an author. I wrote a bunch of books that did pretty well. The big one was I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Spent that book, I think spent six or seven years on the New York Times bestseller list. My other two spent a long time. All of them hit number one, sold like 3 million copies. You know, all that sort of stuff.

Then, now what I'm doing, I did a few other things, but kind of the main thing I'm doing now, really the only thing, aside from raising two kids and being married is I have a company called Book in a Box that helps people sort of write and publish their books. And we use kind of an innovative method. It's sort of like ghostwriting, but it's an interview style where we kind of get everything out of your head. We get a book out of your head that's all your words and your ideas in your voice.

That's cool. Yeah. And I know you. I was browsing this site. You've worked with, I mean, I don't know how many authors now, but it seems like all walks of life can come to you for it.

Yeah, we're close to 1,000 now in four years.

Damn, that's awesome.

Are there any specific types of people that you look for to create books? What's the target market for that?

Well, so for us, our process only works obviously for nonfiction. So that's number one. And then it generally needs to be prescriptive. Nonfiction, meaning like, I'm going to teach you something or I'm going to show you something, which basically covers pretty much everything in business, pretty much everything in self improvement and self help. We can do memoirs. We charge more for them because they take a lot longer. But yeah, we've done some books that your listeners probably know. Like we did Tiffany Haddish's book, the Last Black Unicorn, which has been on the bestseller list for like the last six months. Been blowing up. We've done Joey Coleman's book, which was a big Wall Street Journal bestseller. We've got a couple books coming out that are going to be real big. Todd Herman's got a book coming out. Philip McKernan's got a book coming out. We've got a bunch of other Cameron Herald. We got Nick Kuzmich. There's all kinds of kind of mid to upper level coach, consultant, executive entrepreneur, CEO types. All those sorts of people kind of are right in our wheelhouse.

That's cool that they let you go out and talk about it too, because I would have imagined that most of this would have been under, like an NDA type thing where they want everybody to think that they sat down and painstakingly wrote it out for hours.

Yeah. So you know what's funny is that people who use ghostwriters do that. Because if you use a ghostwriter, what you're saying is, I need someone else to write my book for me. Our process, what really differentiates our process is that Nick Kuzmich is one of the big Facebook ad guys. I don't know anything about Facebook ads. My team's not writing a Facebook ad. Book for him, our process is entirely his words and his ideas and his voice. We just take the hard part out of writing a book. So that's why I think we've only had two authors out of 800. Well, somewhere between 800 and 1,000, I forget.

But.

We'Ve only had two authors that have asked for an NDA. One was a big executive at a massive company. You would not have heard known his name, but you would know the company. And another one was like just some random dude that no one's ever heard of, but he was convinced that his book was going to be huge. And I'm like, yeah, I don't think so, but I'll sign it if that's what you want.

It's like one of those things, if someone comes to you with a business idea, it's like, dude, you got to sign this NDA right before I tell you.

Yeah, that's the sign of the amateur immediately.

For sure. It is. So what's like the. So I guess the big motivation is, yeah, they just can't get this book out of their head. They probably have some idea, but just. They just have no clue how to do this. Is that kind of the common theme?

Yeah, it's either. It's either they don't know how to write a book or they don't have the time to dedicate to doing it. Right. So basically, if you sit down and write a book yourself, let's just say a normal nonfiction book, you need to probably budget somewhere between a thousand and two thousand hours over the course of a year to two years. Two thousand hours a year is essentially. That is a full time job. That is 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, right?

Yeah.

And that's generally. A nonfiction book generally takes between 1,000, 2,000 hours. So what people with us, you're looking at spending somewhere between 50 and 75 hours on the phone, almost all of it on the phone, over about six months. And so it's a massive save of time. But then also a huge number of our clients are people who are dyslexic or who have like, for any number of reasons, they have a lot of difficulty writing or they are like kind of. They get stuck in the. There's so many emotional tar pits that come with writing a book. And by hiring us, you're essentially hiring experts to make sure you're not getting stuck in those tarpits. And then the other big thing too is that, you know, like, all of the people who work for me are all ballers. Like, I Mean, we have Emmy award winning writers, Pulitzer Prize winning writers, like people who spent 20 years at random House and you know, like as editors and stuff like that. So we have really, really high level people. And so the reason people hire us is because they want to make sure that their book is as good as it could possibly be. You know, like, because here's the thing is like we can't make your book great, but we can make it the greatest possible book you have in you for sure.

That makes sense. So I guess what would you tell people? They come to an idea or something like that, they have what they think is going to be the big hit. What's the percentage of people that are usually on point or wrong in that sense?

Well, so it depends how you define hit. Right. Most people, if they don't think about it, they think of their model for a hit as a book is something that sells a lot of copies and gets a lot of attention. Their model is the professional writer model of success. But we actually tell our writer, our authors that that's the wrong model because for almost all of them it is the wrong model. So for example, if you are, let's.

Say.

Take Nick Kuzmich, just because I just mentioned him, he's one of the best guys in the world at Facebook ads. He teaches this to people like, there's no possible way a Facebook ads book is going to be selling hundreds of thousands or millions of copies. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal aren't doing any profiles on this book. Right. Like, it doesn't make sense to think of this book the way that Seth Godin or Tim Ferriss or Malcolm Gladwell think of books. Right? Yep. For Nick, the book is something that will get him authority and credibility and will be a lead gen into his, you know, his funnel and his courses and his masterminds and his small group TR and things like that. So someone like Nick might only sell. I'm making up numbers. I have no idea how many books he sold, but let's say 10 or 20,000 books. But that could lead. In fact, I'm fairly confident his book has led to multiple seven figures of revenue for him because he has an entire business behind it. So instead of he doesn't spend any time marketing his book, he looks at the book as a marketing device for his company. Right?

Yep.

And that's what all of our successful authors do. We have a lot of authors who sold a thousand books over two years, but made 500,000 or a million or $2 million off of their Book because the book got them clients and their clients are worth huge amounts of money.

Yeah, no, I love it. And I guess it's breaking that thinking of the kind of the linear approach to books, you know, in the old school way, it's kind of trashing that whole idea and going, hey, there's so many damn opportunities out there. Speaking gigs like you said, masterminds, whatever courses you already have. And it's a massive brand play too, when it gets in the right hands.

Yeah, I didn't even talk about speaking. That's another huge thing that a book can get you. I mean, it's almost impossible to be a paid speaker without a book. There are a few people who have done it, but not many. And there's pretty much a ceiling for it. But once you have a book, then everything changes. And now you're doubling your speaking fee, you're booking three times as many speeches, everything changes.

Now do you think to be able to do the speaking and to double your speaking fees and all that kind of stuff, does the book need to seem like a success for that to happen? Or could somebody who's only sold two copies of their book go and say, look, I've got a book pay me to speak?

Okay, so it's a good question. I should clarify. If you take a dump in a paper bag and write book on the COVID and say that that's a book, that's not good enough. Right. Your book has to be good. There are people out there, they call themselves competitors to us, but I kind of, honestly, I look down my nose at them. But you will hear them say, it doesn't really matter how good your book is, you just need a book. I think that's total bullshit. Here's the reality. I mean the numbers are very clear. Depending on sort of the genre. Anywhere between 30 and 70% of Kindle books are never opened.

Sure.

So there are a huge percentage of books where that's true, where someone will buy it and then they never open it. But whether it's 30 or 70%, that means the inverse do open it and they do read it. Right. And so like the only way a book is really going to actually get you benefits is, is by being good for the audience you write it for. I'll give you a really good example. Our very first client, she's my favorite example of this. Her name is Melissa Gonzalez. She's one of the world kind of leaders in pop up retail. Like when Macy's or Chanel or whatever they want to do temporary pop up stores she's the woman they call. And so she did the very first book on pop up resale and she has probably only sold a thousand copies, but she says it has tripled the size of her firm, slowed to millions of dollars in revenue and all this sort of stuff. Because the only people who are going to read that book are people who are decision makers in pop up retail. In retail, right. There's probably an audience of 3,000 people around the world for that book. That's it. But she sold a thousand copies, you know, so every single person on earth that needs her. That book is the most targeted, high status ad you could ever envision. And what it does is because it's a really good book, it displays to all her potential clients what a baller she is and how smart she is.

I love it.

If she'd done a bad book, it wouldn't have worked, it would have hurt her. But a good book has tripled the size of her business.

I mean that's, I love that example right there. It's the kind of the, it's the way we treat our content is you're just speaking to just the right people. The way we use content is we segment, segment, segment, segment, Disqualify. We tried to disqualify 95% of people, people we actually deal business, do business with are frickin begging to do business with us. That sounds like what she's doing. She's just being there for the absolute right people. No fluff, no, no. People that are questioning if they're in that niche or not or if they actually need her. No, they frickin need her.

Exactly right. Yep.

I dig it, man. Now, I guess going off of her example, I don't know if you don't have to tell me specifics about her, but like if she were to then market that book, let's say if she wasn't really like a big name yet, is she trying to go after keywords and something like Amazon or other?

No, no, no, no.

So I mean we wrote a case study about her on our site. So I mean, I can tell you exactly what's in the case study. So if there are 3,000 people in your niche that you're trying to go after, then it depends. The question is how do they find their information? And that will differ greatly depending on the niche. For Melissa, those people are. All the people in retail basically are in New York. They're in New York or Milan or a couple of other cities in Europe. And they all get their media from like four to six different sources that are all kind of retail industry newsletter type things. Right. So what her book, what she used her book to do was essentially be a hook to get her covered in all of the retail.

Niche industry sort of newsletters or you know, or media channels. And like there's one TV show in New York that's retail based that all retail people watch. And then there's like one podcast that's really big and then there's like three or four kind of email list newsletter type things and she got covered in all of them and now it's like she's the 800 pound gorilla in that niche. Basically whenever someone wants to do pop up resale now they say, all right, get Melissa. If you can't get Melissa, then I guess get one of the people who copy her.

I freaking love it. So she's literally just going after, she's like 80, 20 in the communication channel. Going after the 20% are just rocking, are always on the bookmarks or whatever the first page is. Someone opens their browser, she's right there as the expert.

Yeah. And then of course, and also now all she does now is. It's funny she even said this. She's like, I used to be invited to be on panels at conferences and the men would always talk over me. Now I get paid to keynote and no one interrupts me.

Hell yeah, that's it, man. And I would assume, yeah. And with a book, immediately you're going to sites like Haro, for instance, like you're just trying to get attention from these reporters. But if you have this book, if you're the expert in talking to the right people, it should be a no brainer to get on the. Get some press. Yep.

Now what do you think about what's your opinion? I think I already know the answer, but I'll figure I'll ask the question anyway. What's your opinion on, you know, claiming you're a best seller? If you're like a best seller in a sub niche of a sub niche of a sub niche on Amazon, which seems to be the way most people talk about being a bestseller these days.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's BS dude.

Like.

It'S like anything that Internet marketers get their hands on. Like if there's any truth to it, they will destroy it as soon as they can, you know?

Yep.

And I mean before, before, I mean Amazon created it. Like best sellers in subcategories didn't used to exist. And they, then they put that on and then some marketer figured out oh, like, I'm number one in, you know, like, women's underwater knitting. And it's like, oh, I'm a bestseller. And then, like, a bunch of people, like, started selling that, and it was like this clownish thing.

Here's what's funny. To be totally transparent, we actually do that for our authors. It's part of the package. When you buy sort of a book package from us, we will do that for you. I would say about 30% of our authors get really excited and they post out on their social media and they brag to their friends, and 70% don't care. And. And it's cool because we do it anyway. It's really easy to do. The ones who want to talk about it can talk about it. We tell them. We say, listen, here's the deal with this. If you want to brag, you can, but here's kind of like how some people will see it, but it's up to you. And then we give them a little screenshot of their book at number one and whatever the category is, and then they do what they want to do.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. That's kind of been my philosophy on it as well. I had a book on. On Amazon as well, and it was a book about how to set up WordPress. It was, you know, seven years ago or something. And I really promoted the fact that I was an Amazon bestseller at the time. But in retrospect, I was like, yeah, there's really nothing that special about it.

Felt a little dirty. Yeah, right.

Well, it means you sold 30 books in two days or something.

Hell, yeah.

It means I was, like, one of five books in an entire category.

But so. Oh, shit. What was the question? I just had another question. I was about. Oh, so for like, a newer. Like, comparatively, for like, a New York Times bestseller, like, what is the. How much more difficult is it to become a New York Times bestseller versus, like, an Amazon bestseller?

It's the difference between, you know, like, climbing an ant hill and climbing Everest.

So what would go into, like, that process? If one of my goals, my dream was to, like, get on that New York Times bestseller, what kind of advice would you give?

So I put four books on that list personally that I wrote, not counting all the, Like, I've helped Tim Ferriss launch his. And Peter Thiel and Seth Godin and a bunch of other people. So, like, I know that very. That system very well.

It's a huge pain in the ass. So if we're talking about doing it organically. Right. If you're Doing it organically. You basically, you have to already have an audience, and I mean an audience of at least, I would say, 10,000 buyers, which means an email list of 100,000 or something. Right? So 10,000 buyers at a minimum. And you should be able to get a decent amount of press the first week so that you have, like, enough. If you can sell 10,000 books spread across the right places, then you're gonna make the New York Times list. Unless your book is a narrative violation on the New York Times. The New York Times won't list Jordan Peterson's book, even though Jordan Peterson's book has sold a million copies in like five months. Right. Because Jordan's message is a narrative violation for the New York Times.

And here's the thing. Here's what you have to understand. The New York Times bestseller list is not a list of best selling books. They don't even pretend it is. It is a curated editorial product. They have said this in a court of law because the guy who wrote the Exorcist, they wouldn't put the Exorcist on the bestseller list in like 1978. And he sued them and they won because they admitted it wasn't actually a bestseller list. Wow. Right.

Exactly.

So essentially, let me explain, when you're trying to get on that list, what you're trying to do, impress a bunch of loser snob, Upper east side, New York snobs.

Got it. That's what you literally have to write to them if you want to get noticed.

Well, more or less. That's the easier way. You have to either write to them or sell a lot of books and not write something that they find offensive or they don't want to endorse.

How the hell do you sneak past them?

It's a good question, man. I sold. So there is a category called too big to ignore, and so I fit into that category.

So you even have a better reputation, a better, you know, achievement, I would say, for the list.

Yeah, right. I didn't even. I didn't even talk about that. There is too big to ignore, but, like, people can get there, but it is effectively impossible. Right. I did it, but I was, I think, for the most part, lucky.

Now, for an entrepreneur, someone that's writing a book about their business knowledge and kind of goes through the type of service that you provide, do you think it's worth the time and the money and the effort to try to get on the New York Times bestseller or.

So here's the maybe.

I wasn't clear.

It's not Fucking possible, dude. There's a couple of other steps too I left out for brevity's. Like, you have to have a traditional publishing deal. So, like, if you aren't published by Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, etc. They won't even consider your book. Right. There are some genres of fiction where that's not true anymore because all of the romance and all the vampire and all that stuff, none of that's through traditional publishers anymore. So that stuff they'll accept self published, but for nonfiction, they basically just will not accept it. And most people cannot get a traditional deal because all a traditional publisher cares about is how many people are going to buy your book, Meaning how big is your audience that is waiting to buy your book right now when we cut you this deal. We work with both types of authors. 96,7% of our authors that we work with publish through us and are self published. But, you know, we have, we've worked with, I don't know, however many, 20, 30, 40 that we got them. You know, we did proposals, we got them a traditional deal and we did that way. But all of them, with one exception, had big audiences already. Like people like Todd Herman. Right, Or Todd Herman or Pat Flynn or whatever. People like that.

That already had big audiences. And traditional publishers want to give them a deal because they know they're gonna sell a lot of books. It's guaranteed, there's no risk for them, you see? Yeah. So like, so when I say, like, you have to have a huge audience to even be considered. If you don't have a huge audience, it's like not even on the table. Right. You can't. It's not even a. You know, it's like one of those. You must be this tall to ride. I'm talking about people who are that tall.

Yeah. Yeah. I would almost think in my, like, it's. It's kind of the difference between, oh, I want to be famous or I just want to be rich. It's like, do you really want to be famous? Which I would assume is more that ego play. It's the I want to be that best seller. Whereas if you take the approach of not going down that route, I feel like it'd be a lot easier not saying we're taking the easy route, but it's going to be way more lucrative, it sounds like, with a lot less effort.

So you're exactly right. What we tell authors is you can.

We don't even say you can have fame or fortune, but not both, because it's really not True fame is extraordinarily difficult for most people, at least. Unless they're like, look, unless you're like an emotionally broken attention whore, then it's easy, right?

But if you're a normal person, not only is fame difficult, but it's useless. It doesn't convert into anything. Right. And in fact, most of our authors come in thinking kind of they haven't really thought it through, but they have it in their mind, oh, yeah, I gotta write a big book or a broad book appeals to a lot of people. And we're like, no, you're gonna do the opposite. You're gonna write a niche book. In fact, you're gonna niche down as much as possible. And they're like, I don't understand, like, don't I want to appeal to as many people as possible? I was like, no, because you can only sell to these 10,000 people with these four attributes, so why would you write a book to anyone else? And they're like, oh, yeah, that makes total sense. Of course I'm gonna write a book to high net worth divorced women because those are all my clients. Why would I write a book that includes everyone? That doesn't make any sense at all. Because most people's models for what they should do with a book are from professional writers, not from authors who are using a book to promote their business.

Yep, makes absolute sense, man. So I guess the big thing for the folks listening, who is like the ideal person that you can just rock and roll with, I'm sure. Yeah, I know you're not a cheap option, which you shouldn't be because you're fucking, you're the best out there. But. And obviously the folks who are listening here, you know, some people are going to try to do this on their own. Who are the people that you want to work with?

So the ones that do best are we have to have two things to work with somebody. They have to know what they're talking about. Because our process works really well. If you've got the knowledge in your head not of how to structure a book, I'm not talking about that. The content, if all the content that will go in the book is in your head or basically in your head, then we structure it, we organize it, we outline it, we do all that stuff with you. You can rely on us for that. But we can't tell you how to sell. You've got to know how to sell. We can tell you how to structure a book on sales. Got it? That's number one. Number two is they have to have realistic and achievable objectives for their book. So if they want to be Malcolm Gladwell and be on Oprah, then we're not going to work with them because.

Not only is that unrealistic, but then even if we do a great job, they're going to blame us because they didn't reach their unrealistic goals.

If they have unrealistic objectives, we don't work with them. And we need to actually make sure that their objectives are aligned with what they want, because they can be realistic in the sense that, like, okay, this is what someone could do, but they could be unachievable for them for various reasons. So before we even sign someone, we understand.

Okay, they have a book in them, yes or no. And then basically, we have to make sure they can get an ROI from the book.

It doesn't have to be money. They could say, you know what? I want to tell my story so my family understands and knows my story. And as long as they know that that book probably won't sell many copies.

It'S just an ego thing or it's a communication thing or connection thing with their family. If they're cool with that, that's no problem. That's the roi. And it's totally fine as long as they understand that. But if they say, oh, I'm going to tell my story and the world will love me and my daddy will give me a hug, it's like, no.

Maybe that'll happen, maybe not, but probably not. And we don't. That just means they don't have realistic understanding of.

We don't have a guarantee for that.

Right. Exactly.

Yeah.

Now, what would you tell people who. Who maybe don't have an audience yet, but maybe they're like, world class at their specific thing. Maybe it's like, this is the best person in the world at making a very specific type of, you know, fishing lures that just work or, I don't know, I'm thinking random topics, but let's just say, like, they don't have an audience, but they are world class at what they do. Do you have any advice for, like, what you should do before you go.

Down the book of our clients, Most of our clients fit that bill.

Okay, what sort of advice would you give them about the audience portion of it so that they could get the book in front of those people?

Okay, so now you're talking about. Well, here's the thing. Marketing begins before you write the book.

The most important marketing decisions you make are actually positioning decisions, basically deciding what book you're gonna write. So that gets back to the whole niche versus broad discussion, right? If you.

If.

Let's say you're a consultant and you have 10,000 clients out there, realistically, you have 10,000 people that are right in your wheelhouse. What most people want to do is write the broad version of that book. Oh, but I want to talk to the million people that I could potentially hit. And I'll give you a really good example. This actual client I just talked to the other day, he basically helps plumbers run their businesses, right? And, like, he's a plumbing consultant. And so because plumbing is like a big business, obviously, and plumbers, like, people who know how to plumb is a different thing than people who know how to run a plumbing business. And so he was just insistent that his book should be about how to run a small business, because he's like, look, all of the things I teach plumbers, like a small trade business, all the things I teach plumbers apply to electricians and apply to landscapers and apply to. You know, he went on and on. And I said, dude, I believe you, but guess what? If I'm a plumber and I need to learn how to run a plumbing business, I'm never going to read a book that is for all tradespeople.

That's right.

I am going to read the book that is for plumbers. And he's like, oh, yeah, you're right.

And so that's how he's like, okay, you're right. I'm gonna do the book for plumbers. And then it's like, here's the thing. He wants to expand to other trades. And we're like, awesome. So what you need to do is do the book for plumbers, because now every plumber, you're gonna be the God of plumbers. And then every time that plumber goes on Amazon and they look up how to run a plumbing business, your book's gonna come up and Google, your book comes up, and you can set up really basic funnels for that. And then if you want to set up the same thing for electricians, you can take almost the same book, change the title to electricians, change the 20% of relevant content, and you just create a different funnel. And now you will be the God of electrician businesses. It's just two different ones. And so he's like, oh, yeah, that makes total sense. We have the same conversation with 80% of our authors.

And to their credit, almost all of them get it. Once we accept, explain it. It's just they kind of have that idea in their head of mass media instead of niche media.

That's right. And it's all disqualifying all those other eyeballs that are never going to take action with you. Love it. Sick, man. Well, I guess what are before we kind of transition because I want to go to buying your time back with some cool strategies that you have. Are there any, like, I know we like tools and all that stuff. Are there any necessary tools for a writer that thinks that they just want to kind of go it alone? Maybe some key things that you guys use.

Well, just so you know, we have our turnkey package, which is, it's actually. When is this podcast going to run?

It should be released probably four weeks from when we're recording right now.

Okay. Okay.

All right. So our turnkey package is 36 grand. Because we're raising the price like literally this week. So our turnkey package is 36. That's where we do everything. We just launched.

Kind of a coaching thing called Guided Authority where we. It's like a year long program and we basically coach people through writing their book and it's five grand now. And so. And we also have a book that actually describes exactly how to do that, which is like $4 on Amazon or $8 on Amazon. And it's free on our site because again, people, people are paying us for their time and for our expertise. They're not really paying for the information. Right? Yep. Even though the information is great, the world of paying for information is quickly shrinking and dying.

100%. We agree. Yeah.

Right. And so anyway, so if you're going to do it yourself, I would highly, highly recommend you read our book. Or at least a book that is really good and that walks you through exactly what to do.

Is that a book? Bookinabox.com they grab it.

Our book is called the Book in a box method. It's on Amazon. Or to get a free PDF go to bookinabox.com book sweet. You can put in your email and it sends you the PDF for free. But here's the thing. I've been a writer, professional writer for 15 years. I've sold millions of books and I've multiple bestsellers. Almost every single book on writing is dog shit. All the books people recommend Bird by Bird, Terrible. Stephen King's book on writing, Terrible. Go down the list.

All they are are books that they're signaling devices for writers to talk to other writers. They're not actually instructional manuals for people who are trying to do a job.

Got it. That makes sense.

I just Actually pulled those two books off my bookshelf because I actually have both those books. I also have Everybody Writes by Anne Handley.

Oh, the worst. No, actually, hold on. That's not fair. I think Anne Hanley's is better than those two. To be totally fair, Anne's book has a lot of actionable insights.

I really hate Anne Lamott's book. I don't know her at all as a person. I'm sure she's wonderful, but Bird by bird is. She spends three pages talking about the right desk to write. It's man. I mean, this is just. It's just writer elitism, snobbery, nonsense.

Yeah. Matt, this is gonna be our burn pile for later. All right? Those two books, maybe three.

Yeah, but it makes my bookshelf look cooler.

Oh, shit. All right, cool.

See, but that's the whole point. You just proved my point and recommend those books to look cool, not because they actually work.

Matt, I could tell. These books aren't even open.

So I actually read Stephen King's book, but I never read Anne Lamott's book.

You shouldn't. Alright, moving on. So, yeah, go to go. We'll link the link in the show notes too to the free book and Amazon as well.

Buying your time back. So what's your favorite way to just stop doing the shit that you don't want to do anymore and leverage other people's times or maybe systems better?

Yeah. So let me go through what I said at speakeasy is.

It'S one of these things that is really simple, but most people like to hear it like, oh, that's smart. And they don't do it. When I did it, it changed my life. Right? So basically my wife and I. My wife has her own business as well, and she's very successful and makes a lot of money. And so like, and we got two kids now. And so it's like we had to get serious about, okay, how are we gonna spend our time? You know, because, like, especially our first kid was like, hell, we were totally, utterly unprepared for having two businesses and a child. And so we basically sat down and decided, all right, our time is worth $100 an hour. And then we spent a week writing down every single thing we did. And we realized that like something like a third or two thirds to a half of our time was spent doing things that we could hire people for way less than a hundred dollars an hour to do. Right? And so. And by the way, $100 is way, like, way like below $100 an hour basically means you're making 250 a year. She's making way. We're both making way more than that. So, like. But 100 is just like a nice. You can make it 50. Just figure out what your sort of number is.

So what we did was, first of all, we got a maid to come two days a week, which was a no brainer. And we should have done that before, but then we realized we just need to buy a household manager or to hire a household manager. So that means, like, no doing dishes, no ordering food, no cooking food, unless we decide to do it together as a family because we enjoy it. No laundry, no picking up, like, you know, dropping the kids off at school. There's a million errands you run, right? And so, like, we have our household manager and we pay her. Now she's full time, but when she started, she was hourly. And the way we saved her time instead of telling her to go to the market, we just got Instacart and, you know, all those sorts of things. And so we use services to leverage her time. Like, we pay her. What do we pay her? 40 bucks an hour. And Instacart's like, you know, almost nothing. So we would save, you know, 80 bucks. Instead of her going to the grocery, she would just order on Instacart and Instacart would, you know, would come do it. Right?

Yeah.

And so basically what we ended up doing was buying back like three to four hours of time a day for each of us.

Wow.

And it fundamentally changed our lives. It took basically everyone who feels hectic and harried stressed is because they don't own their time. So we just bought our time back. And now it's like I spend about six hours a day working. I spend about an hour to an hour and a half, like, working out or that stuff. And then the rest of the day I spend with my wife and kids or doing what I want, or watching TV or reading or anything I want. I just relax. And it's like I have this amazing life because.

I refuse to spend my time doing anything except the stuff I wanted and the stuff that I didn't want to do but had to be done, I just pay somebody else.

So what if there was something in there? And I'm speaking from my wife now, so I'm trying to break her into, like, doing more of the online shopping, Instacart stuff. She's like, I like to go to the store with the kid. It's my form of outing.

So hold on. So my Wife. It's not that we. We go every Saturday. We go to the farmer's market and to Whole Foods as a family, but all four of us go. And we do. We enjoy that. So we go do that. And it's fun. The kids love running around Whole Foods and finding new stuff and all that kind of stuff. And then Sunday, a lot of times, maybe every other Sunday, we go to Costco because the kids love all the free samples, right? And so, like, so it's not that you can't do that. It's that now everything you do is a conscious decision. You do because you want to as opposed to because you have to. Right? But, dude, it did take me a long time to break my wife out of the middle class mindset.

Yeah, and that's exactly what it is. It's the middle class mindset. You're stuck there unless you force yourself.

She thought, like, if she's not cooking dinner and doing the laundry and with a full time job, that she's a bad person. And I was like, she's like, no, this is what, like, I.

We don't fight about, like, you know, why, you know, you cheated on me or nonsense like that. Like, our fights are like, why don't you spend more money to get your time back?

I'm like, why are you doing this task? This is what your assistant is for. And she's like, no, but I feel bad. And I'm like, I had to break her. She had that middle class mindset of like, oh, this is what people who are better than me do. And I'm like, no, we are those people. We are better than those other people. And that's why we pay them to do this.

Hell, yes. That legitimately is the fight that I had with my wife a few times this last week. But it all ended well. I mean, at the end of the day, we grew like, you know, she definitely grew from it.

Right? Well, I mean, the crazy thing is the mindset is that like. Like menial labor or whatever is like, is like.

It's the mindset that that's what, like, people who can't do anything else do, or that that's what bad people do. Or that's what that's like. It's bullshit. Like, we hire people. People choose to take these jobs. Like someone from Instacart, who knows why they're working for Instacart, right? I mean, like, it's a shitty job. I would never want to do it. But someone who's in school, they need flexibility in their hours. They, whatever. Instacart's a lifesaver for them. It is the reason they can go to school, right? And like, our household manager, like, she's married, her partner, like, has an expensive job or, you know, makes money, whatever. She wants to do something, but, like, she doesn't want a full time job. She wants to only work four to five hours a day and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So it's like, I had to get her out of the mindset that having other people do your work, do work for you made you, like a bad rich person. Right? It comes from the mindset that rich people used to be really evil and poor people were like, oh, fuck these rich people. Classified used to be a real thing, but the mind. And it's not really true anymore, but the mindset has stuck with so many people, dude, it was a knockdown, man. In her business, like, they got. So she was the big problem too, was her hiring her business. I had to go into her business and force her to, like, to make checklists so she could hire an assistant.

Oh, my God. That's the thing is, like, everyone needs an assistant for one, and then now everyone needs a freaking assistant for your home life. Yeah.

Yes, yes. We have a household manager. It's the greatest thing we've ever done, ever.

I love it, man. I think I'm about to take it to the next level. Because I know you know this, but everyone listening. I mean, after this event, literally was the next day, I told my wife and she was all for this. She didn't do it. Actually, I did. I tracked every little thing I did, you know, even taking the trash out, picking up dog shit, whatever. But it ended up being like, okay, what's the one thing, the easiest thing at least to outsource, quote, unquote outsource, or just hire out? It's the freaking laundry. So we already had a maid. Luckily, I think maid is also probably, maybe before house manager get a maid first.

Depends on if you love cleaning. But that laundry was $20 more to pay her. And she does like six or eight loads every single time, every two weeks or so. Best shit ever. It was absolutely amazing. And it just like blew my mind. I had to send you an email.

And I love the reframe too, because, you know, like, my wife will have these conversations and she'll be like, well, I've got the time to do it. You know, it's like, it'll take me an hour to do this, so if I got the free time, might as well do it. It's like, but wouldn't you rather do other stuff at the time other than laundry? And also that sort of reframe of. Well, by actually outsourcing it, you're actually improving somebody else's life. You're actually going out there and helping somebody else make a living. So there's like that reframe of. You get to buy your own time back and you're supporting somebody else. Like, there's, you know, there's. There's happiness value in all of that as well.

Yep. No, dude, it. Once I. Once. Here's the way I explain it to my wife. I'm like, when you're on your deathbed, do you want Bishop and Vaughn, our kids, Bishop and Vaughn to say, man, I'm so glad, mom, that you did all the housework? Or do you want them to say, thank you so much for spending all that time with me? And of course she fucking broke down in tears. Like, oh, of course. I'm like, okay, well, that's what you're doing. You're saying the housework is more important than the children. And once. Once I framed it that way, then she's like, okay, yeah, obviously I love it.

So I'm gonna take some nuggets from this second time chatting with you and tell her that. But also, I love what you said about still going to the store, doing the stuff she loves, but going as a family. I think that's the key thing is, like, do you want to spend time as a family, even if you're just doing it alone or whatever, running around those two things that matter so much more at the end of the day. Yep.

Yeah, no, we. We have the best time at the grocery store when we go as a family, because it's not an errand. We're not rushing to do anything. We.

We.

It is a thing we choose to do together, and it's awesome.

Yeah. And honestly, the Austin, you know, like, the. The big Whole Foods out there is like a theme park, so it's freaking great, dude.

It's the greatest place on earth. It really is.

I love it. Every time I go to Austin, I'm like, gotta go there. Just hang out the bar or something. All right, man. Well, let's see. Anything else before we close this thing down that you want to share?

I mean, it's your podcast.

You were flowing on a good one here on the time back stuff. So I think let's end it there and definitely check out Bookinabox Book. It was called.

Yep, bookinabox.com book.

Now, are there Any books that you've read that you recommend to people often that you really enjoy.

I mean, loaded question.

I know it's a loaded question, but.

You know, just, you got to give me a genre man, because that's too broad of a question. I'm a huge reader.

All right, so you know, the audience that's listening is mostly entrepreneurs, probably mostly Internet entrepreneurs. Somewhere in that realm, is there a book that maybe it's something you refer to often or is like sort of had a positive impact on your business?

All right, I'll give you one that this is not going to be. This is not a common recommendation for that group of people, but it's one that I think almost every Internet type entrepreneur that I've ever met.

They can't. They're basically, they have no idea how to actually run or scale a business. All they talk about is oh, I made all this money with this little work and blah, blah. But like then they're stuck in their like maybe high six, low seven figure treadmill because they don't know how to build a team. They don't know what a business actually looks like. They don't know how to scale, they don't know how to do any of that. Right. And the person that I would read a lot of is Peter Drucker. Like all of the management business books you read are effectively poor rip offs of the greatest management thinker of all time. Who was Peter Drucker?

Probably his best book is Managing Oneself.

That's the one that I think. I hesitate because it might be a level above or maybe the Essential Drucker, which is like his sort of best of. But that's the guy who basically every Internet entrepreneur I've ever met is a clown playing in the minor leagues. If they want to actually move up, Drucker is one of the guys to read.

Love it. No, that's perfect man, because that's what we're trying to do on the podcast here is introduce Fresh Eyes. Something new that'll elevate you not to stuck in this frickin rabbit hole of Internet marketing or just marketing in general. Good stuff. Drucker's books are solid. Cool man. Well, check out. We'll share this. Definitely all the links and things in the show notes here. And Tucker, it's been awesome man. Thank you.

Yes, definitely. Thanks guys.

Talk to you later.

See ya. All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now right now before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training and a whole bunch of other cool, cool, free training that we give out at evergreenprofits. Com. So that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.