Part 2 - Dale L. Roberts’ Self-Publishing Winning Formula

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

As you went through that process, what, what was the first taste of winning that you had from this experience?

I think the big win for me was just publishing the book because at the time I was only intending on being a hobbyist. So getting it published onto Amazon's marketplace. And then the bigger taste of success wasn't just the fact that I sold some books to my friends and family. That was great. But I started seeing more sales beyond that and to me that was enough blood in the water for a shark like me to realize I'm going to quit my day job. And this is literal. Like as soon as I got that first paycheck, I'm already having this conversation with my wife. I did this part time. Can you imagine if I did it full time? And she actually wasn't reluctant to it. She was like, okay, I think you've got something here. But thankfully she had already established herself as a solo entrepreneur because she was working an Amazon FBA business. So essentially she was selling things on Amazon that wasn't publishing related, obviously. So yeah, I decided to go ahead and leave my rather good job to pursue this life as a full time author. And that was my first real taste of success. Wasn't just the publishing the book, that was the big success metric, but the surprising success metric to me was people are going to buy my book that I don't know. This is crazy.

Yeah. And were you thinking, what did you have a worry about being able to come up with content are titles that people would be interested in because you have emitted 7080 books. So from inside, woof. And so at the front, did you realize, you know, I'm tapping into a motherload of oil reserves here that could just go on and on because usually I want to write a book. And I'll tell you this, I want to get your opinion on this. I wrote a book. Bestseller 2015 serial winner, 600, 635 or something. Five star reviews on Amazon still on there.

Nice.

What I was told was now that was when I had a ghostwriter help me, I was not going to be able to write a book myself. That was the one thing I knew in my entire life. You can't write. I always thought I could do everything except write. I don't know what it was. That and the, you know, that and get an A in chemistry. Those are two things that weren't going to happen. But the thing is that. And I wrote. But I went ahead and wrote a book one time anyway. I wrote a book.

Yeah.

And when I gave it, I gave it to some of my friends to say, what do you think? And I thought I had my manuscript like you. I'm telling you this because I think you will enjoy it. But when I gave it to my friends, they said, this looks pretty good. Why don't you write and turn it into a book? I said, I thought it was a book. No, go get. Somebody could help you write a book. This is a good idea. It was like Paul McCartney. They had him. He wrote the theme song for one of the James Bond movies. I don't forget what it is. You know that.

Live and let die.

Live and let die. Good man, you are. This is you. That is your industry.

So anyway, love music. Yeah.

Well, he gets it all together, he's all excited, and he flies down to deliver to the producers down in the Bahamas or someplace. He goes in, makes a big presentation and they said, pretty good. When are you going to record it? When are we going to do the real recording of this? And he said, that was the real recording. And then they had the awkward moment, the face off. We're staring a beetle in the face and he's telling us, this is the final version. And they said, okay, yeah, this is the final version. We're gonna go with this.

You can't argue with Paul McCarthy.

You don't argue with Paul.

He's a legend.

But it was. But when he tells a story, it's exactly the same thing. It's like, you don't know. But it was a different type thing. He wasn't in that style of music at the time. And when you go into these new. You don't know what the reaction is gonna be, but you got to throw the dice. You gotta get yourself out there. I told you all that to say. The advice I got was, everybody's got one book in them. Oh, yeah, write one book. Just write one book. Don't you know, because the segment's always worse. Not quite as good. Like, look at Dale Carnegie, his second or third, fourth book. Nobody remembers. They only remember the first one. And so I bought that. But I think that's bad advice. I since learned that's pretty much bad advice. And if you've got other books in you, go ahead. And you probably should keep on writing. What have you learned about that? You can educate me because you've you've got a bunch of them.

I will tell you that. I just, there's a superpower that I have, it's adhd. And I am able to harness that for good. It is a double edged sword. It can work against me and if I don't have it wrangled in, it could become a big problem. And so my biggest problem is my creativity. I have creativity. Just I, I don't have enough time in the day. That's my biggest issue. In fact, even now as we speak, I have a laundry list of ideas that I'd like to do in YouTube videos and do with books and things like that. So my biggest issue is, okay, what is going to be the idea or concept that's going to work right now? Because I know that I could sit here and try to churn out 50 books, but the problem is if I can't get it out there into the marketplace and see that there's proof of concept. First of all, are there readers that are willing to buy it? Yeah, I mean, that's going to be the big thing because I got bills to pay, man. I can't just go out and churn out a manuscript and go, yay, look at me, everybody, right? No one cares if they're not buying. So that is the thing is I figure out what's going to sell right now and pay those pesky things that come in the mail called bills. And so that's what I really focus on. So it's, how do I get it? I don't know. It's one of those things. I think I've always been very excited about life, very excited about various aspects. I'm passionate about so many things. So it's just a case of taking my, you know, my proverbial fire hose and rather than letting it flail about in the wind, I've got to grab that fire hose and direct it towards one area until I feel like something's fulfilled and then I can move over to the next area.

Well, that's key because even, and you see this even in Hollywood at the highest levels you can have, well, even the greatest producers, directors, writers, everything, say we have no idea what we're doing. You know what I'm saying? It's just like, what will work next time? You know what I'm saying? Like, what's going to work the next time? I don't know. We just give it our best shot. But in line with that, they actually do a lot of testing and probing and watching trends. And like the lady who wrote The Dracula series or this and the other. You know, she had done some research, this is 20 years ago, Adam. But she had seen in young people a big surge of interest in those, that kind of fiction. So she wrote it and she had big hits. But when you get an idea, how do you sort through? How would you recommend people start to weed out their possible topics, directions to go in to find, what will people respond to? Because you know, like here, one of the things you hear, this is one piece of information. Everybody seems to know that Tim Ferriss came up with a title, the Four Hour Workweek. You know, because he researched, he ran double blind AV testing with all kind of titles. And that was before he wrote the book. He did that kind of testing and then that was the title everybody seemed to have interest in. So he wrote that book. He just put a lot of the same information and kind of put it up like that. Now it was a blatant lie from the beginning because people who know him at Princeton say work 20 hours a day, even as a student. So. But he probably had, he probably had three or four different four hour projects he was working on every single day. But you know, here and there. But the thing is, it caught on. But he did it, he did research. And so for a lot of us, we love that. I hear those stories. You don't know how to do that research yourself. How do you sort through the ideas and start to get an idea? This is something that would resonate out there and people would be interested in.

It's important that you get it out of your head and onto paper. Make it actually physical or digital if you want to. If you have like a Microsoft Word document, whatever that might be. A lot of people unfortunately always go, I've always wanted to write a book. But the problem is their idea always stays up here in their head. And that's not going to help out at all in the long term. So what I would say is get a list and see, I always have a notebook right on my desktop where I write all of my things down, ideas that I have and I try to keep those up and I try to look over at them from time to time and go, okay, does this make sense right now? Great. But that's going to be the thing is get it out of your head, put it onto paper. Whether physical or digital, it doesn't matter. Get it to where you have that there. Instead of just talking about it, be about it. Now the next thing is going to be do the research. It's. There's a Beautiful thing. It's called Internet. You literally can just go on and.

You spell out, I'm just kidding.

Exactly, exactly. You got to get on and just do the research. You'll be able to see if there's popularity and proof of concept if you spend enough time looking through. So if you're wanting to get into being an author, obviously go into places like Goodreads or into Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Cobo or any of those other ones, and the audience is going to tell you what is resonating with them, what is selling the most. You're going to see a number of reviews and you're going to see why it resonated with them or in the instance of low reviews, why it didn't resonate with them. Studying the marketplace is a huge factor. I see a ton of aspiring authors skip over. Yeah, they're too busy romanticizing the muse. They're like, oh, this is beautiful. I've been inspired to write this amazing Dragon shifter romance novel. That's awesome. But did you seep there's demand? Because, I mean, if you want to go ahead and scratch that itch, that's fine. Please don't think that I'm going to look down upon you for being a hobbyist. But if you're looking at this for doing a as a business, you need to do that research. See if there's demand in the marketplace, because otherwise you're going to put that Dragon Shift romance book out there and it's going to flop and you're going to be going, well, why did this happen? You know why it happened, because you didn't do the research.

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Yeah, and the thing about that, to reinforce that people think so much of these things, is to get yourself thinking the right way about whatever it is you're setting yourself out to do. And one thing is that I found a way of communicating that to people is if you approach it as whatever this thing you're doing, if you approach it as a hobby, you're going to get a hobby income. If you approach it as a business, you got the chance to turn it into a business income. But you can't approach it like a hobby and have any chance of it turning into a business type income. Because, see, you set yourself up, even though the first one, you set yourself up for a lot of success with a disciplined approach. You had particular time you got the whole book together before you went and moved forward with it. I mean, that was the way it wasn't sloppily put together. We'll finish it. Here's the idea of it, here's a concept. If you like this part, we'll send the other five chapters in later. No, you had the book. And so that's a great thing for people to learn. And it has applications in all businesses where you're writing a book, where you're doing a, you're singing, you're writing songs, you're, you know, because they're very organized. I've got friends of family and that are songwriters in Nashville and they're very particular and organized about writing those country songs. They'll have the lyricist, the guy with the melody, they'll have this, that, that. They'll have the. The guy would come in with the entrance, the hook. And. And this is not. This is just the writing part of it, not getting into the producing of it. But they're very organized about what, how people respond right now, what's good in the market. And that's the thing they say that's the reason behind Taylor Swift right now is that the miracle of John Lennon and Paul McCartney is they came up with all this stuff themselves. They had all the ideas and they put them together. They fortunately had George Martin to kind of put it together and cobble it together. But it all pretty much came from in their heads. Whereas Taylor Swift is writing a lot of songs, but she's got people all over the industry watching trends, coming up with ideas and say, this would be great for Taylor Swift. And she's just a matter of picking and choosing, cherry picking from the best minds in the industry that are basically doing the work for you, for her. But in the beginning, she did it herself. And so in the beginning, we always have to do it ourselves, don't we?

Oh, yeah, yeah. You won't have that giant team of people assisting you until you have the discretionary income and the proof of concept. It's incredible. I Tell you the more successful that you get, the more people will be willing to help you out. It's incredible. Psych. Sometimes I think to myself, I even say this to my wife from time to time. I work with these different sponsorships and brands and such and they'll just give me their stuff for free. I'm like, where were you 10 years ago?

Right? Yeah, yeah. And the thing is that if you need something, you're not going to get it. You get it when you don't need it.

And yep, that nailed it right there.

And so the thing that you do get from doing it yourself is you learn how to evaluate, supervise, train directionals. When you start adding them to your team, you're not just because there's, I'm sure you've done the same thing. You get, you have a problem, you don't know how to deal it. There's someone comes in there, that expert, and they, they talk you into, say, we're going to solve this for you. You're so busy in other areas, you don't have time to do that from grassroots from the beginning to learn it right from the bottom. So you bring them in, import the genius, and the genius just turns into an incredible expensive dude. And because you don't have experience, it takes you a while to pick up on it. This guy doesn't know anything. And also he's incredibly lazy and non productive. And so when you've been through it yourself, you have instincts, you can kind of smell a rat or you can smell somebody who's good. And right now I'm sure that those early struggles you went through are serving you well now as you deal with other vendors, et cetera.

Oh, absolutely. I say this often to people. I smell like smoke because I've been through fire. There's been so many instances where I've come close and I've been on the edge of saying, screw it, I quit. But I also remember, like, hey, that that's not the mindset that has gotten me to the position that I'm in right now. And it's not the mindset that's going to take me above this position that I'm currently in because I, I am not happy plateauing. I'm not happy being the same and getting the same status quo. I like seeing upward growth like everybody does. Everybody likes to win. So you have to have a winner's mindset when you go into this whole business. I mean, in any walk of business or even in life, you have to have that positive mindset because otherwise you're going to be self destructive. You're going to do some things that are going to sabotage what you're trying to do, whether you think you will or not. Like, oh, mindset's bunch of bs. No, mindset really does make a huge difference because I will tell you this much, that if I weren't grateful, that if I weren't humble, if I weren't flexible, if I weren't coachable, I probably wouldn't be in this position that I'm in and having such a deep, amazing network of individuals with me.

Well, mindset years leads to expectations when things flatline. If you're not, your mindset is not based on growth. You don't panic as quickly or you don't make as you're not as decisive, you put up with it longer. And when, or sorry, employees or you know, when your employees start to go stale or sour, whatever, bad attitudes start to creep in. That's where mission statements I think are good for a lot of companies that get big is because it's like for the founders, it helps them remember, wait a minute, what are our values? Because by having that out there, it allows you to notice when people are deviating from those things. The negativity, not so much on customer service, a little starting to get a little sloppy and you have excellence as one of your core values. I think those mission statements and core values are really good to establish. Wait a minute, here's the standard that we know we've got the level we got to play at if we're going to grow and growth is the gravity, the idea of grow or die. That is the fundamental rule of business. Just like gravity in the universe, grow or die is a fundamental rule that governs everything. But it's amazing how many people don't pay attention to that. Have you noticed?

Yeah. Why do you think that is? Because I think there's sometimes, you know, I'm satisfied.

Satisfied, you know, I never to have this guy. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Expectation.

Yeah.

And because you're not aware, most of us are entrepreneurs. It's like most first time millionaires, our most millionaires are first time millionaires, you know, so we didn't have millionaire parents to educate us and coach us on the fact that this might not continue forever. You might need to want to save some of this. And because you always think, oh, it's just going to get bigger and bigger. Not necessarily so if that's going to happen, what really happens is what goes up comes down. Unless you make sure you do things to make sure it doesn't come down. And so if you have that kind of coaching, you're ahead of the game. But that's why we talk about these things Dale on here, because to give people, help them set their expectations and know how things are going to go, what they can accept, what they can't accept. But you just can't accept things to go stale because if it starts to go in a flat line, pretty soon it's going to go downline. There's no such thing as life is not lived on a level. There's no such thing as either you're pushing to go ahead, move up, or you're sliding downhill. And downhill happens a whole lot faster. I'd like to thank you for listening.

To part two of this episode episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast.

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