Write, Publish, Win: How Dale L. Roberts Turned Passion Into Profit

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. Let's have some fun this afternoon, everybody. We're talking with Dale L. Roberts. Dale is all over YouTube. He's got. He's a self publishing giant. He's a great teacher of people on the way up. And he's got the self publishing with Dale. Is that your podcast or is that the YouTube or what is self publishing with Dale?

That is all encompassing. That's the full brand. Because I actually have two different channels. But a lot of people didn't realize the first channel started out self publishing with Dale, which. But then I ditched it because I started a podcast with the same name. Not smart on my behalf there. There's a first mistake that we can go ahead and discuss is. Is splitting into two.

Okay. So welcome, Dale. Glad to have you on. Thanks for joining us.

Love the intro, by the way. That was good. I need you as my hype man, Larry.

Yeah, I'm a hype man. Yeah, I just call me Bondini Brown or something.

There you go. There you go.

Dale, you're in the world of, you know, you moved in, you've had a lot of things that you've been involved in. And so why don't let people to get the background, the one thing they need to know is you've been incredibly successful here in the last few years writing books. You got. How many titles do you have? How many books you have out there?

Oh, good lord. It's over 50. I think last count I saw was somewhere in the 70s. But I have delisted some of those nonfiction books. But yeah, it's a lot. It's one of those cases you just lose count after a while. And after a while, like, should I even flex that? I've done over 50. It's just you get past 50, it seems almost like. It's like, sit down, stop. Quit bragging.

Well, and then how many languages you're in? Multiple languages.

Let's see here, we're in seven different languages, so Dutch, German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian. And I know I'm missing one more. Beyond English, of course.

So let's talk about how you came up. Let's just start when you started. What was in your mind as you grew up? What fascinated you? What caught your attention? What captivated you?

Oh, man, as a kid I was very self entertained. Like you could put me Into a room with some books and some action figures. And I could go all day long without bothering a single person. And I've been a lifelong reader and writer, love to read books. It's just one of my favorite things to do, to just escape. So you can only imagine, like the whole full circle type vision of where I was to where I am now. The small kid in me is living this dream.

Yeah. And so where did you develop a personality?

Oh, man.

Staying in your room. Usually that's because you just don't like to be around people or you'd rather be. You prefer your own company. But when you. You come out of the room, what got you coming out of the room and interacting with people?

Oh, I wish I could blame it on any one person. I think there's a variety of factors. It's. I think the people I've surrounded myself with, a lot of people that are very personality driven, a lot of people that are very forward, a lot of people that are very opinionated, especially in a public capacity. So being around that, I think influenced me a lot. My mother, I. I've inherited a lot of her traits where she's a very social bug, she likes to talk to people. So I think I'm very fortunate in that capacity.

I think what happens somewhere along the way, we either get around, we find ourselves in situations where we are around more interesting people, or we realize something causes us to start focusing on them and what they have to offer and the adventures they're going through that you can learn from and get fascinated by that rather than withdraw into our shell. And it's not living if you just stay like a hermit crab. This is not much of a life, but you got to get out there and circulate. And I think what that people hold back for some reason, like fear of public speaking just as a huge thing. Hutch, you find out you're just talking to people. You know, it's like on here, we're just talking and you can open your mouth. We used to say about prospecting and sales, it's like, I've run out of people today. I don't know who I would talk to at sales. You know, it's like, well, you talk to your friends. Well, I don't have any friends or my friends or this or the other. Say, well, let me tell you this. I said, do you know how to make friends? If you don't know how to make friends, think of the last time you made a friend. Go do that again. Okay? And then that's a great Advice. Or go find someone who seems to have a lot of friends and ask them how they do it so that you could. You know, making friends is a skill. And it's a matter of getting out in life and meeting the world is full of interesting people. And so. And then what you'll learn is that some of the most interesting are just con artists. However, you pretty much learn if they're too interesting. Whoop. Is almost like a stock that has too big of a rate of return. It's like, whoa, too many stories. You had 17 careers by the time you were 18 years old. Or a bronco rider in Montana, you'd have jumped out of planes in California, put out fires. You served in Congress as a intern. Wait a minute. But, you know, there are a lot of legitimately super interesting people out there, and that's living to get out there and meet people because you. It sparks things inside you. If you are the kind of person that has the freedom or interest or desire to try new things and move in new directions. And if you're going to be an entrepreneur, that's what you're trying to do, reinvent your life, grow your life. And there's no better. That's why we've got you on here today, is because there's no. No better person to get on as somebody that has had achievements. This is not. Had a life of doom and gloom. And they've got like, well, try this, try that, try that. You fall down, but you get up. And so there's a way that attitude is projected. And so the more you can get yourself out around people like that, the better. So when did you get involved? Let's just talk about how you came up through high school. What were you in? What did you do in college, things like that. What motivated you? What caught your attention?

High school, it was a little bit of. This is the same thing. I say high school and college would probably interchangeable because that was back in the days when I had a long head of hair. I used to play music all the time during high school. I love playing guitar to this day. I've actually got a few guitars hanging up over here on my wall next to me. I still dabble. I love to play guitar, but that was then. And of course I continued to read and I loved writing. In fact, I went to college to get into journalism. And I discovered about a year and a half into my experience on college, that wasn't my cup of tea. Like, I wasn't ready for that. I wasn't ready. And I will Tell you, like, straightforward Larry. It was a lot to do with my maturity. I couldn't accept the fact that I went from being in high school where I was praised for being an excellent writer. Like, you're great at everything that you do. You're fantastic. This is awesome. They would, you know, put pieces of a mind inside the local newspaper. Like, I thought I was amazing. And then I went to college and they kicked me right down a few pegs because they were like, dude, you kind of like. My first paper I handed to my English class, I got an F. I was like, what?

What's going on here?

I thought I was way better than this. So I lasted a year and a half where it just really humbled me. Looking back, I'm glad I had the experience of going to college because I met some really cool people and I did learn some in that process. But I think I discovered more about myself and my ability to internalize and understand what the world's trying to present me. And rather than being kicked down a few pegs and like moping about it, I think now, if that were to happen, I would take a step back and go, okay, why did I fail this? There is something obviously that I've done wrong in my processes that I need to improve on. And I think that again, that comes down to maturity. Because there's a big difference between a 48 year old version of Dale versus an 18 year old version of Dale.

Yeah, you remind me. I took calculus in high school up in Long Island, West Hampton Beach. I aced it. I aced calculus in high school. I go to Georgia Tech. It's the same. I got to take calculus your freshman year. It's the same book. I said, piece of cake. I've already spent a year learning this thing. Easy A. I made D minuses all the way through.

Oh, my gosh. That's exactly my story right there.

What happened was they actually expected you to understand and be able to use calculus at Georgia at that level rather than just parrot it back. You know, all the little formulas. Yeah, but that is an education. There's like, you can't deny that real. That's the whole thing. And I was. I'm on this thing lately that if you are in denial, we've got this going in political world right now. But if you're in denial about your career, about. And you just talked about it right there. That was the way you reacted when things went wrong. You didn't go into denial. These people are all against me. I don't know what it is. They're discriminating about with people from my party, the country, or whatever. You said I got to get better. And so. But you don't do that when you're in denial. And when you're in denial, this. This never occurred to me before. But when you're in denial, you can't be helped. You can't be reached. Because when you're in denial, you won't accept reality. And reality is really, most of us that are stubborn is the only thing that can get through to us. We run into, like, you say, turn in a paper and you get an F. I go into the same course and I get a D minus. It's like, that's reality. I can't. I gotta accept it. And so I responded differently than you. I changed majors.

I should have done that. Maybe I'd be a different case right now. Maybe I'd have a degree by now.

Now, as you went through that thing, you made your adjustments, and then how did you proceed forward?

Oh, I proceeded to just screw up a good portion of my life where I just spin my wheels. I truly thought I was gonna become a rock star at that point because that was my intent, literally. I remember the moment that I dropped out of college, and it was right in the middle of a semester. I got up in the middle of a Spanish class and I left my books there, which, by the way, is so stupid. Cause you know how much books are. I mean, they were expensive back then. I left my book. I literally just walked out with a smile on my face and I said, I'm going to become a rock star. I literally believe that there is no turning back.

No turning.

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, and.

And it really. It got hard. It got hard. From that point on, did I become a rock star? No. Did I play in a lot of bands and fail miserably at them? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Did I spend countless hours, days, months, years playing around with something that never loved me back?

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. But I think the big thing that happened was while that's going on, me trying to become a rock star, I continued my quote unquote career at that time in the healthcare industry as an activities director. I actually. I started out as a nurse aide, and then I progressed to assistant to activities director, which anybody that's not familiar with an activities director is at a senior living community that is a person that's paid to play. Like, I get to come in and play bingo. I take them out shopping. I get to go to the movies with them. I get to do A lot. I mean, it's just so much fun. And that was a career I never saw myself getting into. But I loved it with all of my heart. And to this day, I still have just a strong passion for that business. And if someone to ever go, hey, Dale, give up the YouTube thing. You have to, you got to go get yourself a quote unquote real job. Yeah, I definitely would return to that, doing activities director work because it was very fulfilling.

Yeah. And so there. Something happened along the way.

Oh, yeah, yeah, something definitely happened along the way. And that's where, let's see here. I was about 20 years into the business because, you know, I started when I was 17 and I had a corporate wellness coach that saw how much I was very passionate about health and fitness. And she was like, you should write a book about it. And that is when the light bulb went off above my head. But I wasn't thinking like, this is not something, Larry, that I was thinking intentionally, like, I'm going to become a best selling award winning author, I'm going to sell thousands of copies of books and I'm going to get a massive YouTube channel. No, it wasn't even that. All I wanted to do was scratch a niche. That little inner kid in me was saying, you got to write that book, Dale. It's about time that you do that book.

Yeah.

And so me pulling that trigger was the thing that, that was the catalyst that put things into motion.

You're what age now?

Let's see here. I am 48 now. So I was about 37 then.

So the thing is, those are listeners need to realize or just accept the factor and get encouragement for the fact that you went down a road that you was fulfilling. And I don't know how much potential or you know, how far you could have gone in that business, you know, how many promotions or whatever you could do. But income, this and the other, I don't know where you are.

Income wasn't the greatest, but.

If you were out there circulating and then somebody, you know, ideas come from a million different places, you know, that could, that thought could have come. Those words could have come from all, anywhere, but it happened to come from another person who knew you and said, boom. And it's funny, we can be prepared for things that we don't even know we're being prepared for. And we can be very close to a tipping point. And we're just so tied up in our day to day activity, we not even realize what's happening and how the planets are aligning, how the Glacier is melting and getting ready for a big piece to fall off. And then when it happens, it can happen very fast. So talk about. So you said, okay, the book is like, that's something I could do. That's something I could do. I've got enough experience writing, I can put my thoughts together. I've got a body of material that I excited about getting out there to the public. And so how did that go? How long did that take and how did you do?

Took roughly about a year. And it's because I honestly, I knew that I could write. I didn't know that I could be able to write a full length book.

Yeah.

And I didn't even have an idea of what a full length book was like. I was like, how many words do I need to do? I didn'. Care. I just sat down and I'm very much. I love my wife. I love the time that we get to spend together. So rather than sacrificing that time every day, I would get up two hours early. That was every weekday before I'd have to go into work, I'd get up for two hours and I would sit down and I would write at this manuscript. And this went on for about roughly a year. And I finally ended up getting a fully churned out manuscript. Now, was it great? No, not by any stretch. But it ticked that little box of completing a book because that was my mission was let me complete this book and I'm going to go like to a local print place and just have it printed off so I can give friends copies. That was my original intent.

And how did it proceed from there?

Oh, it got worse. It got worse because my wife knew that I was getting up. It wasn't like a surprise to her. She knew I was working on a book and she was obviously very supportive and she appreciated the fact that I wasn't sacrificing our personal time together in order to scratch this particular itch. But it wasn't until I went to the local print shop that was next to my work and I already knew like the owner of that print shop. And so I was like, okay. I went over, presented my manuscript to him, gave him the COVID design and the interior and everything else like that, everything ready to rock and roll. And he gave me a quote of $1200. I go back and I'm just, I'm excited because I'm like, oh, it's only $1200. You know, now mind you, $1200 to me right now is much different than it was Back then. Because what I briefly alluded to was being an activities director. It's not a very high paying job. It's not going to be something that $1200 is definitely more than a drop in the bucket.

Yeah.

And so it was a hard no from her. It was like a, where are you going to get that $1200? How do you plan on getting that money back? And my plan of just printing out a book to give to friends and family for twelve hundred dollars, that wasn't. She didn't like this whole like, oh, we're just going to give our money away to people.

Twelve hundred dollars worth of Christmas presents. Not. Not a good idea.

No, no, not. Yeah, exactly. And so she brought up a very good point. And I think that this is where, you know, a great instance of how resilient and resourceful I am. Because I said, okay, I don't have the money. She's not even willing to even part ways with $5 or our money. And that's. That's totally fine.

Right.

So I said, okay, I have to find a way to do this. And I'm going online and I'm researching, researching. And this is when I stumbled over the Amazon owned company, CreateSpace. Now, they used to fulfill print runs for Amazon. Now it's part of kdp, which is called KDP Print Now. But at that time, I was like, yeah. And with CreateSpace, I tell you what, it was a game changer for me. It opened up my eyes. I didn't have to spend a dime. I could publish it and it would go out to different marketplaces, sign me up. I was like, okay, this is a big bonus here.

Yeah. And it was even better than if you had spent the $1,200 and then you had this and you had followed through in your original plan. So the point there is when you run into a big hard no that might be on purpose for. To prepare you for something better. Right. I know that lesson, by the way, Dale. I know that lesson, but I still don't like to hear it. Right.

Yeah, exactly.

When I'm going down the road and I got an idea and I run into a hard no. I know I've got a thousand examples myself that's probably something better is coming, but I don't believe it at that moment.

But you, yeah, sometimes you just got to take that l and you have to think about it for just a second and go, okay, what can I do with this? How can I process this in a more positive way? And that's why I've always been. So if I've get a video that I've put hours upon hours into and it flops over on YouTube, my inclination, I see a lot of YouTubers that will go, oh, it's the algorithm or oh, it's the wrong time of day or oh, I didn't scratch my head and pat my stomach at the same time, like a bunch of excuses. No, me, I'm going to go, okay, what can I do next time to make this where it's better? And so that's why I'm just always just trying to figure out because I like winning. I don't know about you, I like winning.

You know, I used, I talk about. The thing was I got, I lettered in about every sport in high school. And the way you do that is you go to very small schools.

Good tip.

Yeah, go to a very small school and you're likely to make the team. But the thing is that I didn't have any college offers to sort through when he came. Graduation time, you know, too slow, too short. But the thing is that to be a big basketball star, football star, whatever, you know, it's like, no, but you know, I still got out of the experience. The most important thing is that winning is better than losing. And once you get the taste of winning, you don't want to start losing again. And that has to do with your approach to life, right? So you can set yourself up for losing or you can set yourself up for winning. For those of you who are sick and tired of fooling around and are dead serious about wanting to move up fast, I've got something especially for you. I've combined the best insights from over 40 years in business and making $70 million in income and compress them into a free webinar. That's right. It's a free resource. If you want to find out exactly what the concepts are the I use in coaching million dollar earners. Register now@wearlyllonwinning.com you'll discover the five part framework used by so many to reach their financial, personal and professional goals. You can find that link in this episode's show Notes. As you went through that process, 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 or titles that people would be interested in because you have emitted 70, 80 books. So from inside, woof. And so at the front, did you realize, you know, I'm tapping into a mother load 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 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 being, 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 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 who 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, duh, duh, duh, 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 we're going to do the real recording of this. And he said, that was a 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 going to go with this.

You can't argue with Paul McCarthy, he's a legend.

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 going to be, but you got to throw the dice. You got to 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, right. 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 a. Only remember the first one. And so I bought that. But I think that's bad advice. I've since learned that's pretty much bad advice. And if you've got other books and you go ahead and you probably should keep on writing, what have you learned about that? You can educate me because 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 can become a big problem. And so my biggest problem is my creativity. I have creativity. Just 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 on 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, 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 we should have 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 I this is one piece of information. Everybody seems to know that Tim Ferriss came up with a title, the Four Hour Work Week. 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 he worked 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 go.

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, 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 see if 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. 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 they'll have the guy would come in with the intro, the hook. And 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 hits. 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. Sometimes I think to myself, and 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 so, 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, direct professionals. 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. You have a problem, you don't know how to deal it. If someone comes in there, they're an expert, and they, they talk you into saying, 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, learn it right from the bottom. So you bring them in, import the genius, and the genius just turns into an incredible expensive dud. 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 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 a 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 or 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? You know, because it, it allows, 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 you're 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.

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, well, it's either you're pushing to go ahead, move up or you're sliding downhill and downhill happens a whole lot faster. As you got into your second book, tell us about that.

Oh man. Second book was much, much easier than the first book was. I had already done a lot of studying. I was already out of my job by then and I knew it. Precisely what I needed to do. I think I was very fortunate in that I had a great mentor in self publishing business that he was able to kind of guide me in the right direction. Like, hey, I saw what you did with this first book. It's great. But you probably should focus a little bit more right here. And so I was able to do a lot of that research and such. And that was actually the 90 day home workout plan was my first real big hit. Did it bring in me hundreds of thousands of dollars? No, but it definitely was a better proof of concept than the initial one that got me to leave my job because, I mean, I probably pulled in like $21 and some odd cents to like, determine I was ready to leave my job. Whereas with the 90 day home workout plan, I was pulling in a substantial amount of revenue that I go, oh, now I'm headed in the right direction. The writing was more crisp because I had a great editor. I had a lot more direction. I knew exactly who my ideal audience was. I didn't realize back when I wrote that first book, it's a good idea to identify your audience that you're writing for. I thought initially that I was writing it for everybody. Everybody could benefit from this. But one of my good friends, Mark, said to me, he goes, there's no way you wrote a fitness book that's good for a teenager in the same instance that's good for a senior citizen. And I was just like, it's a good. That's a good point. And he did. He brought up a great point. I can't write a book for everyone. So when you write a book for everyone, you write for no one.

Yeah.

So that's going to be the thing, is know who your audience is. And so for me, when I finally figured out who my audience was, that's where I had my first real big success. I think the biggest success didn't come until about a year after that is when I actually was really able to refine that down. And that's when I started hitting the best sellers lists. And I mean, to hit the best sellers lists in fitness, I mean, it's a very hyper competitive industry. And back at that time, I was like, literally almost to tears. Like, I'm looking at my book going, oh, my gosh, how am I selling this many? I'm nobody. I don't. I'm not anybody compared to this other big author. But for whatever reason, it was pushing me up to the top. And that taste of success was huge. And that precursor of that was that second book. Putting that one out. It made a huge difference in my life. It was the turning point. And I believe now these books, what.

Have you found out about? Are these. These are nonfiction books, correct? Yeah, these are nonfiction. And you may have it in your future to write fiction. I don't. I've never thought about writing fiction. I tell stories, but I don't I wish to write a novel Just seems I just don't aspire to that. But have you thought about getting into fiction?

I have actually. And right now I'm in the midst of launching a 12 book series that's nonfiction and I need to wrap that up. And by July I'm going to be fully pivoting over into fiction. I'll be writing science fiction horror.

Okay. Science fiction horror.

Oh, I hope too much Stephen King growing up.

It sounds like an interesting world to dive into. So now these books, what have you found out about the length of nonfiction books to be self. All of these are self published. Right. And what have you found? I'm enamored of the idea. I haven't written any of these, but I'm enamored of short books. And because my mark, you know, like this podcast, I spent my life talking to people with attention deficit and entrepreneurs are all to some extent manic depressive. They get super excited about this and then super mad about this. And so attention span doesn't usually flow. There's so many things happening. Usually attention span is hard to maintain during those things. For example, my son is like that, my oldest son, he works with me in the business. My book went out in 2015. He just was happy to tell me he finally finished reading it this fall.

And you're like, thanks, did you read a word a day?

But, but I obviously I don't know what he, you know, focusing on reading. Some people are just not readers. But the thing is with entrepreneurs, what I found Dale like we write for impact. You write for impact. I write for impact. Especially if you're in the nonfiction thing. And what I found from doing thousands of meetings with high level managers is like you can have a room of 100 or 200 to 300, doesn't matter. But somehow if you're up in front of them, you can read their, read all of their eyes. You read the eyes. And what happens is that when you connect over here, over here, over here, somebody like they get it. It's just like they almost like elevate eyes get bigger like that. And it doesn't matter if this is the first hour of a three day conference, they're ready to go home because they got where they were looking for. Because the people who do things, Dale like you, here's let me tell you who you are. You're the kind of guy you get one idea that you need from your mentor and you're going to do it a thousand or a hundred thousand times. Most people who Want to write a book, you will tell them a hundred thousand times to get them to do it once. You know what I'm saying?

So true.

So when you're. I write, I don't write for the people who are not need to be told a hundred thousand because they're not going to read the book a hundred thousand times.

So true.

I write for the people who, when they hear an idea, you know, boom, connect, boom. Because those are people who move the world. And so I've been enamored of the idea of the shorter books. The idea of. I think Don Miller, who's the coach builder guy, said that his idea of a great book is one, there's 100 pages, you can buy it as you get on the plane and you're finished by the time you get off. And what's your attitude about length of nonfiction books?

Length should only. Well, there's. First of all, there's two things you need to study. The very first thing is going to be study the market. Make sure that there is demand for something like that within that specific genre. Because nonfiction obviously is a broadly encompassing identifier. There are so many things that break out into self help, health and fitness, writing, education, things like that. So it does break out. You gotta make sure, first of all there is that proof of concept, that there is that ability. But in the same instance, though, you bring up a really good point that a hundred pages or even less sometimes might be more than sufficient for some people because maybe they're reading it on a commute to work, or maybe they're listening to it inside the gym during a workout, things like that to kind of think about. So what I would say is anytime that someone goes to you, like you should write a book, don't just think automatically that you have to write this like 500 page tome, right? Think about delivering value. What is the value you can do? And try to get it to where you can condense that down. Especially if you're an indie author and self published, you don't need to worry about traditional publishing standards because yes, they do have requirements. Yes, literary agents expect a certain number of pages. But if you're going the indie publishing route and you're doing it on your own, this is your game, this is how you determine it. You can go ahead and say, I'm going to write a 50 page book or I'm going to write a 30 page book. It's up to you. Just deliver that value and make sure that you condense it down the best you can. Because a Lot of people, they don't want you wasting their time with a bunch of fluff and a bunch of garbage. They want you to get to the point and give them the goods.

Yeah. In fact, I think in a lot of different genres, there are books that are incredibly short, that have been classics for 50 years or something like that. But like I think Harvey Pennock in Golf is like the Little Red Book of Golf or something like that. It's like little tiny thing like that. But people go to it, go back, buy it, it's still selling and making the impact. They're spiritual growth books. Principles of Spiritual growth. Miles Stanford, 72 pages. I mean, it's just. I've been reading that one since I was 27 years old. And so the thing is that. And there's one on English where there was written on grammar or something like that. You probably know which one it is. William Somebody. That is like a textbook on being grammatically correct. This is what you need to know right here. And so you don't have to have the 600 page dictionary or encyclopedia be able to be literate. You know what I find is that what I've always challenged people to do, like if you go to a meeting, we do a lot of meetings, you go to conferences and this and the other. If we retain one main thing from every big event we went to in our lives, I mean, we'd have encyclopedia of main points, you know what I'm saying? But I always like to look for, when I go to an event, an idea that is so big that if I think about this meeting five years from now, I'll think about that idea that I got, because I would have gotten that idea and I would have been using it ever since, and I would have been talking about it ever since. And I know that I got some small books when I was starting in business and sales at something like Joe Gandolfo. Ideas are a dime a dozen. The theory, the central thing was ideas are a dime a dozen, but the punchline is, but the people who use them are priceless. That was the sentence. He wrote a little book on it, but that was the sentence. I've used it over and over ever since. And oh, there is an advantage of being succinct. And what have you found in your books? How long do they wind up turning into after? Because you've got to have some kind of pattern, as many as you've written.

I do, yeah. About 20 to 40,000 words typically. And it's so funny, my editor now knows me so well, she doesn't even ask me anymore how long a manuscript's going to be, because she knows it's always going to land somewhere between a 20 to 40,000 range. There are some exceptions to the rule, but it's rare these days because I've done so many that it's. I don't want to say I've got a formula in my head, but it's kind of like that, where I have a specific, like, pattern of, okay, I'm going to cover this and this. I always know that I'm a bookend. My content with a story that I try to relate to whatever the main, like, crux of what the book is going to be about. I always try to figure it out because I feel like stories tell. I think you and I, we've been in the sales business before. Like, you hear, facts tell, stories sell. And to me, that's one of the biggest, like, things that I try to embody within my latest nonfiction publications is getting that story, leading in with that. But all in all, about 20 to 40,000 words. I've gone a little north of that. I think I got close to 50,000 words. But my. My editor was like, and we're going to clip this out, this out, clip this out, clip this out. And I'm like, okay, we're back down to 40,000.

Now. How are you using dictation to. I remember I started writing during. I had a cycling accident and the middle of Palm beach, and it incapacitated me. And I've been 17 years in recovery, and I've been fairly functional most of the time. But I did gain a hundred pounds and then have to lose a hundred pounds. And so I was relegated to the couch for many years. And it's like, what am I going to do now? You can't. If it wasn't for commercials, I would have probably never done anything. I would just sat there and watch television. But the fact of commercials, where they repeat them over and over, I think that's what they should do in supermax prisons or with Terrace and Guantanamo, you take commercials and you play them over and over and over and over and over and just drive them into your head. And then when they say you torture these guys, we just played them commercials. What are you talking about? Why is that? Just.

I think it's a good game plan. We need to run this up the ladder here.

So. So the thing is that that's where I started. Well, I got to do something. So let's get into Twitter. What would. How would that work? And then Facebook. And then before I kind of like you, you have ideas. Before I knew it, I had. Then you do blog posts. And then before I knew it, I had like 40 or 50 potential book titles out there. And then it was like, well, we did one. And so. But you get to where you're doing a lot of typing, but you can save a lot of time if you can get the dictation down. How do you move fastest through your. Getting your content down, get the, your, your 30,000 words down as fast as possible in your outline and all of that. How do you get it out, out of your head?

I, I'm a very fast typist, I would say very fast. I, I'd say I'm. I'm proficient. That's the best way. Because I've heard some other people that type way faster than me. I'm probably pumping out right, about 50 to 60 words per minute. I have done voice dictation before, and it was good. My biggest issue was the whole idea of having to punctuate and going through like, oh, you. You'll say, some people may not understand this. When you do, like, voice dictation, you're typically having to say, like, today I walked out and saw the sun was beautiful. Period. Next line, and you're having it. It slows down that flow of thought. So I found that I wasn't very proficient. A good friend of mine, Nick Thacker, he's an ace at doing voice dictation. He could literally just rall it off, but came from years of experience of him actually doing it a lot now. As far as voice dictation goes, though, now it's getting even better and I'm gonna just kind of share with you. They're not paying me to say this or anything else like that. There's software out there. It's called Prose, right? It will do voice dictation for you, and it will automatically insert all the punctuation for you. And then you can even have an AI model that goes. And it will edit as you are going along, really. But prose, right? That is just amazing. I just found out about them about a month or so ago, and I have loved what I've seen so far. It's definitely changing the game because, you know, as you know, probably there's Dragon, Naturally speaking, which comes at a very high premium. And you've got to train your dragon, quote, unquote, train your dragon to understand your dialect and your delivery and things like that. And it becomes a little bit of a hassle. See, I Did voice dictation through my little phone, my Android back, gosh, let's see here. 2016. And I did it with Google Docs. All I did was just turn on my talk to text speech or my speech to text feature and it put it on in there. But again you're having to say all the punctuation. So I'm very excited with what the future holds right now for voice dictation because I'm a pretty proficient talker. I think I'm a better talker than I am a typer. But I think the real challenge is going to be is taking that same part of my brain that actively edits as I type and try to do that while I'm doing voice dictation. Because there's many things that will go through my head. Some of the lessons that my editors will kind of share with me, some of the issues and hang ups that I have in my own writing that I try to stifle as I'm typing. Whereas when I'm talking with my voice, forget about it. It's, it's unfiltered, it's going to come out, it's going to have a lot of your nose and ums and all that type of stuff that I'm going to probably have to end up cleaning up in some capacity.

Yeah. And I probably AI can do a lot of that. You know what I'm saying? You know, get trained. It just, you know. But tell me this, what you screwed up and told me that you've reached a couple of points in your life to where our. When you've run into those points where it's just like I'm thinking of tossing the whole thing and just turning the whole thing in and forgetting the whole whole deal. What kinds of things cause that to happen? What have you been through that's reached that point? Why is it not an automatic thing that where you just keep putting out books and the money comes in and then you expand it other countries and then you write another book and then more money comes in and then what in the world could go so wrong? That probably has to do with the YouTubes and the videos and the podcast or something.

It has, it does have a lot to do with being very public. I think the biggest issue that I have is I get thin skinned on some things and it varies from one thing to the next. So for instance, I'll get one trolling comment on a video and I realize I'll get like 50,000 different great comments. But for whatever reason, this one negative comment Cuts through the mess. And for whatever reason, it just validates that monkey mind. I got in the back there going, you aren't good enough. You aren't that person that you think you are. You are. It's that imposter syndrome, if you will. And it kind of validates that. But I think sometimes when I have to take a step back and reanalyze it, the first things I need to look at is how many people would disagree with this person. Okay. How many people would disagree with that monkey mind of mine. And the next thing is, what are my goals and am I working my way towards those goals and am I feeling fulfilled? That's the most important thing.

The feedback, the negative, the troll, the negative feedback. Stuff like that. Rather than it's just like, I'm not sure that you're going to be a great politician here. I don't know if that skin is.

I'm not going to be cut out for it. I don't lie very well.

I don't know if you're going to pass the thick skin test to move on to the political phase of your career. I'm going to have to over tell Donald Trump not to nominate you for any cabinet position.

Yep, no cabinet positions for me today. Boy, I'll quit the first day in. They're like, oh, this guy.

Well, may I make a suggestion on that point?

Yes, please.

Because we all, we all deal with it. But I think he might have the wrong approach because you're trying to unravel a negative, irrational comment from a son of a who just does not like you. So the first thing you got to realize is that certain people aren't going to like you, don't like you. And I don't care if you bought them ice cream and hundred dollar bills on the hour, they would still hate your guts.

There'd still be something wrong with the ice cream that was bought. Yeah.

What flavor? I've told you, never bring me vanilla. And the thing is, I learned that early in my career because I recruited this guy. I thought he had great potential. Unbelievable. He just hated my guts. I don't know why. He did well in the business, this, that and the other, but it's just like I never could figure it out. I liked him, he just, you know, and then it dawned on me. Oh, okay. I've learned something. Some people you just don't click with, move on. Because like you say, there are other people in the world, but you just gotta be able to say, and you know, it's all right, I'm an artist too. I do painting and I love the attitude of painting. I love the idea of painting that I show people a painting. If they like it, they're right. If they hate it, they're right. Whatever their reaction is, they're right. And so what I would suggest. So not everybody's going to like it. And so I think the thing that would concern us when like the bulk of the comments are nasty. Yeah.

And it's a fraction at this point. I think you're catching me on a pretty good day. Like, this is a rare occasion that I get very much down on my luck. I think I'm very fortunate that I've got a beautiful wife. She's wonderful to me. And sometimes when I bring up those things, she's like, who cares about that person?

I'm like, there you go. Yeah, yeah.

She's like, we don't know them. Like, do they pay our bills? I don't care about them well.

So here's my suggestion that consider taking this approach, the comedy angle. Think about evaluating their comment from a comedy perspective. Because here's where I learned that one I was checking through, coming back from. Many years ago, we were tried to build a sales organization over in the UK and financial services and Enron blew up and then every country in the world put in all kind of regulations. So that was the end of that party after I'd spent a quarter of a million dollars and six months of my life. But anyway, I'm going through security on the way home out of Gatwick and I've got. I guess I'm not moving fast enough for this proper English lady, early 40s, all dressed, high heels. This at the other coming, you know, her stuff was on the belt behind. On the conveyor belt behind mine. And I'm getting my stuff and she's up there. She's furious at me for not moving faster. And she rattled off something so with that vicious, cutting, wicked English sense of humor. But she wasn't trying to be funny. It was just. I almost fell down on the floor laughing, it was so good. And I said, to this day I'm pissed that I didn't have anything to write it down because it would still be funny saying it today, whatever she said. And so. But the thing is, I realized there's no way to respond to this thing except that was hilariously funny what you just said. You know what I'm saying? And what I did say to her was this. I said, you know what? I said, oh, you know what? I'm happy about, because she just insulted me. I said, you know what I'm happy about? You're going to walk away from here and have to live with yourself and whatever's going on in that poisoned mind of yours the rest of your life. But me, I'll never see you again. Goodbye.

Well said. But I said, well said.

But what you just said to me was hysterically funny. And so the thing is that we don't have to take it on face value. Logical thing. And you know, and I'll tell you this, the things that our critics see, that where they criticize, they're probably right on some of it. It's just like they probably did us a favor to point out a little bit. Of course they're going to take it to the nth degree, but the way they do it a lot of times is hysterically funny if you give yourself permission to look at it from that standpoint. But you certainly don't have to unravel it logically. It's just like it doesn't merit that kind of consideration. And so when you go in your start, did you. You do things different, how long do you allow yourself to write a book now? When did you become, like, super productive putting these books out?

I typically give myself about a month to two months to sit and just actually write the first draft. I have done it in as short as 24 hours before, really, and as short as. As a week. But I find that I get a better manuscript when I give myself about a month to two months to really get it all dialed in, because then it makes the editing process so much easier. So that's. That's typically what I'm shooting for now. Can I do it in a day? Sure. Do I want to do that all the time?

No.

It's tough.

Yeah. And so the thing is, there's a thing called life that you have to do, too. You can't always put things on hold. And so when you do that for you get that first draft down, let's just say it's 25,000 words. That's. That's the first draft. Now, when you go through, do you turn it over to an editor or do you go through it again?

Oh, I give it three passes before I even get it over to my editor, because I obviously, editors, they value their time, and I try to value their time as well. And they're obviously charging. So if you send in that manuscript just raw, unfiltered, without going through and cleaning it up somewhat, they're going to charge you more. They're going to take more time. It's going to be a whole laborious process. Whereas if you just go through a few passes, it helps out. My three passes typically consist of Microsoft Editor really fast. I go through with ProWritingAid. You can use any grammar checker that you want to. And then I do text to speech. The reason why I do text to speech is I sit back and I listen to my text and I make sure it sounds right. Don't read along with it. You want to hear it. Because your brain is going to tune out all the typos and mistakes and grammatical errors. But those three passes really help it out to where I get a more polished manuscript. So then I send it over to my editor for the developmental and structural editing before they send it back to me. I refine that. We go back for line editing and copy editing. Probably a couple rounds until we get to proofreading.

And so the first was Microsoft Word.

The second one was what prowritingaid. And you can do anything like Grammarly or Ginger or Hemingway is a good one as well. Any one of those tools. The whole reason why I want to do something different than Microsoft Editor because I need something that's going to have more of a granular approach and it's different from that software. So that way it identifies different issues. And then the text to speech is just getting it to where I can intervene without any of the extra tools and things like that.

Have you had a demand for you to actually read? Make an audible version of your read it or the author reads the book?

I have actually. I did my first four books in the self publishing series where I did those ones right now. And since I'm in the midst of doing the 12 books, I will be doing all 12 of those books. There is a really good local studio that comes really cheap, like $50 per hour and I can rent it out for the day and get at least one book or two books done within a week.

Yeah, pretty cool. And so how did you. How has the video. When did you make the step? Why did you feel like I just can't sit here and write books and put them out. I've got to make now and go and torment myself by making videos and podcasts. Somehow you got talked into that.

So you nailed it. Exactly. I actually never had the intention of doing YouTube. I seen YouTube. I've been a big fan of it. I've been a consumer of it for the longest time. It wasn't until I had a couple of interviews on a couple of YouTube channels that were devoted to self publishing that I started getting attention that I wasn't expecting. There were other indie authors wanting to know the whole process. They're wanting to know the ins outs, what do I need to do here, do I need to do there? Where should I go? How should I publish this? And the problem was is it was taking me away from my writing and publishing schedule.

So.

And I'm not. I'm not the type of guy that's just going to ignore people. Yeah, I typically always just try to answer at least one question via email and dm and after that I send people over to different areas. But back then I didn't have a YouTube so I thought instead of answering the same question time and again, let me just publish a video about it. So that way somebody comes back and asks again, I just send them over to that video. Little did I know though, Larry, I would become hooked within a year. I fell in love with the process because initially it was kind of like my venture into self publishing books that I was just kind of doing it just as a means to an end. It wasn't something I was considering as a career. But after a year of it, I started tasting that success and I started drawing the parallels between being an indie author and being a video creator that I was like, oh my gosh. I was like, this is almost the same. I might as well just go ahead and do this. Little did I know that it would really blow up big within a couple of years. And I'm just so thankful for all that I've done. But yeah, all just because I wanted to answer a few questions. And here I am answering more questions than ever now.

Has it your volume of sales in your existing catalog?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Initially when I did it though, it was minor because the books were all fitness. If I was doing a fitness channel. Okay, a different story here. When I actually pulled the trigger, I think it was in 2020 when I finally launched books about self publishing. That's when I started to reap the rewards. That's when I started to see, oh wow, this YouTube thing can be beneficial to selling more books and not just like an ancillary part of things. It's a very much embedded in what I'm doing with YouTube.

Yeah, this. The ripple effect or the cascade that can come from however you can get your material out there for getting people excited. Even aware that you have a catalog. You know, like the Rolling Stones when Microsoft paid them for start me up that little using that song for promotional thing. There was a lot of People didn't know. The kids who didn't know about the Rolling Stones. I know Tom Petty, they used a Tom Petty song, Running Down a Dream or something like that. No, the Long Long Road in this Grand Theft Auto. That came out. Well, as soon as that came out, boom, the whole Petty catalog blew up. Because all these kids, they had never even heard Tom Petty, never heard the name. But now they're all in there and listening and streaming. And so it can have an effect because what's happening is it's important for you and I to realize that there's new generations coming up all the time that might be as interested or more interested. And there's other people growing up in other countries that can get excited about what we put out. I know now I put out a hundred. I used to do these three day full timer and financial services, full timer training schools. And I would do all the speaking for three days. And then it came. You get yourself psyched up and you do it and there'd be about 200 people there. But then, then it went like 15 years and I hadn't done it. I said we got a whole new generation, I need to go do it. Well, all of a sudden, well, you need to do it here. You need to do. I was going to have to do it in nine different places around the United States. It's like, no. So I got on YouTube and I copied the Khan Academy's approach. I saw Khan Academy and I, you know where you just, all I did was draw. You get a chalk and you draw out a blackboard or something or marker board, whiteboard. And I said, that's what they do. I can do that because I don't have to be on camera. You don't have to do a lot of editing. You just video the board and you just go. Just like if I'm at a meeting, I'm up at the board, they're seeing my back and I'm talking and we're going like this. So I said that works. So I did 180 of them and I think more people watch those now. I haven't done a new one in probably 20, 15, 20 years. And so these things can have. But you know, the podcast, I think this podcast lets people know that I'm somebody who they might want to look up and follow. And so it's interesting now. Wonder what you think would happen if you were not doing the podcast, what that would do for your business. I mean this is a big, this has become a driver for everything you do. Is that right?

True. It's true. What would I do without it? I would probably be even more prolific. I would probably write 500 books by now. Yeah, yeah. No exaggeration. It probably would be. At that point, I think YouTube had slowed me down with that because a great majority of the publications that I did of those 50 that I had mentioned came between 2014 and 2017. Like, that was a huge chunk because that's all I did day and night, 16 to 18 hours per day, sitting down, churning out manuscript after manuscript, sending them to editors, getting that feedback, putting it out there, doing the promotion. It was a lot to take in. But, yeah, I. If I didn't have YouTube, I'm sure I'd be more prolific, but I love it. It's actually. It's fun and it's very creative. It's crazy to think here and say this out loud, but I've already published over 1600 videos between two channels.

Good Lord. Goodness gracious. Yeah, You're a machine.

No rest for the wicked, right?

Wow, 1600. Now, what's the average length of those things?

Oh, since some of them are alive, some of the live ones are about an hour long. But if I were to, say, to average it out 15 to 20 minutes apiece.

And how many do you aim for during a week?

For the podcast channel, there's typically two, and for the main channel, there is one to three that I'll typically, You're.

Still running all the channel. You're still running two channels.

Yeah, but the podcast is easier, though, because I do it live.

Yeah.

And what I do is I record the live podcast and I have live viewers tuning in, and then I stop when I'm recording, but I continue to go live. And I'll chat with the live viewers, and then I'll record another segment that I take and I clip and I repurpose it for the very next day as a separate video. And that works really well. So, yeah, you got to work smarter, not harder. And that's one of those things I did with the podcast. Now, the main channel, that's the one that has everybody trips over me. That's nearly a hundred thousand subscribers. Actually, I'll probably be hitting a hundred thousand this Saturday.

Congratulations.

That. Right. Hey, thank you so much. That is the one that typically 10 to 15 minutes long here. Lately I've been getting some longer ones because a lot of people been enjoying the deep dive videos. Those take a long time. Right now I'm working on a sponsored video. Its raw content right now is about 40 to 50 minutes of content. It's going to probably take me about three to six hours to edit that down and get it to between 20 to 30 minutes. I really try not to stretch it out too long. As I had shared earlier, I like to get to the point, I like to be succinct. So that way when people go to my videos, they know there's no bs, there's no fluff. They just get the whole meat of it.

The time you spend on that editing, video editing is substantial.

Oh, it used to be worse. It used to be worse. I would spend any upwards of about 12 hours, sometimes longer on some of the videos because there was this crazy.

Three books by that time a year.

Yeah, that's no exaggeration. Exactly. I really could. The biggest issue, and this was one of my setbacks and my failures, if you will, was not understanding what my audience wanted. I was following a lot of advice from YouTube experts, and I'm gonna put quotes around YouTube experts that would say retention editing was the thing. Retention editing, you gotta change your clips every five to eight minutes or five to eight seconds. So that way it keeps people kind of going, no, no, no, I'm in a space. I'm not Mr. Beast. I'm not trying to entertain people, I'm trying to educate. And if they get entertained in the meantime, all the better. So when I realized that retention editing wasn't for me, that freed me up so, so much more. Now the three to six hours that it takes for the editing and such sometimes comes down to just the software and of course, different bells and whistles that really help illustrate specific points.

What have you learned that you would say to entrepreneurs that are on their way up or already successful in terms of what place, what kind of value should they put on getting their own book or books out there? Boy, we have people listening to this. Like these two dumb dumbs are up there talking about putting out a book. I'm not going to put out a book. Maybe I can pick up something I can apply to my business from in between the cracks, but this is something that is a priority, should be a priority for a certain segment out there, maybe bigger than most people think.

What do you think this authors, Believe it or not, we're in this whole bubble here. Not many people realize within the bubble that being an author is a very special thing. I can't tell you how many times I've been into business mixers and meetups and things like that. I say I'm an author and people lose their minds. They think that's absolutely amazing. And so just to have something that you can present to somebody that you have spent any amount of time on and your heart and poured your soul into that, people are going to sense that and they will resonate with that and they also will be inspired by that. Because I'll tell you, the next thing typically people will say to me is they'll ask me, what do you do for a living? I'll tell them I'm an award winning author as well as a video creator, that I've done tons of videos about self publishing on YouTube and that is usually people go, have always wanted to write a book. How did you do it? And that really opens up such an amazing conversation that you just, it's, it does wonders. Now that is just on a networking perspective. Think about this on a global perspective. Yeah, there are millions of authors out there, but guess what? There are billions of other people that have unrealized dreams of actually putting their thoughts into words and their words into a publication that the rest of the world can consume.

I think a real reason holds a lot of people back is the ignorance of the possibilities of the self publishing world. Because you're thinking, go to a New York publisher and go to Deal. And then James Patterson.

So true.

It's funny that James Patterson got rejected 32 publishing houses on his first book and then he found some little dinky publishing house that would publish it and then he got book of the year, New writer of the year. So don't take the rejection just because you got a bunch of rejection. Don't let that hold you back. But are you a second class citizen when you go out there and self publish your own book?

Oh heavens no. Heavens no. I think there are some people that would buy into that. And I see some people in the trad pub world, traditional publishing, if you will, that do look down upon self publishing. But here's the thing is modern day self publishing isn't what it used to be. It's no longer like this taboo thing. It's not this thing like your creepy uncle goes and writes a bunch of erotica books and publishes it and he has a pallet full of books inside the garage. No, it's no longer that. This is a different game. In fact, you even see some traditionally published authors that actually segue over to self publishing. Why is that? Well, there's more control, there is better earnings overall. You have a lot that you can manage on your own, believe it or not. And there are so many resources that you can literally function as your own traditional publishing house if you wanted to. So don't let the rejection of traditional publishing ever turn you off to thinking that you're less than or not a good author. Because self publishing now proves that you can get out there, that most anyone can be able to break in this business and give it a good go.

What's the biggest payoff? What's the most exciting thing that's happened to change your life from the publishing and the podcasting and this whole journey you've been on that just really gives you energy and excitement.

Oh, man. I think looking back at my life prior to this always puts a good perspective on things and the lifestyle that I've been able to place myself into. I'm not a Lamborghini guy. I'm not a type of mansions. Get out of here. That's too much room. That means I got to clean those damn rooms. No, Give me a good two bedroom place. I'm a happy man. But I think that the lifestyle that I live is one of the things that make me super grateful for all of the work that I've put in and the position that I'm in and for all the people that continue to follow and support me. I'm forever grateful.

Yeah. Unbelievable. I always. Thanks so much, Dan. We've got a. We've had a nice long run today, but it's gone fast and I really enjoyed it. I always like to give my guests the last word. And so do you have a last word for entrepreneurs and future writers out there that have stayed with us through the whole podcast?

I think Winston Churchill once said it, and I'm just going to paraphrase this, never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up.

Yeah, Fantastic. Thanks so much. I'll look forward to seeing how you know. We'll have to check in when you go over, like 250,000 on your podcast on your channel. And so.

Yeah, you got it. We'll consider that a date.

All right, fantastic. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Larry.

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