018: How to Write a Book That Sells for Decades with Tim Grahl

I do think there's fundamentally something wrong with that where you know you need to change and you back off. There is something unheroic about that. Yeah, you can live your life that way. That's totally fine. Nobody's gonna come and like tear you down for that. But it's like, are you gonna be okay with that?

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In this episode, I talked to Tim Grahl, who I've been friends with for more than a decade, and he is legitimately one of the best book marketers in the world. Top 5 for sure. Something that I've always respected about him is back when he had clients in the book marketing world, he had 5 of them on the New York Times bestseller list at the exact same time. So he's who I go to whenever I have questions about books. He knows everyone in the industry in the space. And some of the things we dive into in this episode are actually the size of the book industry. It is wild how big this industry is compared to what I expected. We get into what it takes to write a book that sells, you know, more and more year after year for a very long time. And then the other thing that Tim is amazing at is actually like the art and science of writing, of how you actually write a great sentence or a great book and on from there. And then probably my favorite part of the episode is where we dive into flywheels. If you haven't watched the episode from a couple weeks ago about flywheels, like, that's a fantastic one that you should start with. But Tim has a very effective flywheel for his StoryGrid business as he's building, you know, a publishing empire, right? He's trying to, uh, publish hundreds of books that will sell for decades, and he's built a very powerful flywheel around that. So it's a great episode. Let's dive in. Tim, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Nathan.

So when you and I are hanging out in Nashville, Boise, wherever, Atlanta, wherever we find ourselves, you know, at a mastermind or just over dinner, we're always talking about books and specifically like just the reach of books overall. And you were quoting some stats to me the other day. I think we severely underestimate the size of the book industry and what's going on there. 'Cause like a book is not an expensive product. And so there's not really like the flashy business built around a book. But share some of the stats about just the size of the book industry compared to some of these flashier industries that, you know, we think about more often.

Yeah, it's the flash all around. Like, there's no— like, you don't look forward to the award ceremony every year for books, right?

That doesn't— what even would that be?

I didn't see any, like, you know, Barbenheimer or whatever, you know, news articles about the release of the newest book. But what people don't understand is that if you look at like the music industry, I went back and looked up some stats. So in 2022, the music industry was $42.5 billion. If you look, the global movie box office, global for movie box office in 2023 was $29 billion. In 2023, book publishing made $98.6 billion.

Wow.

So people do not understand how big the book industry is, and it just kind of quietly makes tons and tons of money. And the reason why is because the products just last longer. So the example I like to use is like The Lord of the Rings was written— Fellowship of the Rings came out in 1954, and then the other two came out in 1955, and those still sell really well and make tons of money. For the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien. Okay, so how many movies and how much music, how much money do those make from the 1950s now? I mean, it's like minuscule, right? And so books last a long time and they tend to grow over time instead of diminish over time. And so you look at books, I mean, we both have examples. But this is what books can do. And so this is why it's such a bigger industry, is because they tend to last a long time. Where like the new Barbie movie won't be making a lot of money 10 years from now, where a book that does really well this year or maybe even comes out slow but builds, it's still going to be making money for the author 10 years from now.

I mean, there's so many examples here of different books. One that I think of a lot is our mutual friend Josh Kaufman. With his book, The Personal MBA. I think this summer it just hit 1 million copies sold, something like that. Or in the last—

Well, it hit that a while back now, but yeah.

Okay.

I think he's at, I don't know, the last I heard was something like 1.2 million or something. Here's what's interesting about that book. I use it as an example to talk people out of going after the New York Times bestseller list is that book has never hit the New York Times bestseller list, never hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. Think it's ever hit any major bestseller list, and yet it sold well over a million copies. It still sells really strong, and it's now been out like 12 years. And most of the books that you see pop onto the New York Times list, there's so many books that hit the bestseller list that don't ever break 100,000 sales or even 50,000 sales. A lot of times books will like, they'll come out, they'll sell 10 or 15,000 copies and never sell another 1,000 copies the rest of their life. So this is the other thing too, is there's no like gold or platinum level reward for books. And like The War of Art, we talk about a lot by Steven Pressfield. It only sold a little over 9,000 copies the first year that it came out. But then every year since then, it's sold more copies than the year before. And so it just keeps growing and growing and growing and growing. And like, this is the other thing is Steve has not touched that book since he wrote it. So there's no extra work involved besides a little bit through the publisher, which he doesn't have to do. He just gets checks. And so this is what's so fascinating about books to me is if you can get one, like I have one, Your First 1,000 Copies, I wrote it in 2013. You know, it's not making me rich, but it brings in over $1,000 a month, you know, and it's like, it's this little just drip of money that, you know, I rewrote it in 2018. But other than that, I haven't touched that book since 2013. So it's like these things have a long shelf life that most things don't.

When we were having dinner in Nashville, we were talking about your first 1,000 copies. And, you know, if you're pursuing something as a like a side hustle, right, it'd be fairly natural to say, hey, I'm going to take some money that I made and I'm going to buy a property and long-term rent it. And if that makes me say between paying down my mortgage and the cash flow on top, let's say I make $1,000 a month. That'd be pretty good, right? A steady stream. And you're like, hey, this book that I wrote 10 years ago is doing more than that without having to take out a $300,000 loan or something. And so this is actually a better stream of revenue.

Yeah, there is— just to make sure the metaphor holds, like, there is no big payoff at the end, right? So I can't like go and sell it at the end. But it is this idea of like my partner Sean Coyne and I run StoryGrid. And we have a publishing house and we're going to continue to publish books. And our goal is that our grandkids' college is paid for by the books we publish over the next 10 years. So, if you have this long-term view of the kind of wealth that can be built a little bit at a time, that $1,000 a month and you have 10 of those, now you're talking about something that has a real impact. And this is a thing, not just your life, but think of like C.S. Lewis's estate in his family and how they've been taken care of by stuff that he wrote a long time ago.

So let's run through a couple more examples. Like, I think of Ryan Holiday in this camp where, you know, he's putting out— is it more than a book a year, or is he right at a book a year? It's a lot.

I think it depends on the year because he's also starting to— I don't talk to him a lot, so I just watch what he does. So he's also going into space where, like, he's working with other authors So like, he'll— I think The Daily Stoic wasn't fully written by him. He had to go off—

It was him and his agent. They co-wrote it together. Oh, right. Because his agent, Steve, I believe is his name, was like, hey, you should write this book. And because Steve had a firsthand insight into a couple of other like daily journal type books that had done really well. And Steve was telling Ryan like, write The Daily Stoic. And Ryan's like, I don't know, like I'm just trying to get stoicism to be this thing that anyone cares about at all. And I'm trying to like, hide it and package it inside of, you know, more approachable philosophy. And Steve kind of insisted and predicted from the beginning, he said, this will be your best-selling book.

Yeah.

And I think it is.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's well over a million copies sold now.

Ryan is so interesting to me. In fact, like if there's one person I struggle with being jealous of in this industry, he's just such a workhorse and he works really hard and he stays super focused on what he's interested in. And there, I don't think anybody's working harder than him for for his success. I just think it's amazing what he does. But yeah, it's like each book stacks and then of course then his speaker fees go up, his email list grows, you know, he has his own bookstore now that he's selling books through. Like it creates this whole ecosystem around, or as you might call it, a flywheel around like everything that he's doing. But again, like all the way back to his very first book, which—

Trust me, I'm lying.

Yeah, the PR book, like that book still brings him in money. And so that's, I think, the thing, like, I think we're so used to like doing a product launch or putting out this new thing or that new thing. And we don't think about like there is this little industry over here that just kind of chugs along and makes almost $100 billion a year. And books just keep on selling for a really long time.

You know, I'm thinking about the difference between like the course industry and a lot of the areas that creators are in compared to books. And traditionally, a course has a lot of revenue upfront. You know, people are making hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of dollars off of their course. And then it has a fairly short shelf life, right? Like, not many people are running the same course and improving on it 5 years later, 10 years later. There's definitely people who are doing it. I think of like Ramit Sethi with his Earn1K course has been going for a long time. I think Marie Forleo is still doing B-School and having a big impact.

And you bet they have to change it constantly. So like they continue to like adjust it for the market and what's changing and all of that, which is, I mean, wonderful. And obviously they're doing really well with that. But like the book Ramit wrote, besides an update on the 10-year anniversary, yeah, he doesn't do anything with that thing. It just keeps selling and again keeps powering everything that he's doing, right?

And so it's just interesting, like I imagine two different slopes, right, of this spike and starting high with the course and then tapering off basically to nothing, you know, over a long time horizon. I'm not talking 1 to 2 years, I'm talking 10+ years. Whereas the book starting with this, you know, slow burn and growing from there, it's a different model, but it allows you to compound it rather than seeing the other side of the course creator jumping from thing to thing and not really having the compound returns.

I mean, the other thing is that, I mean, the course industry is relatively new and everybody I'm talking to, including myself, is seeing like it's getting harder. Prices are being pushed down, less people, like there's more competition because anybody can kind of jump in. And so the other thing I like about the book industry is it's been around for a really long time. And obviously, and this is the thing I love, the book industry has been around hundreds of years. I've only been around for 42 years, but like Even like so many people keep calling for the death of the book. Oh well, people don't have attention spans anymore.

And it's like TikTok, not books. And yeah, I don't know about that.

Yeah, well, and even when people say that, I'm like, then why is the most popular podcast on the planet a 3-hour-long rambling conversation? You know what I mean? So it just doesn't make any sense. And so people keep saying like people aren't reading anymore, and I'm like, well, I guess I got to give all this money back I'm making off of books, you know?

So we've been thinking about Christmas this year. I mostly bought people books, right? And other people mostly bought me books because that's what, like, that's what I was interested in. You know, we all get to a certain age, it's like, hey, just give me the book that you most enjoyed this year and that's all I want for Christmas. Yeah.

Yeah. So I just think it's fascinating. And I mean, and a big part of what I've dedicated many years now to is figuring out like, okay, what separates books out? Because books are just like everything else where a small percentage of the books published make the most amount of money. Right? So like Atomic Habits is making way more money than my little Your First 1,000 Copies book, which— and they would both be in the like nonfiction how-to category. And so I think it's super interesting looking at what it takes to create a book that will actually stand the test of time.

I want to dig into that. But you mentioned Atomic Habits. We're recording this in January 2024, and James just hit number 1 on all of Amazon for 2023 for the second time. He did it. So the book was published in 2018, I believe, and then I think he like didn't hit any top 100 in 2019. It was something like that. 2020, he was, you know, top 50, top 60. 2021, I think, was really high. I think 2022 was number 1. 2023— okay, I'm getting the numbers wrong. 2021 was number 1. 2022 was number 5, I think.

Well, because the pandemic around the pandemic when it really started hitting big.

Yeah.

So, and I'm looking at it now. I've got it up on Amazon here and this is the thing. So I've been in the book industry now for, I don't know, like 13 years or something. I've literally never seen this before. He has 121,000 reviews and ratings on Amazon.

Like that book has been around for 5 years.

Insanely high. Like you, I don't know of another book. There's no way to like run a search on Amazon, but like you look up Harry Potter, it doesn't have 100,000 reviews. And so it's pretty amazing. But that book, I almost don't like talking about it because it's so far, like, such an outlier that, like, it's almost like I think a lot about the book, but I don't love talking about it because it's hard to use it as an example of something you could do because you can't do what he did. Because it's also like the right time, the right place. Obviously he did an enormous amount of research, but like it built off of this like growing wave of how-to books around habits. And he hit it at the right time and it's so well-written and so well-researched. And he did such a great job building an audience before it came out. He had this enormous audience before it even came out. He got one of the best agents in New York. Like, I mean, it's just like everything hit for that book at the right time in the right place. And so it's this weird combination of a really well-written book a really strong platform and just the right fucking time. And you can't like duplicate that. But I've just loved watching the book since it came out because it's just been amazing to watch how successful it's been.

Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely phenomenal. But you were starting to talk about the difference between writing a book and writing a great book. Yeah, like maybe first, what goes into— what's the difference in reach? Because I think a lot of us think about Okay, if I'm going to try to hit the New York Times bestseller list, or I'm going to try, like, I need to pay a ton of attention to the platform, right? Like, that's the most important thing. And it'd be easy to look at James's success and say, oh, it was the strength of his platform at launch that contributed to the success of the book. I think that contributed to the initial, what now is a blip compared to the success of the book. It was a successful launch, but yeah, dive in.

Well, so like James had a big platform, but he didn't have a bigger platform than Michelle Obama, and he's crushing Michelle Obama in sales. So like, this is the thing is like people try to just throw out like, well, he had a big platform or he had, you know, famous friends that helped him promote the book. And it's like, yeah, but not bigger than Michelle Obama, right? So it's like you can't just do that. You know, it's again, you know, I'm probably like one of the top in the world at book marketing and book launches. Please don't try to hire me, I don't really do it anymore. But when— if somebody would come to me and say, how do you sell 100,000 copies of your book? Like, how can I launch my book and sell 100,000 copies? And the real answer is, I don't know. Like, there's really no direct way unless you come to me with like a 7-figure budget, I could probably pull it off. But for any kind of like normal book launch budget, there's no way to like sell 100,000 copies on purpose. But so that's where the goal is in the— across the industry. I'm not— I'm far from the first one to say this. The goal is always like get the first 10,000 copies out into the world, get 10,000 people to just give the book a try because books only work by word of mouth. Like the only way you sell 100,000 copies is to sell 10,000 copies because you can't sell 20 copies and then hope your book actually gets out into the world. I think of it like launching a rocket into orbit. It's like it takes a whole lot of effort and energy to get it into orbit, but then once it's in orbit, it's pretty easy to keep it going. And so if you get 10,000 out, then the book— you basically find out if your book's any good or not at that point, because I've worked with plenty of authors. We sell 10,000 copies and then nobody ever buys it again. And then you have somebody like James Clear who probably on his launch sold, say, 50,000 copies. I have no idea.

Yeah.

So that's a great launch, but it's not the millions and millions and millions of copies that have sold since. That's all word of mouth. In fact, most people listening on this podcast probably bought— has a copy of the book, first of all, but didn't buy it because they were on James' list. They bought it because they saw it on 20 different podcasts, or it was— they went to the bookstore and it was like lined in the front of the bookstore. And the reason it was lined in the front of the bookstore was because it was selling so well, not because James did anything special to get it there. And so that's the thing is like books only grow by word of mouth. And the other thing is they grow slowly because it's word of mouth. So like most— I probably shouldn't share exactly who it is anyway. A book you've heard of, a nonfiction book you've heard of. I was talking to an author several years after the book came out and I was saying it takes a year for your marketing to really hit. You just have to do it on faith for a year. And he's like, man, I am so glad you told me that. And again, this is a super bestselling nonfiction book. He goes, I came out with the book, it launched really well, had a really strong launch. He goes, and then for a year I was on every podcast, I was traveling, I was speaking, and the sales just kept going down. He goes, and at the 1-year mark, it went like this, and then it just went up and never stopped. And you even described that with James' book, like it didn't become a multimillion-dollar bestseller the first year. It was years after that. And it was because he kept pushing the book, kept pushing the book, and then it finally tipped over. And then everybody knew. It was like all of a sudden he was one of those like, you know, 10-year overnight successes.

Yeah, it's fascinating watching that. And I've seen it a bunch of different times. I was talking to Dan Martell with his book Buy Back Your Time, and he did the whole book launch. He wrote a really good book. And like he was doing the thing where, you know, hey, I'll come speak at your conference if you buy a book for every attendee, right? He did all of the usual launch and promotion things, had a really solid platform and promoted it heavily. And the book did well. I don't know what lists it hit at launch or that sort of thing, but talking to him the other day, he was just saying, I learned that— well, so Dan's a software guy, so he talks in terms of like virality and K-factor.

And all that.

And he's like, I learned that my book has a K-factor. For every 1 copy I get in the right person's hands, you know, someone who, you know, is at a certain level in their business, basically, if I get the book in the hands of, you know, an entrepreneur, then I know that like that results in another quarter of a book getting out to someone else, right? Every book sold, you know, it has a K-factor of 1.25 or something. And so once he realized that, he's just been trying to get the book in as many people's hands as possible of actual readers, not, you know, warehouses. Yeah. Yeah.

When we were promoting this book a few years ago, Sean and I, it's a 730-page fantasy novel, right?

Okay.

And what Sean was saying was it's easier to sell a copy of a book than get somebody to read it. And it was the— he's always said it, but it was the first time I realized, like, okay, If I don't like fantasy novels and you're like, all right, you can read this 730-page novel or pay me $29, which would you pick? I'll just pay you the $29. Right. So it's like I don't really worry too much about book sales. I worry about getting people to read it. I will give a copy of a book whether I'm promoting it or it's my own book or it's the book I'm publishing. I'll give a book to somebody if I think they'll read it because I don't need that sale. I need the sale of the next 5 people they tell. Right. And so, so that comes back to I need to write a book that is so good that when somebody reads it, they'll tell 5 other people. Because if I don't, it doesn't matter how many I sell on launch, it's just going to fall off a cliff. And it's like the amount of time and effort it takes to write a book, you might as well— if you're going to do something that's just going to fall off a cliff, you might as well launch another course because it'll make more money. If you're going to write a book, it's worth putting the time and effort in to make it something that people will tell 5 other people about.

So it's easy to say something like, you know, we have to write a great book. And I think of it, you know, we're using the software example of K-factor. It sounds great.

I don't know what K-factor means.

What does that mean? So K-factor is, it's been a term in like virology for a long time of watching the study of like communicable diseases. Basically, if someone gets— this is a terrible example, but Ebola has a very high K factor, meaning that for every person that is infected, a lot more people get infected in immediate contact. But the problem with Ebola is— problem, good thing, I don't know— is that it kills the host so quickly that it doesn't actually spread very much. Whereas COVID has a very high K factor, right? That's why we had a global pandemic. So it's basically a study of For every reader, how many more readers does that turn into, right? When we're talking books terms. In software, you know, if you think of like something like Dropbox, when they had their refer a friend to get more storage thing years ago, that was a K-factor play. And in software, we get to do something where we get to watch our users. We, you know, we've got great analytics. There's a tool we use at ConvertKit called Full Story where I can actually turn it on and I can just watch as if we're screen sharing, I can watch someone use the software in real time and I could record thousands of sessions and then see, okay, someone went through the setup process. Oh, and looks like out of 1,000 sessions, 100 people got stuck right here.

Oh, that's so interesting.

But we can't do that in books.

Well, this is what's crazy. I wish Amazon would do this is like they do know because of Kindle. So they know how far when people drop out of reading a book. And if I as an author could see my Kindle stats, I could go back and edit the book and fix places where people are dropping off.

And so we want YouTube watch time, basically.

Yeah. And they have the stats, they have it because that's how you get paid with Kindle. I won't go down that path, but like, yeah, but that is also like, you can do that anecdotally with books anyway. But yeah, I mean, it's easy to say write a great book, but it's hard to actually write a great book. And I mean, this is what, you know, we pursue at StoryGrid is how to actually learn how to write a great book. But it really just starts with looking at masterworks, which is books that you're like, if I could write a book like this, it would be a win for me. So it's like if you want to write a book about self-help, it's like you should be studying Atomic Habits and studying like how long are the chapters? What are the titles? How many words does he use that are more than 3 syllables? How long are his paragraphs? Paragraphs, you know, read it yourself. And when do you get bored? If you get done with the book, what were your 3 favorite parts? You know, like analyzing books and how they do. I mean, I remember I've done this for Ryan Holiday books. Like, I printed out the introductions of 3 of his books and I sat down. I'm like, okay, he changed subjects here and here. So how long was each section? And I literally like counted the words and put the word figure. And then it's like looking at that kind of stuff and studying that kind of stuff. Of like, how do you structure a book that people actually read all the way to the end and leave a review on Amazon? And so those are the kind of things that you can do. Writing a book is one of those things that we all think we can do because we know how to, like, type sentences. But writing a great book is the hardest thing I've ever set out to do. And so it's really fascinating to me how the whole process of how it goes. But yeah, taking the time to do something great is the difference again between selling 10,000 and selling 100,000 or a million.

One thing that I'm wondering is how you really study those drop-off points, because like we're talking about, there's not good data or the data exists, but it's not available to us. I was thinking of years ago there was a course called The Foundation, which was about creating a like bootstrapped small software company in a specific niche. And these two guys working on it, Andy Drish and Dane Maxwell, they knew that for the launch of this, they wanted like the absolute perfect video that would hook you. And so they wrote a bunch of scripts, they worked on it, and they were really working on the timing and everything else. And Dane and Andy lived in different cities. And so what they would do is get on a Zoom call together and Dane would have the script because he was the talent. He was going to record it. And Andy would go find someone else at the coworking space he was at. He was like, hey, can I run something by you really quick? And they're like, yeah, sure. You go, hey, my buddy Dane, he has a video he's working on. Like, would you mind watching it? And they would deliver it live. So it's like, here, you know, if I'm doing that to you, I'm putting the laptop in front of you and I'm sitting back and watching, right? So Andy's sitting back and watching. As Dane's living the script. And, you know, we're totally just watching your reaction. At what point are you hooked and intrigued? What's the body language? At what point do you kind of look away or go like, I got to— like, I was trying to do work, you know? And they like tweaked and refined that script until they got it super, super dialed in. And when I saw the end result, it was one of those, you know, 4-minute videos that had me completely hooked all the way through.

Yeah.

What I want to know as an author or a wannabe author is how do I do that for books, right? How do I get the book that is going to keep someone interested and have a big payoff?

Yeah, I mean, this is what I do the entire YouTube series on. We have a 3-year course on or like—

Give me the 30-second version.

Yeah, I had a friend one time that should know better that called me and was like, so give me like the secrets on how to write a novel. And I'm like, I don't know what you mean. He's like, well, just like give me like the rundown real quick. I'm like, I've been working on this for years. You know, like this is not something that like I could just— so it really comes down to understanding, like, so obviously you could do something like that with a book. You could definitely do that with like chapters. One of the things I tell readers all the time, and I've actually done this myself, where like write a scene and just send it to 6 people and just wait to see how many people want to know what happens next. We're kind of leaning towards fiction when I'm talking about that. Would work for nonfiction of like, leave a hook at the end of like, here's what you're going to talk about next. Do not ask them for their feedback or anything else. Just send it to them and say, hey, you know, let me know when you give it a read. And just do 3 of them, 1 of them, none of them, all 6 of them respond. I was like, well, what's the next chapter? What happened? Now you've got them hooked, right? You know, they want to know the next thing. So send them the next chapter. And if they don't, go back and work on your first one.

Right. And so this is like Andy Weir writing The Martian live on the internet where everybody's following him. I mean, it's a little bit of a different example, but yeah, I was like, hey, what's— where's the rest of it?

Yeah. Yeah. Andy, that book, I've studied that book a lot that I love that book. I think it's so well done. His second book was atrocious. His third book, Hail Mary, was really good. Another guy that did this was one of my favorite authors. Max Berry wrote The Machine Man one chapter at a time, and you could sign up for his email list and each day you would get a page of the book sent to you. And it was a way to force himself to write the first draft of the book. But he also got to see what parts worked and what parts didn't. I think that you can, if you're looking at the nonfiction, especially kind of how-to self-help space, this is where you can start looking at like, well, what are your most popular blog posts? What are your most popular YouTube videos? When you are giving a speech, like what parts do people lean in and pay attention? Like, those are the parts you need to lead with the book. Front-ending the book with the most compelling stuff, but also like understanding how narrative works. You know, things have to change. You have to have an inciting incident all the way through a resolution. You have to have a clear object of desire for your protagonist. And here's the kicker, is that with how-to self-help, the protagonist is the reader. That's why it's written in second person. So you have to think about your reader as the protagonist. So you have to incite your reader and then you have to build a progressive complication. Foundation to make the problem worse and worse and worse until you offer them a solution. And so again, I haven't looked at Atomic Habits, but I've read it but not analyzed it. I guarantee you this is in there over and over and over because it works. And so it's learning. Again, this is where, like, this is how Shawn started, my partner. You know, he's been an editor for over 30 years. And actually, we went back and checked recently because, like, less than 30% of books in traditional publishing turn a profit. And we went back and looked, and his track record is 85%. And so he has, you know, he's 2.5 times more successful than, you know, the publishing industry. And so, and how he learned what he knows is studying masterworks and looking at books and books that work and have stood the test of time and looking at how they're structured, how they're written. If you just take the time to do that, you learn so much and you start with the books that are like, I want to write a book like this, right? So my next fiction title comes out this year. It's called The Shithead. And when I set out to write it, I wanted to write my version of The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, which is this amazing novel. And so I read that book, I studied that book, I looked at the arc of that book, the structure of that book. Now, you would never read my book and be like, oh, he rewrote The Accidental Tourist, but it's structured in a very similar way. And whenever I got stuck with my book, I went back and said, well, how did Anne Tyler solve the problem in her book? And so I wish, like, so many people, the first thing they do when they're like, I want to write a book and they have this idea is they open up a Google Doc and they just start typing, you know, and they haven't really— or they like make an outline, you know, but they don't compare their outline to other books and how other books have worked. And so I think like that kind of stuff goes into writing a really great book and understanding it's going to be hard. Hard and take a long time, but the payoff is, I mean, enormous, you know?

Yeah. When I mean, what you can do with it is phenomenal. Something that you do with StoryGrid, and I want to get into the business of StoryGrid and the flywheels in just a second, but you take the most analytical approach to writing, scene structure, everything else that I've ever seen before.

Yeah.

Can you apply that in nonfiction the same way? That you've been doing it in fiction?

Yeah, and we have, like, we have a masterwork guide to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. We actually consider nonfiction downstream of fiction, so it's actually an instantiation of fiction. But yes, like, the analytical approach is really important. If you want to drive me insane, give the advice of like, hey, you got a book idea, just sit down and write it. And it's like, okay, that's like saying like, hey, your favorite song is Hotel California. Just pick up a guitar and play it. It's like, well, no. Well, why not? Oh, well, you have to know how to like play chords and how to tone a guitar and like how to like pick a guitar, you know, like how to strum. Like there's like to play the guitar is like call it 20 different microskills you have to learn and then put together and then you get to go be creative. Writing is the same way. And again, just because you can write an email or a blog post doesn't mean that you can write a book. Like, it's a completely different skill set. And so there are these, like, fundamental skills that you have to learn and that you can— this is the thing too, is it's not fucking subjective. It is objective, right? So it is— I heard this great quote from Quentin Tarantino. I was, you know, one of the interviews he did, and he was talking about perfect movies. And he started naming perfect movies and he's like, Back to the Future is a perfect movie. And what he means by perfect is not that everyone will like it, but if you like movies like Back to the Future, you will like Back to the Future, right? And he mentioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre and he's like, that's a perfect movie. Now, most people probably won't like it, but if you like movies like that, you will like that movie. And so this is a thing, is it's not luck and it's not random. There are— just like playing the guitar, it's not random whether or not the chord progression works, right? Like, there is an actual clearly objective way that chords and notes have to be played, and if they aren't played that way, it's wrong. It's just wrong. And so writing a book is the same way.

There are laws and principles of music theory. And then if you break them without understanding them, that's the thing.

You have to be so good that you can now break the rules, but you don't get to break the rules at the beginning because you break the wrong rules.

Yeah. I want to talk about the flywheel behind StoryGrid because we did an episode, I guess 2 episodes ago now, about flywheels, introducing the concept, walking through Sahil Bloom's flywheel and a bunch of them that we've implemented across ConvertKit. So I think listeners are familiar with the concept now, and you've got a flywheel for StoryGrid that I think is just phenomenal. Like, I understand how it all fits together. And then I think your audience, because you did an episode on your YouTube channel explaining it, your audience understands how it all fits together. Talk through that. Like, how— let's just dive in. That YouTube video that you did, it's titled The Plot Thickens. Inside StoryGrid's Evil Master Plan, and you have like sort of this like evil doom and gloom thumbnail for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why would you—

but in a world where most people are like, I'm going to put out content and then like over here I'm going to have my true business model. You think I'm fully altruistic? Great. Let's keep that going. And then behind the scenes, you know, here's what I'm actually doing. And you don't share those normally, but you're out there and you're saying like, look, Here's the whole thing. Here's everything that I'm doing. Here's why. And here's like how I'm using your attention to make a bunch of money for decades to come and just share the whole thing. Why do that?

Yeah. So I mean, this kind of comes from kind of two angles for me that I finally did that video. One is I kept getting questions from people like, why are you putting out the YouTube videos? I would have phone calls with potential customers and they were kind of like skeptical about what we were doing. And everybody's real question was, all right, are you full of shit? And if so, you're like, where are you bullshitting me? Right?

Right.

And as that was kind of rolling, I got off a call with somebody that like, it is a legitimate question. Like, you should assume everybody's full of shit until they prove you otherwise. So like, I am not offended that people assume I'm full of shit too. And so I got off a call where like, I, you know, somebody kind of came in with that attitude and, you know, we had a great conversation. It ended up great. But it made me think of Alex Hormozi, right? The big business he's blown up on YouTube and everywhere else now. And for the longest time, I would not watch his videos because every time I saw him, I was like, that dude's going to try to sell me some cryptocurrency just by the way he looked. I was totally judging the book by the COVID And so, and then a good friend of mine was like, hey, watch this video. It was an Alex Hormozi video. And I was like, all right, fine. Because, you know, my buddy Matt told me to watch it. And then I watched it. I'm like, this is the best. Training on sales I've ever seen. And so I just, you know, nosedive into all his content. And what I really like about him is that he is super clear about what he's getting out of it. So one is he's like, the bigger my platform— so he owns a company that acquires other companies, buys into them, and then helps them 10x or whatever. He's like, so the more people that know who I am, the more likely people will want to sell me their business instead of somebody else. Also, if I can teach you how to grow your business to the point where I can buy in, maybe you'll sell it to me or like let me come in. And so I really like that he's just super clear on like, here is the selfish reason why I'm putting all this content out.

And so basically saying, I want to help you build a great business so that when you either want to double down and grow it further or you want to exit, I'll be the first person you call, right?

Yep. So now he's getting first right of refusal on like hundreds and hundreds of companies. And so he's going to crush his competition because of that. Now, you know, he could also like start trying to sell cryptocurrency at some point. So who knows? But like so far he's like sticking to that. And so when I think about like what I'm doing, I think there are people that are truly being altruistic and just like they want to, you know, teach kids physics. And so they put videos up and they're a physics teacher and they have no back end to their business. But if you do you do have a back end, I think it's better to just tell the truth. So I just made the video and I'm like, look, here's how we make money. Our goal is to build a publishing house that publishes the greatest fiction ever written. Turns out that's really fucking hard to do. So when we tried to go about like taking manuscripts like other publishers, that wasn't working. So we realized we need writers that can do two things. One is write really well, but that's kind of a given. The other is let us kick the shit out of them when they do it wrong and they just keep coming back for more because that's what I did. Like, if, you know, we've been doing the podcast, we stopped doing the podcast, but we did it starting in 2015. There was over 200 episodes and it's just Sean kicking the shit out of me and my writing. And that's what we need is we need writers that will like stick with it. And so we started a writing program that's a 3-year program that builds from how to write a great sentence because it is not subjective, it is objective, how to write a great sentence all the way up to writing a full book over the span of 3 years. I'm trying to put put every creative writing MFA program out of business because our training is so much better. And so, and it's all built on one feedback. So every week you turn in your work and you get one-on-one feedback and you have to go try it again. And so, okay, so now we have a great training for writers. So at the end, they're writing books that hopefully they'll let us publish. All right, great. How do I get people to join a 3-year program? Because people aren't just going to come off the streets, they've never heard of us, or maybe they've read one of our books and they're like, Well, you know, how do I know you're not full of shit because you're expensive and it's 3 years? Okay, well, we're going to join— we're going to start a 6-week workshop. All right. So this way people can get a little taste. They can come in and I can guarantee them I can make them a better writer by the end of 6 weeks. And that is the guarantee. If they feel like they haven't, they can get their money back. So far, 100% of students have said that they have. So it's a 6-week workshop, but it's also expensive. It's $1,200 right now to do a 6-week workshop because again, they're getting one-on-one feedback every week. So, how do I get people into that? That's why I do YouTube. And so, I put out YouTube videos twice a week teaching all the different aspects of writing based on Shawn's research. It's all coming from Shawn. He's the genius. I feel like I get to work with Einstein while he's coming up with the theory of relativity. So, Shawn has built an entire narrative theory from the ground up and I just teach aspects of it on YouTube and that's the way I bring people in. To get them on sales calls so that they'll do the 6-week workshop, so that they'll do the 3-year program, so that they'll publish books with us. And like you said, the flywheel— what I get out of it is teaching the workshops and teaching the training. I don't do most of the teaching. I do some of it. I extract where people are struggling and the ideas they find most interesting, and that feeds into the topics that I put up on YouTube.

What I like about that is Well, there's this idea called the theory of constraints, which comes from a really great book called The Goal, which I'm reading right now because you recommended it to me. Look at that. And that book came out 45 years ago, 50. Yeah, yeah, like it's from the '70s, I think, maybe the '80s.

'70s? Yeah. Wow.

Geez, it's, it's not a recent book.

It's also a novel.

It is.

It's a fiction book. Yeah.

There's also— I don't know if I have it on the shelf. I don't know. It's— there's also a graphic novel version of it that the author's son came out with.

That's cool.

Like, you know, 25 years later or something. But in, in The Goal, they talk about the theory of constraints. And at a very high level, it's, you know, they're talking about in manufacturing, but it applies in many other areas. And you look at the core bottleneck in the business, and basically if you apply effort anywhere besides the current, like, most acute bottleneck, not only is that effort wasted, it actually makes the bottleneck worse. And so when I think about what you're talking about, you're like, we're going to build a publishing house. Okay, what's our bottleneck? Obviously great books.

Yeah.

And so if you were to spend time anywhere else, like maybe you're getting cover design absolutely dialed in, you've got printing and distribute, you know, all of this, right? Like it just makes everything worse. When you don't have great books to publish. And so then you're thinking about, okay, what's the bottleneck to great books? You need actually people. You need two key ingredients: people who know how to write books and people who know how to edit books. And so I love that you've actually split, you know, the program. You have two separate three-year programs on this where you're saying my core bottleneck is actually the humans that know how to do this thing. And so I'm going to create a machine that is the best in the world at creating these two types of humans. And then I'm going to stick these two types of humans together and they together are going to solve my bottleneck, which will then get me, you know, a whole collection, right? We're aiming for hundreds of books that will sell for decades.

Yeah, I mean, that's the idea. And again, looking at Shawn's track record, right? So let's say I publish— every book I publish is 2.5 times more likely than the typical book from traditional publishing to be successful, to make money. So that doesn't mean every single book we come out with is going to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. But if every book we come out with is selling 100 copies a month, 500 copies a month, 1,000 copies a month, I mean, that shit adds up. And so it's like we believe that, again, the books that stand the test of time are the most well-written books. So we are putting all of our effort on helping writers and editors produce the best books possible. And again, this is not a subjective measure. This is an objective measure. And so, so this is what we are focused on because we feel like if we can do that, then the publishing house will be successful because it's publishing much better fiction than the typical. I mean, I just read a book, I just finished it last night and I was so frustrated. It came from traditional publishing. you know, was heralded as this book. I'm like, this book fucking sucks. Like, it's just not good. I'm never going to tell anybody about the book. You know what I mean? And it had clear problems that are fixable problems anyway. So like, this is what we're focused on.

Well, it's like I was talking to a friend who's a comedian and he said that conference talks are the most frustrating experience for him because he sits there in the audience and most great conference speakers tell stories.

Yeah.

And so he sits there. And he's listening to a story and he's like, oh, this is good. Oh, this is good. And then they just like go somewhere else or they land it in the wrong spot or the timing is off. And he was like, you were 95% of the way to getting like a great laugh from the audience and getting— keeping everyone engaged and all of that. And you just screwed it up. And it's not like you're saying it's not subjective. He's like, if you made these exact tweaks, right, then you would get these results. And he would do this where he'd help people with conference talks for a while. And he would actually track his metric was laughs per minute of the conference talk. And he went and helped Dharmesh Shah, the CTO of HubSpot, give his big keynote at the Inbound conference. And they would have Dharmesh, just like a comedian would go test material, you know, on a small stage, they would do that and they would track the laughs that Dharmesh got and then they would tweak each thing. And it was often just a couple of words different or a little bit of a timing difference or something else. And they'd be like, there we go, that landed. And I imagine you doing the same thing.

Well, here's the thing, though. This is what's so interesting and is probably the most controversial thing that we talk about at StoryGrid. I mean, controversial, it's not like it's politics or something, but like what he's applying, what your friend is applying to Dharmesh's talk can be tracked. Like you could graph it, right? So we actually will take scenes. We can take scenes and graph the scenes on an actual line graph and find the boring spots and say that's where a fix needs to happen. So it's like what he is applying is an objective measure that he is doing intuitively because he's picked it up over years and years of being a professional. What he does, he's applying it intuitively. This is how it works is he's like, He's watching a talk and he's waiting for air signals to ping the back of his brain and he's going to be like, oh, something was off. Now, sometimes he immediately knows and sometimes he has to think about it. What's off? But he's applying a rubric to the talk that is a clear rubric. Now, he's probably never written it down, or if he has, I just know from experience of working with writers that do have a rubric. It's usually about like 50% there because so much of it they do intuitively that they don't understand the rubric they're applying. So like Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, these like great writers, they're applying very clear A/B rubrics to their writing, but it's so intuitive they don't understand them. What we have done at StoryGrid is actually write that rubric down. And so when I evaluate a scene, I can immediately tell you what's wrong, where it's wrong and why it's wrong and how to make it better. And it doesn't matter if I like it because it's about the rubric. That's what's so interesting about this stuff is it's like you can take any talk, apply the rubric and make it better because it is a rubric that applies across the thing. And it again, it frees up creativity, right? Creativity that he is— is it Dharmesh you said?

Yep.

He is experiencing in that talk is greater than just letting him do whatever he wants, right? So that's what I love about this stuff is that if you can learn it, you can like, you understand that by constraining down to a rubric, you actually create creativity that people will enjoy. And so, and it's again, it's objective.

Yeah, there's so much stuff in there that's really interesting to me. Going back to something earlier, I realized if we're talking about bottlenecks, you know, bottlenecks and flywheels, I think most people actually would misdiagnose the bottleneck in your business, right? Or in a publishing house where they would say the natural thing is to say a publishing house needs to be good at selling and marketing books, right? If we just sell more copies, then this is going to be more successful. And so they, the natural place to go that would be wrong is to say, we need to build a publishing house that's the best in the world at marketing books. And I think that's where a lot of businesses go wrong, where they're saying, okay, we need, how do we get our platform bigger so that when an author comes to us, we have the biggest platform to be able to sell as many books as possible. And that's, they're zeroing in on bottleneck, but I think they're, you know, that would be not understanding the physics of the book industry to realize that you shouldn't focus on that initial spike. You should focus on writing a great book, and then you ultimately had to build a completely different flywheel than what you would do if you had, you know, if you had believed that the bottleneck to selling copies was platform.

Yeah, I could go different because you're just tempting me to just shit on the publishing industry, and I would love to do that, but I don't think that would be helpful to your listeners. Yeah, on the business side, like, I mean, honestly, this is like such a common thing. I've been listening to Alex Hormozi a lot, so he's the one that's most like in my brain. But it's like you just got to have a great product. Like, that is where all of the effort should be going at the beginning because it's like the reason. So I just closed a promotion because we're running an MFA program. We only open twice a year because we run two semesters a year and I just closed it and we just sold 3 times more spots than we've ever sold before. And I actually could have sold more. We just don't have the— that's our current constraint is we only have so many people that can give one-on-one feedback and that's what I'm working on. But like what we have hyperfocused on that I— is why we're being successful is actually making people better at writing. That is all I care about. I let somebody go recently because they would not get on board with that vision. Right. I actually went back and looked at my budget from 2022, and 82% of our income came from training and seminars only, no feedback. And what we've realized is that doesn't make people better writers. They can pass a test about how a good story is structured, but they can't fucking write.

Yeah.

So we move. And again, that fucks up my goal. I need people that can actually write books. So I don't care if you buy a training seminar, if that doesn't get you closer to my goal of you writing a book that we can publish. So now my 2024 budget— so over the last 2 years I've changed. Now 81-point-something percent of my current planned budget for 2024 is coming from one-on-one feedback because that is where people get better. I actually think it'll end up being more, but we've completely flipped the business model because that— and here's what's happening: people are telling other people. So one woman took my 6-week workshop. Not only did she sign up for the 3-year program, she went and got 2 of her friends to take my next workshop and one of them signed up too.

Right.

So now we're talking about because the product is so good, that's all I'm focusing on. I'm pouring tons of money, effort into making the product as good as possible first. And yes, I'm doing YouTube to promote it, but it becomes way easier to promote something that everybody's talking about. And like one person was like, well, I want to talk to a couple of your students before I sign up. I'm like, that's fine. I'll give you the number of all of them if you want. All of them that allow me to give you your number. I don't care. Talk to all of them. Like our churn rate is almost zero. In fact, this semester it was negative because we had two people that had to drop out. One got injured and another had work stuff come back. So like we brought more people back than we lost this time around. And so it's like the product is so good, therefore it's easier to sell it and everything else gets easier. So I think the biggest constraint for most people is like, if you want to write a book on habits, can you write a better book than James? Like, that's what you should be asking yourself. And so like, that should be the super focus. And like, I heard this for years and I didn't take it seriously. And but it's like if I could go back to any other time in my life when I was focused on trying to build a business, I would be hyper-focused on just creating the best product I could possibly create, whether it's a course or a service, you know, whatever it is, because then everything just gets so much easier. And so anyway, yeah, that was the thing that it's just getting so much easier because we have the best product that exists.

One thing I'm curious about is how much does the work that you're doing of what you're teaching in the program result, like, close the loop in the flywheel to the content that you're putting out, right? Like, how often do you get the idea for the YouTube video from the day-to-day, you know, students going through in the class?

I don't teach the 3-year program, so I don't have a very up-close view of them. Most of my stuff comes from two sources. One is my sales calls. So that was a big change I made about 6 months ago too, is I stopped trying to close an email because our products are so expensive. So I just talk to everybody that wants to talk to me and I keep feeling like, hey, I need to hand this off to salespeople, but I'm learning so much about my audience and their struggles from having these conversations. So a lot of it comes from the sales calls of like, oh, because we have clear solutions to problems, but they're super nerdy. And so like, it's— I have to find the path between what people are saying in their head and what they're struggling with and the solution. You know, nobody will listen to your solution if you haven't— if they're not convinced, you know, their problem. So when I get off the sales calls, I jot down notes or drop in a Notion like, okay, here's an idea for a YouTube channel. I got to solve this problem. And then I come up with like the StoryGrid way to solve that problem. But I lead with the problem. So I come from that and I do teach our 6-week workshops and I get a lot of ideas from that too. I'm like looking at everybody's scenes. I'm like, oh, this is where people are struggling. And then I'm like, okay, I need to do a YouTube video on that. The other thing, I don't know how much this applies to everybody, but when we switch to one-on-one feedback, first of all, As far as I know, we're the only one that has a clear systematic rubric on how to give feedback from a sentence all the way up to a full novel. So our product is now feedback. So what that allows me to do is just teach everything we know for free. So like I'm trying to give away everything we know because what will happen is people will go try to do it, they'll still suck, and they'll need to come pay us to get feedback because writing is uniquely hard to do in a vacuum. It's really hard to self-evaluate your writing. You need feedback. And then when you ask your writer friends for feedback, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. So they say a bunch of random stuff that's not helpful. And so when you come to us, we are literally like, that's the problem. Here's how to fix it. Go try again. You try again. Okay, well, that's better. Now this is actually the biggest problem. Fix that. Go try again. And that like short feedback loop is where people actually get better. So by focusing on that, it's like it is open season. I'm putting everything we teach in the workshops and the 3-year program. It's all going on YouTube as fast as I can get it up there.

That's really interesting. So in the last episode that I just recorded is with our mutual friends Grant Baldwin and Brian Harris, and they both have inside sales teams for their businesses, which I think most creators are probably like, wait, what? Hold on. That's, you know, and then you're over here saying like, yeah, I also do sales calls. And what I think is interesting is the flywheel that comes from that of put content on YouTube in order to get leads, book those leads on the calls, you know, close those, you know, into customers. And we're gonna use that revenue to drive everything. But especially those conversations, you know, what questions people have, the way they phrase something like that is giving you just so much ammunition to say like this, oh, 'Okay, I did that video already, but let me go and redo it to this person.' You know, and with that mindset, same content, totally different target audience or mindset, and it's a totally new video.

Well, and the other thing, and this is really hard to keep in mind, is I'm not trying to get a lot of views and subscribers on YouTube because let's say there's 10 million people that want to write a book. How many of them are going to pay $30,000 over 3 years to take our program? Right? Like way less than 1%. Right? I'm just looking for those people. So I am putting out, you have to understand, like, so if you think of signal and noise, right? So it's like, I always think of the old like radio dial, right? Like in my dad's old Cutlass when I was growing up and it's like, you're like hearing the static and then you start to hear the voice and then you're like trying to like, like get it right where you hear the voice and no static. Right? So YouTube is just static. I mean, as loud as it can possibly be. And I'm putting out this little tiny signal And I need to make sure the people that hear it are the people that are going to buy my workshops that are $1,200 and my 3-year program, which is $5,000 per 6-month semester. So I have to dial my videos in that only people that are serious about learning writing, not people that are doing NaNoWriMo, people that actually want to get better at the craft of writing hear my signal and then they come. So when I put out videos, I'm not trying to get videos that get 100,000 views because those are the wrong people. My goal of the program is 300 members, 300. Like, that's not that many, but they're the right people. So I have to, like, be careful about chasing the YouTube stats because those are the wrong stats. It's how many books, how many calls am I booking, and how many of those are leading to workshop sales and then to the writer mentorship. And boom, it's working. We just 3x'd our biggest sale ever and we ran out of space. And so that's the judge is like, so you have to be careful with these things that you're making sure you're judging it by the right metric. Because if I'm chasing YouTube views, that's a different metric than people signing up for my program. So I had 26 people sign up for my program. That was my 3x. 26. That's it. That's way less than 100,000 views on YouTube. But I made way more money off those 26 people than the 100,000 views on YouTube.

Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. When it goes back to just sharing that full master plan, right? Because when someone realizes, when the right person gets all the way through and they're like, what's Tim's deal? Why is he doing all of this? And you're like, wait a second, our incentives are 100% aligned. Like you're just, you're all the way down here saying, look, my goal is to publish a book that sells for decades. And as a viewer, I'm like, well, hold on, that's my goal. My goal is to write and publish a book that sells for decades.

This is the thing. So like I did the video that went out today was for memoir writers. And the first thing I tell people in the video is your story is not interesting enough to be a book. So if I was trying to get hundreds of thousands of memoir writers to love me, telling them their story sucks from the beginning. Your life is not that interesting is the wrong thing to say. But people that want to get the shit kicked out of them until they're a good writer will be like, thank God somebody said that to me, right? But that's like 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 1,000 people. So I don't care if 1,000 people click on the video and right there I lose 900 of them.

Them.

It doesn't matter to me. I need that 100 that will watch all the way to the end and the one of those 100 that'll call me and thank me for telling them the truth. And so it's like, I am purposefully— I don't think I come across as a complete asshole, but I'm combative. I'm like, I don't care what you feel, I don't care what you think, this is the truth. And so if you like what I'm saying over here, come over here, because I only need 300 of I only have room for 300 of you. So I think getting super clear on that kind of stuff is really important in making sure you understand who you're trying to attract and every signal that you're putting out. I know we're going past an hour, but this is really important too.

Yeah.

So at the beginning of last year, our mutual friend Kara told me I needed to start talking to customers more. And so I have not stopped. That's why I still do all the sales calls. She's like, you have to talk to more people. You do not understand why people like you guys or don't like you guys or whatever. So I did 50 calls with people that some were customers, some weren't, some had joined the email list in the last week, some had been around for 9 years. Like it was all in between. And here's what I noticed when I went back and looked at the notes because I asked them all the same questions. Not one person said anything about making money off their books. Also, I talked to out of those 50, I think maybe 5, I'd have to go back and look, were under 40 years old. Now, if you go to our website, it says, learn the skills, write a book, leave a legacy. Everybody, what's— here's my audience. They're getting later in life and they're realizing this dream they have, if they don't start now, is never going to happen. So, their kids are getting older or they're about to retire or like I had one guy that's like his dad died at a young age and he's like, holy shit, I might die 20 years from now. I got to do this thing. And so nobody's trying to make a bunch of money as a writer in our program. We're very highly focused on fiction and it's like leave a legacy, right? That's why I wrote my novel. I mean, I hope it sells, but I got a job, I make money, I don't need it to sell. I want to leave something behind that matters. I did not realize that is why our audience loves us is because we do that. So, all of my marketing changed. I don't talk about trying to write a book that'll sell a million copies. I don't talk about the marketing or the launching or anything. It's all about you have a message inside of you that you're trying to put on paper. And every time you try to put it on paper, it sucks and it's not very good and it's not getting on the paper. It's like I can see a picture in my head and then I go to paint it and it looks like a child finger painted it, right? So it's like, we're going to teach you the skills so that thing you see in your head, you're actually going to get down on paper. And, but I didn't know that until I talked to 50 people one-on-one, asked them all the same questions. That was probably about 70 hours of my time. But like, that was the beginning seeds of what has turned our company completely around.

Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, the customer research and just doing it in a hands-on way and using the words that people are actually using, like it'd be very easy in your headline to end with and make money or and sell books. Yeah. And that switch to leave a legacy is, you know, that's what— that's the copywriting that comes from 50 hours of customer calls.

Yeah. And now I'm putting out a signal that's attracting the right people. Of those 26 people that signed up, not a single one of them were under 40 years old. It's a mix. It's pretty even male-female. We had somebody join that was 70. And here's the real thing, that's what I think too. That's why I write, you know. So like, what I realized is like, oh, I'm already attracting people that are just like me. I need to like lean even harder into it, right? Because when people are like like, well, you know, nobody's going to make— you know, most of the people that take your program is not going to make that money back. I'm like, fuck you. Like, so everything you do has to have a price tag on it? Like, I go to jiu-jitsu 4 times a week. I spend thousands of dollars a year on jiu-jitsu. I'm never going to make any money on that. It's like the most useless skill. Like, unless somebody attacks me that also knows jiu-jitsu, it is a useless skill. And yet it means something to me, and I'm getting something out of that's important. And so it's like understanding why your people do what they do too. Maybe your audience is they're trying to make money and that's perfectly fine. My audience is not those people. And so I have to lean even harder into that. And, and then they hear me above all the other noise of all the other people promising them they're going to put their book on Amazon and make $1,000.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, just that audience messaging fit. It, and then ultimately to the product, right? You have to have a product that delivers on that.

Yeah.

But I think it's really fascinating to see all of the pieces come together and to see you play such a long-term game. Like, I think so many people in this space, whether it's books or, you know, podcasts or, you know, anything in the creator world, so many people are playing a short-term game. And so I love the way— I guess a couple things. I love the way that you're focused on decades, right? Your time horizon is like actually, you know, 20, 30, 40+ years.

Yeah.

And then you're willing to put the blocks in place to make that happen. Like, I think most people would hit the bottleneck and be like, we need great writers and editors, and be like, well, that's not possible to do at scale in any meaningful timeline. And so never mind, let's go tackle a different problem.

Well, and it's important to hear Okay, so the last 14 months, November 2022, I realized something was wrong with the business. Like something major was wrong. We did a promotion I thought was going to be our biggest promotion. It was one of our worst. And now looking back, I'm like, oh, it's because we were relying on training and seminars. We need to switch to one-on-one feedback. But I didn't fucking know that at the time. I just knew something was wrong from November to August. Was the most suffering I've ever had in my business because I could not figure out what was wrong. It was just like slamming my head against the wall over and over. And I kept trying to do all the things I'd been doing for years and years. You know, I'm 42. I've been in this, whatever this business is that I do, I've been in this business a long time and it just wasn't working. And I kept just seeing our revenue go down. In 2023, I got to take my full paycheck from my company 3 times. One month I took a third of my paycheck. And so I kept having to work at it. And then it wasn't until August of 2023 that I had the insight of what was wrong. That's— and, you know, a bunch of shit came together where I could finally see it. Personal stuff. And I mean, like, dude, like, my marriage was like suffering this year. Like, this was horrible. I was like, is this going to work? This whole thing may unravel on me. Like, everything was falling apart. And then it was like I finally had the insight. And I had to push all of my— what chips, the chips that were slowly falling off the table, the ones that were left, I had to push into the middle. And so, I made the change in the company. We're no longer selling seminars. We're no longer selling training, which again, 2 years ago was 82% of our income. So, I started that in August and our revenue kept going down. One. Like, it just kept going down as I was pushing all the chips towards January 7th, right? I was spending— and I do all the editing, scripting, every shooting of YouTube myself. I added up one week, I was working roughly like 60 to 80 hours a week. It's like there are no off days. Like, I was getting up at 6 AM on Saturdays, working half the day on Saturday. I was working on Sundays. I was up at 6 AM every weekday, coming home, working at night, staying. Last night I was up until 12 12:30 editing a YouTube video so I could put it up today. And like, the wheels were coming off, right? Like, literally in October, my partner and I were like, I don't know if this is going to work. Like, we might end up having to let everybody go. I don't know what's going to happen. And he's like, hey, should we just do like one more training? I'm like, no, this is the right thing. And it's the right thing existentially. I can no longer sell products I know aren't making people better. And then it paid off. And so it's like, this is hard stuff that will change you. Like, it will— like, I can't even, like, express the amount of suffering I've done over the last 14 months. And it's 14 months. Like, this was not fast. Like, I kept telling my friends, I'm like, I'm on a treadmill where somebody keeps reaching over and turning up the speed. And I'm like, this is as fast as I can run. And then they turn it up a little bit more. And so like those 26 sales came in, we're set up for the year, we're going to be just fine. We're probably going to double our revenue this year. Like I'm actually going to get paid every month this year. Like all those things are wonderful. But like in July, I was talking to my wife, I'm like, I don't know if this is going to work. I may— you know what I said to her? I said, you know, Nathan would probably give me a job. Like, that's actually what I said. I was like, if I called Nathan, he'd probably give me a job. We might have moved to Boise though. And, uh, now we're remote. But that's so funny, it just popped in my head. But I was like, I really— we had that conversation, and then now I'm looking at like, oh my God, we're gonna double, and this is amazing. But it was not great there for, again, a long time.

Well, I think— I mean, what I hear in that is the author that you were talking about early on in the episode who is doing all the activities that they know will work and they've got a great product and they're promoting it nonstop as sales are going down and down, but they're dead set like this is the right approach. They know that intuitively. And then, you know, you turn that corner and that's the same thing for ConvertKit, right? Of we had that, you know, 2 years in making $2,000 a month in revenue and watching the bank balance just decrease. All the time and realizing like, look, it just takes making a great product and sticking with it for a long period of time. And so seeing that, you know, you always want that, that inflection point to come before you truly run out of money. Yeah, but if you go to all of these different creators, like many of them have a story like that of realizing being certain on what you're going to deliver as a product and it not getting there as soon as you would like, or it taking this grind through the dip to be able to get there.

Yeah. And I think the biggest thing that was surprising to me is that I was the problem. Like it wasn't some external thing like, oh, I'm not doing the right things to grow the email list or, you know, whatever. Really the truth was, and this is gonna be specific to each person, but for me, I was waiting on somebody to come and rescue me. Like I wanted somebody to come and tell me what I was doing wrong and tell me this. And I was like looking around and through a series of events, realize like, oh, I have to take ownership of this in a way I never have. And I have to actually push all my chips onto the table. Like, if this had failed, people would have lost their jobs. I would have to call Nathan and ask him for a job. Like, everything would fail and it would be my fault that it failed because I put all my chips on the wrong thing. But if I kept trying to like hold my chips back, they were just falling off the table and I was going to run out of money anyway. And so, but like that was the biggest thing. Now I did a bunch of external things that turned it around, but it took an internal shift in me and realizing like I have to change as a person and I have to become more brave, more in all these areas that like honestly had held me back. I'm 42. I've been trying to do this for a long time. And I have come to these inflection points and pulled back and gone and tried something else 3 or 4 times. And this was the first time I pushed all the way through to the other side. And so it is not for the faint of heart. And then even like, this is important because it's like making money, you know, like this is super important. And of course it doesn't matter, right? Like fast forward a billion years, anything I do in my life doesn't matter. So I have to do it for some other reason. Reason. So actually what I was most proud about on Friday and Saturday when I finished closing all the sales and knowing like the business is not only going to be fine, it's going to be like we're going to double this year. I was like, the most thing I'm proud about is like, I am a different person. Like that was like the best part of the whole thing was I overcame this thing that has been haunting me for decades. And so it's like, that is like, I'm like, I can walk around now, even if the company fails, at least I'm a different person. You know, that is to me the most, like the most exciting And so it's like, I think looking at all of these things is not some sort of like success measure other than like it will force you to overcome these demons that are like haunting you. That is the most exciting part of the writing process too, of all of these processes where you have to like push through these horrendous barriers.

There's a couple of things I talk about entrepreneurship and setting goals as like like to set a goal and to go on a journey. Let's see how to put it. I talk about entrepreneurship as setting a goal that is big enough that you're going to have to go on a journey that changes you as an individual, right? You have to become a fundamentally different person. We don't have time now, but you know, we get into stories, right? If we read a fiction story and the hero is the same at the beginning and the end, like that's a terrible story, right? Like it's garbage, toss it out. And so So I think about that of the difference between a lot of these, you know, maybe someone who hits it off with an audience or a viral video or a blog post or whatever, and gets to the point of earning a full-time living versus the ones that push through and build something like really substantial. Really, I think the biggest difference is that personal change. And most people are going to hit that pain point. And because they've achieved a level of comfort in their creator business, they're going to back off from that pain point and say, never mind this $100,000, $300,000 a year, $500,000 a year that I'm making comfortably. I'm going to stick with that. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just if you want—

Isn't there though? Like, I hate that we say that there is something wrong with that. Like, I do think there's something wrong with that. Like, sure. Like, people are allowed to do whatever they want and live their life however they want. That's fine. But like, I do think there's fundamentally something wrong with that where, you know, you need to change and you back off. There is something unheroic about that and there just is. Yeah, you can live your life that way. That's totally fine. Nobody's going to come and like tear you down for that. But it's like, are you going to be okay with that? Are you going to be okay with consistently making the unheroic choice? Like, I'm not.

I think I like— I know I have a set of values and desires that I want to put into my own. Life and business and everything else. I mean, I'm probably a little bit careful to not put those on other people, but I definitely— like, the number of times that I see someone else and I'm like, you have all the ingredients, and if you were willing to put in the effort and change, then you could have this major breakthrough.

Well, and from my side of the table, it's like the amount of people that started businesses in the book industry because they wanted to be a writer and they've never written anything great write, but they have a business. This is what I tell Sean all the time. I was like, I will burn our company to the ground before I will stop writing and pushing myself as a writer, because that's how I started. And like, this is where, like, my next book, when I showed it— Sean had not read it until I wrote the third draft of it. I showed it to him and he told me, not only is this the best thing you've ever written, it's one of the best things I've ever read. And it's like, it doesn't matter how much money I've made on StoryGrid the business, if it doesn't produce what I set out to produce in the first place. And that's what you're describing is like people set out on an adventure and then they get halfway there and they like stop off on the side of the road and get comfortable and then they just stop. And it's like, why? Like, it's so boring to stop. It's way more painful to keep going, but it's way more exciting. And so it's like, that is the thing. I'm like, I mean, I tell Sean this, I tell my wife this. I'm like, if I ever stop, just drag me out into the street and put me down. Like, there's just just, you know, it's just like, what's the point if like you're just gonna stop and coast? It's like, I'm here one time as far as I know. And so it's like, you know, I mean, I'm halfway done, you know.

So it's like, do something meaningful with it.

Do something. And of course it's your values. Like, and see, this is the thing is I can look at people like we've talked about Ryan Holiday. I don't know Ryan Holiday very well. This could be his version of comfort or it could be his version of pushing constantly past his comfort zone. Only Ryan knows. Same for anybody successful you've seen. You don't know, right? You're the only one that knows. My level of success is here, but internally I know when I'm being heroic and when I'm pulling back. And it's like, that's why you can't put your values on other people, but you know when you lay down at night Am I doing it or am I not doing it?

That's a good place to wrap up. I like it. You know, yeah, only you know and can apply it to yourself. Where should people go to— let's say they're in that group of people. If they're just listening and they're like, oh, whatever, I don't want to become a better writer, like, forget it, don't look up any of Tim's stuff. But if you're in that group of people like that resonates, where should they go to learn more about what we do?

Oh, well, check us out on YouTube. Go to StoryGrid.com. If you go to StoryGrid.com and scroll down, I have like a little like mini blog post there, and at the bottom, you can schedule a time to talk with me. So if you want to get me on the phone for 30 minutes, I'm happy to talk to you. But yeah, YouTube, StoryGrid.com, sign up for my email list, which runs on ConvertKit. Always.

Help me make some more money.

That's right.

That's right. Good stuff, Tim. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Nathan Barry.

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