Our Viral Book Launch Playbook

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke, is this going to be shorter than an hour? Because it's Friday morning and we are once again hyped up on caffeine after a great week where we dropped a book. What do you think about the book launch?

Everything went, I think, best case scenario, truthfully, I guess if anyone wasn't part of the experience. Yeah, we dropped the art and business of ghostwriting this week, which was really exciting. I. I think everyone. Everything went really smoothly. You know, there weren't really any hiccups. We executed our plan pretty close to perfection. Little. Little tweaks, I think, for next time. But, yeah, we thought it would be helpful to recap how we did the book launch and explain the decisions we made, how we maximized virality for it, different ways you can leverage it, you know, the benefit of creating free assets around it, you know, all sorts of things. So if anyone's thinking of publishing a book or marketing a book, you know, dropping a book, there's definitely some things you can steal from our playbook here.

Yeah, I think beyond just the book, this is how to launch anything on Twitter. If you have an email list. I think this is the most powerful thing that we've now engineered and implemented probably four times this year. ChatGPT launch. We did it once. We did it with a yearly review last year, all of our book, all of our ebook launches, we've been doing it. And it's just kind of a proven method that you can come back to every single quarter to capture more emails, give away more value, kind of reignite momentum for people who might not have been engaging with your stuff quite as much recently. So a lot we can dig into. But did your physical copy get in yet?

Yeah, it did.

I think mine's one day away. Yeah, let's see.

It's right here. Came in the mail.

There we go. This is really good podcasting. If you're. If you're listening to this, the book is front and center, so. But if you're on YouTube, you'll get to see it.

Soon. As the Amazon truck came by, I was like. I ran outside and I was like, oh, it's here. I was so excited.

It's amazing. It looks so good, the coverage that we did a really good job.

Yeah, it does look really great. Same cover designer that did the art in business of online writing. It's interesting. Whenever I share with people, you know, I probably invest. I'd say, on average, about five grand into each book. You Know, between like formatting, because you have to have, you have a designer. If you're watching this on YouTube, you know, you have a designer that makes it look all pretty and you have headers and you know, it just, it looks like a well formatted book. So you got to pay somebody to do that, pay someone to do the COVID design, pay someone to do the back cover. Right. So when all. And then this one, I hired a buddy of mine to edit it as well. So like all in, you know, you spend like about five grand. And it's funny when you explain that to people because some people are like, wow. Like that is way more reasonable than I thought. Like, all the big publishers make it out to be this massively complicated thing. You know, it doesn't cost that much money to make a really professional looking product. Like the, the woman who designed this was a former art director at one of the big publishing houses. So it's like you're getting the same talent anyway, you know, and then other people are like, wow, that's so expensive. But if you think about it, you know, if an asset starts to do well and compounds over time like that five grand, it's like buying a rental property. That's how I like thinking about it.

Monthly dividends, the digital real estate. But I guess this is a little bit physical because it's. You can actually buy the real book. But. All right, let's. Let's prep the page on all the ways or things we're going to talk about here. So I think we can go over one thing we want to do is what we could have done better or if we wanted to truly maximize it, what else we could have done. I think we can save that for the end. I think to start, we can say just walk through kind of the entire thing from landing page to decision around creating free bonuses to how we drove traffic, to the free bonuses to the viral. Kind of take a screenshot that you bought it and I'll send it over to you. Where do you think we should start?

I think that's great. I think, let's maybe just preface even before step one of, you know, these are the questions that I get, get asked all the time. How long did it take to write? It took about three months to write the book. It took about a month, month and a half to edit it. And then it took about a month to just go back and forth, confirm cover designs and everything. So I've tried to really like push the throttle and figure out how much can I get done. The I've sort of accepted like the fastest you can get a book out is six months start to finish from idea to launch, you know, because you just have all these little things that you have to get done. Second is as I was writing it, I had so many ideas inside the book of how like dicky, in the future when we do this, there's so many ways that you can weave in all the other things that you're doing into the text. So like for example, in future books, I think something that a lot of authors should think about doing, and I'm, I'm definitely going to push myself with this too, is when, especially if it's a non fiction book and you're explaining how to do something, it's actually really difficult to fully articulate how to do certain things just in text. You know, a lot of times it's like, like think about explaining writing rhythms. It's like, it's actually easier to explain that on video where I can like go back and forth and delete things and like, it's more of a real time experience. So it makes me think about how much in nonfiction there's this opportunity of explaining something and then going, here's a YouTube video where I break this down in depth. And so you direct people to the YouTube channel, you know, and then at the end of the chapter it's like, oh, and if you want like the super advanced masterclass on everything I've explained here, go to this landing page, check out this course. So there's all these different ways you can weave in other assets inside the like, I think of the book as the hub. And then there's all these other spokes you can put around it. And I, I noticed that a lot of writers, myself included in the past, haven't really maximized that. They're just like, here's my book and subscribe to my newsletter. And you don't realize all these little tangential opportunities you're missing.

Yeah, Hormozi did a good job with this with his $100 million offers course that was also free, but came with the book that kind of was a complimentary learning. I like that because you could also have an audio. Obviously the audiobook is another thing you could do. Have you thought about recording one of those? I know people were asking for it.

Yeah, I'm sort of debating, you know, should I just block next week and read a chapter a morning and just crank it out? Because I have all the equipment here. Like I can just do it in my house. And I was talking to another Buddy. That said, audiobook sales are about a third of his book sales. So it's a meaningful percentage. So. And I've heard that I've, I've heard, you know, for, for books and for authors that have traction, like audiobooks make up a pretty good percentage.

So the first, the first thing I do when I want to read a book is buy the audiobook. I don't even buy the Kindle. I don't even buy the hardcover. I buy Audible right away and then jump to the chapter that I know I want to read and listen to it. But maybe an outlier because I prefer listening over reading by a long shot, but nice. Okay, those are good questions because I know people are always going to ask those.

Yeah, just all these little things that I think you, you can do to maximize a book. But really the launch strategy, if you want to explain, Dickie, how we like some of the assets we created in advance and how we were thinking about incorporating that with Twitter, I think would be really cool for people.

So when we launch free ebooks, it's almost better. I think we start with that and then say how we adapted that for a paid book launch. That makes sense. You agree?

Yeah. Cool.

Okay. So when we launch something free that is a ebook. So let's take the 22 laws of digital writing, which we did in the past, or the five pillars of digital writing. Anything on that is more or less a lead magnet. That will eventually we might charge for it, but it'll probably stay a lead magnet. So the V0 is do a Twitter DM DM campaign. So you say, hey, I'm launching this on Twitter. Leave a comment and I'll send it to you. The low leverage or really the non long term value way of doing that is I launch it and then in that dm I just send them the link, right? Here's the notion page, here's the book, here's whatever. So that's basically the same as social traffic. You have really no clue who is reading it, who's actually interested in it. Like, yeah, you could have the DM records, but then your DMs are a mess. So what we do is we put it on a landing page where all you have to do is put in your email and we send it to you right away. So same thing, same process, but rather than send the actual asset, we send a landing page with the email and then deliver it via email. Why? So we can continue to talk to them in the future. So I like painting like the. Here's the super simple way to do it. And then the slightly more complex. So that's the first thing we do is we put it behind the email subscription kind of paywall, if you will. But it's free. Then what I think a lot of people will do, even if they have an email, they'll send it and then they won't talk to them again. Right. It's hey, here's the thing. So we have a six email follow up sequence to everyone who downloads it where we point out specific things of the book or say, hey, wanted to make sure you saw this. And then we eventually send them in another direction. We give them a cta. Hey, if you enjoyed this, check out this newsletter or check out chip 30 or check out PGA. Right? People want or people aren't going to do anything if you don't give them the call to action. So if you're thinking about launching something on Twitter, that's the first one is put it behind an email. Like people have to put in their email and then keep in contact with them over the next five to six days when the intent is the most high. Rather than here's a PDF, I never talk to you again. Because if you saw my downloads folder of how many PDFs I have sitting there that were lead magnets that I never did anything with, it's hundreds of them. Right. And I think that's one big mistake people make on the lead magnet side. And then lastly, I think what we do differently than other people is we actually email our list to drive traffic to the tweet itself to go pick up the new thing. So we launch it on Twitter, say hey, leave a comment and we'll DM it to you. But then we send our email list who's already subscribed saying hey, we just dropped this new thing. If you want it, go reply to this tweet. So rather than send it to them already just because they're on our email list, what that does is it drives more virality to the tweet itself. Right? So we have people who are already on our list who then go re put in their email and they enter a new communication sequence. And so that's another way of reigniting your list of hey, I just dropped this new thing, go check it out. So all of those are things I think are small things we do in a unique way to maximize the value of these viral Twitter launches. And so if you're listening to this, thinking about launching something like that, there's kind of your behind the scenes playbook.

Yeah, the thing you know, in case someone just doesn't really understand how these mechanisms work. The whole reason this is so powerful, right, is because of the flywheel effect, where you give some sort of giveaway on Twitter. And you can do this on any platform. You can do it on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. Like, we just found a tool that allows you to do auto DMS on Instagram. You can do it on Facebook. The whole idea is you go, I'll give you this thing for free. If you comment in, people then start to comment. The more people who comment, the more the algorithm goes. People are engaging with this post. I'm going to show it to more people. The more people comment, the more the algorithm goes. I'm going to show this to more people. And all of a sudden, you know, our launch tweet, Dickie, by the end had like 100,000 views and over 300 comments. And to spend $0 on that is pretty amazing, you know, And. And so, as a free strategy and as a way of getting a bunch of attention for free, capturing a bunch of emails for free, this is really powerful. The thing that we did that was different with it being a paid book, was two things. One, what most people do is they just go, oh, I'm coming out with a book, you know, and then they do some sort of giveaway and they're like, give me your email and I'll send you the first chapter early. Or, give me your email and I'll give you the bonus chapter, right? And that is. It's such a weak, lazy way of approaching bonuses, you know, it's like, are you really that excited to get the first chapter for free? You're like, no, I just want the book, right? Or it's like a bonus chapter. It's like, well, then why didn't you just put that in the book? You know, like, it's just such a. It's like you're not trying hard enough, you know? And so when I sat down and was like, okay, what are some bonuses that I could create that someone would be like, wow, not only do I want the book, but I really want to participate in that first day giveaway because I want these bonuses. Like, one of them was, I'd say one of the biggest frameworks in this book is this idea of the five archetypes of client voices. You know, if you can write for these five different types of voices, you can go straight for anyone. And I was like, you know, I bet I could train ChatGPT on this, and I bet that would be really Cool. So I spent two hours on Saturday, like, playing with ChatGPT, being like, huh? How can I create a prompt that would help a ghostwriter at least get like, 50, 60, 70% of the way so they can start to see the differences in those voices? Right? And that's really cool, and that's really valuable. And that's the sort of thing where you want to sit there and go, how do I create other assets that in theory, you could charge for. Right. And then you give those away for free like that. It's like, try harder than just, I'm gonna give away a sneak peek at the first chapter. Nobody cares, you know?

Right. So that's how we adapted this one. Since the book is paid and not free, we didn't want to do a giveaway of like, hey, go get the book for free, because we're putting it for sale on Amazon. What ended up happening was everyone who bought the book was replying with a proof that they bought the book. Like a screenshot, a screenshot of a receipt. So in the future, if we were to do this, it will be reply with a screenshot of it in your library and I'll send you over. Because now you have 500 tweets of people who've bought the book who all shared it, saying, I bought the book. So it was double virality, where they were, you know, tweeting it out and sharing it, where. I didn't expect that to happen either. But it was so cool to see you rattle off those retweets during the day because that just further drove the, oh, I bought the book because someone else said, now I go and see the downloads. I'm going to go download that on and on. It's fun.

Yeah. So that was very unexpected for me. I sort of just threw in the language, like, honor system. You know, anyone who buys the book and comments, you know, ghost below gets these bonuses. And I just thought people were going to be like, yeah, yeah, for sure. I bought the book. But then they would just take. Take the bonuses. And all these people were posting these screenshots of their receipts. And two really cool things that come out of that, because now that happened totally on accident. And now I'm like, oh, we're going to do that every time now. Because that's. There's two amazing outcomes. One is you now have all these screenshots of social proof that I can go post on Instagram. We can put in email campaigns. Like, there's all sorts of ways that you can leverage those screenshots and Second is, I then started getting DMs from people that were like, further outside of the types of readers that I think are most likely to read this book. And I started getting DMS from people being like, I'm seeing your ghostwriting book all over Twitter, like, looks like it's crushing it. But really what they were seeing is all these people's libraries with the book in it from, from Kindle. And I was like, wow, that was not something that I was expecting. And what a cool way of, you know, that that has such a bigger impact than people being like, oh, I'm just engaging with your launch tweet on the day you drop a book.

You know, okay, so here's, here's where it could get fun. I'm thinking now for future books, on the first page of the digital version, we should install a quick a click to tweet link that says, hey, because here I'll paint the opposite, right? When someone buys it via Amazon, you can't communicate with them. You can't send them a follow up saying, hey, could you leave a review? Hey, could you do this? Hey, could you do that? So imagine in the intro if it was, thanks so much for buying this book. I've put together a bunch of bonuses. All you have to do is share it on Twitter, click this link, it will auto populate a tweet and take a screenshot of it in your library or something like that, and I'll send it over to you. So it's like we build in the viral share campaign at the beginning of the book and make it only on the digital version. So literally I'm sitting here reading it on my computer, I click it, it populates a tweet on Twitter in the main browser that I could go tweet and share.

That's an amazing idea. And think about the evergreen, like if I had done that with art and business of online writing would still be screenshots today of people doing that, even though I published it three years ago.

Can you amend Kindle versions?

Yeah, I can go and re upload. That's a great idea. Why don't we just go re upload.

Versions to both of them? Right? And so it's a click to tweet, hey, share this. And then we just set up a Twitter list filter to look for those tweets and anytime it comes in, we go and send it to them.

Wow, that's really cool.

That's why we do it live here, folks. This is exactly what we do over espresso. Anyway, brainstorm more ideas.

Yeah. So I would say with that playbook, we executed everything really well, you know, and. And I think part of it is going into it with reasonable expectations, you know, like, understanding that at the end of the day, you're launching a paid product and, like, you're really excited about it. And other people, I'm sure, will be excited about it, but the whole world isn't going to be excited about it. So just going into it, going, I'm executing this. Well, my little corner of the universe got excited about it, and then, you know, let it be. And I'm much more focused. It's funny, the same day that the book came out, I was already, like, jotting notes on what's the next thing I want to write. You know, I'm so not focused on the hype of one book. I'm just focused on building the library and us continuing to stack assets and what's the next thing? What's the next thing? What's the next thing? So taking the long view in terms of measuring success.

So I'll pause to come back to talk about the next book and brainstorm some ideas there, because I think that'd be interesting. But just I'm realizing now that there might be some people listening to this, being like, how do I run a viral Twitter campaign? So we use hypefury. It's a Twitter scheduling software that allows you to, when you tweet something out, set up a filter for when someone replies with a certain thing. In this scenario, it was a ghost. It will automatically DM them a link or automatically send them something that you get to configure. So just for anyone who's unfamiliar with this, Cole tweets it out, says, hey, leave a comment with a ghost, and I'll send you over the bonuses automatically. When someone leaves a comment, the Twitter API from hypefury or hypefury talks via the Twitter API and sends the DM to that person with the link to our landing page. So that isn't something that you have to do manually. It happens automatically. And for context, this one we had like 300 or 350 comments because you had to buy something first to get them. But when we've given things away for free, we've had some with 3,000 comments. 3,300 comments. Like, our yearly review had almost 4,000. So you can really maximize a lot of emails in a short amount of time if you create something high value. That's the only way to get is actually by commenting on that thing, because Then people tell their friends and then they go back and forth on it.

And I guess two really great follow up strategies to inject urgency. One is if you go and drop some sort of free resource like this, saying, this is the only time I'm going to drop it. So either engage now and you get it, or I'm never sharing this ever anywhere else again. You know, so that injects a lot of urgency. Or, or what we did with the 22 laws was, hey, we're dropping this for free now, but it's going on sale in a week or two weeks. So if you want it for free, engage now, but otherwise it's gonna cost you, you know, $22 later. So both of those are really effective at getting people to go, okay, well, you know, what's my upside? Downside? Why don't I just get the free version? Why don't I just do this now?

Exactly. Okay, so next book, next thing that you're gonna chef up, do you want.

To share real quick how then how we used the book with the closers in PGA and how they used it as a follow up resource?

Good call. So, yeah, anyone who's familiar, this is a lead magnet for our premium Ghostwriting Academy. At the highest level, right, the book is kind of a high level overview of the art and business of, of ghostwriting. But we have a group coaching program that takes people from freelance writers to premium ghostwriters. So a lot of people are going to read this, say, hey, I want Cole's direct help in learning how to do all of this stuff. I'm going to come to you and learn more about it. So when we launched the book, we've already had a bunch of calls with people who it was not the right time for them to join pga. So we had our sales reps who really are just enrollment advisors, where they're constantly talking to people, seeing if they're a good fit, figuring out, hey, if now is not the right time, when would be a good time, what you should go do first, kind of giving them a roadmap. And so for a lot of people that weren't qualified to join in the beginning, we now reached back out to them with the book saying, hey, I think if you read this, it's going to get you up to speed where you'd be in a much better situation to eventually go and join, right? So that gave us a new touch point for a lot of people who we probably haven't contacted since we were in initial contacts with them because we might have put Three or six months down the line is when we were going to follow up with them. So it allows our team to have a new kind of relationship. Offer of, hey, wanted to make sure you saw the book. Cole also put together some bonuses and then start to have that conversation just to figure out where people are again. Because otherwise you don't really have anything. You're just following up with like, hey, how's life? But when you can follow up with value first, right? First of reciprocity bias, they feel like they need to answer. They feel like, although they just did something for me, I should do something for them. Endless rabbit hole there. But, yeah, I think that was an under. I didn't even recognize that that was going to be something we could do until the book launched, but it's already working great. Mm.

Yeah. So one, one quick little sales pro tip for everybody here, because this goes in both directions. So whether you have something and you have a sales team and so you're reaching out, or if you're a ghostwriter, for example, and you're trying to land a client, in either case, you're always looking for the conversation starter. And the conversation starter means anytime you launch something new, that means you can go ping everybody that you're in conversation with. You know, so, oh, hey, did you see? We just launched the book. It wanted to send you over some of the free resources. There you go. You know, hey, we just launched a whole new upgrade inside pga. Just wanted to send you the first module so you could check it out, see what you think, Right? Like, anytime you're doing something new, treat that as the open door to re spark the conversation. It also, though, works in the opposite direction where if you're trying to land a client and you say you're, you're pitching and you're trying to get like this fintech startup as your client, and one morning you wake up and you see in TechCrunch that they just raised their Series A. Well, you shouldn't just sit there and go, wow, well, they just raised a Series A. You should take that dm, the founder, whoever you're trying to, you know, you've been pitching and trying to follow up with and go, hey, woke up this morning, saw you just, you know, saw the announcement that you just closed your Series A. Amazing congratulations, by the way. I still think, you know, creating these assets for you would be really beneficial. Let me know if, you know, now's a better time to connect. Anytime the company that you're trying to pitch does something, they close a funding round. They announce a new hire, they scale into a new industry, they drop a new product that is an opportunity for you to ping them again and go, hey, I'm still here. Do you want help? Do you want help? Right? So I just like crystallizing that because it's worth thinking about in both directions.

And we've experienced that a ton with YouTube editors or other writers that we've hired who it was just not the right time. And it's so easy if you reach out to someone and offer services and they don't answer or they say, hey, now, it's not the right time to just never talk to them again. But the framework we teach in PGA is like, you maintain that relationship until they say, don't talk to me anymore. And so if you do it right, they're never going to say that if you're always leading with value, rather than, hey, ready to hire me? Ready to hire me? Ready to hire me. If you just consistently send them valuable things or have conversations that maybe spark a new way of thinking for them, you're going to maintain a strong relationship where six months, a year down the road, it's like, I need a ghostwriter right now. And I know exactly who to reach out to. I need agency services for design right now. And this person's been keeping up with me for the last year. The. The people who maintain the relationships the best are always just one realization from the founder away from locking in a new client.

And I experienced that a gazillion times building my agency, like people that I followed up with for nine months. And then all of a sudden, I just, like every month I'm like, I'm just going to check in again. And then nine months later, they're like, so funny that you emailed me today. We just closed. We just finished a meeting where we were talking about how much we need this, like, great timing. Can we get started next week? Like, that happened all the time for me. So I always like pointing that out for people.

Nice. Okay. Just because I'm selfishly really want to know the next book. If you. If you had to write one, what do you think?

Well, of course, the answer isn't just one. So I have. I have two. I have two really big ideas. So one is, I think that there's a third book in this art and business series. I think this series is going to go on for a while, but I think that there's sort of these three primary ones. You know, we did online writing now we did ghostwriting. The third one. I think is going to be around copywriting. And really the idea that I have there is so many people approach copywriting through this lens of persuasion. So it's how to use this like persuasive language in order to convince people of things. And my thesis is that is not the most effective copywriting. My thesis is the best copywriting is category copywriting where you are educating people on the old category versus the new category. It's a very, it's. It's not persuasion, it's education. And I think that simple shift again like total differentiation. Great third book in the series, tons we could build in terms of products around that. Like so that's one idea that's lingering.

All right. My head goes how lucrative that is. B2B, right? B2B to startups, B2B to any like mid sized company who wants to educate the market on why what they do is different than everyone else. That's enterprise level stuff versus like enterprise level white glove service kind of thing. You know, rather than either B2C or like a digital product style course, you go after the biggest, most lucrative clients.

For that one there. Yeah, I mean and I've done a handful of work with them like that. That's the thing is you, we might even have two, you know, we might have like the low ticket Async that's for creators because it's the same rules, it's just a different value prop. Right. And then have the high ticket. You go after these big companies that are like we have no idea how to articulate what we do. And totally agree. The other big idea is I think that there are very few writers on planet Earth. I actually, I mean I'm sure there are, but I don't know about them. And so I, I don't have anyone that I could point to that approach or think about self publishing the way that I do or all the different ways that you can leverage things that you've written. And so there's two components here. One is I really love this idea of building like a personal publishing portfolio. So what does it look like to acquire a certain set of skills and build a library of books that you own that just continue to compound over time? I think that model is becoming increasingly interesting for people. And I think even though it's easy, a lot of people don't know how to do it. And I know how to do every single step. And then paired with that is I've been getting a lot of questions from other people. Just random dms or emails of people that are Like, I'm writing a book, I'm writing my first book. And then they have all these questions, you know, how do I name and claim a category with this book? What should the title be? What's an effective title subtitle combination? How do I structure it? How do I think about format? So I have this really interesting idea of writing a book about how to write a category defining nonfiction book. So how do you write a book with the intention of being like, this is my land. Just like we've done with our business of online writing or in business of ghostwriting. Right. Like more and more people are going to want to do that for themselves. And then in the book hub and spoke, the book is the entryway to the async course that is building your personal publishing portfolio. So how to write the category defining book. And then here's the model for doing it over and over again for yourself. Scaling into other categories, building your library, things like that.

Nice. Okay, I did not think you were going to say that one. So it's good. I have two other ideas that were not the two that you mentioned, which is just proof that we're going to be able to do this forever. I like that one because it's such a different market than what we've worked with so far via ship 30. Because ship 30. Very few people who join ship 30 are like, yeah, I'm like steps away from publishing a book. People look at ship 30 and goes, that's too beginner. That's too beginner. That's too beginner. And it probably is for if you're like steps away from writing a book. Yeah. You probably don't need to think about like a daily writing habit as much.

So we're going up, you know, think about all the, the steps of the journey, all the different parts of the buying curve that we can create products for.

And so that leads perfectly into the two that I wrote down. Which was the very first one was the daily writing habit book. Like the atomic habits for niche down to how to build a daily writing habit as top of market as it gets, educate people on why they need to be writing every single day. That I think could be. If of all the books would be the broadest. Right. How do you reach the most people? It's that one. So that one, if, if we were going to go the traditional publishing route with any of them, that I think would be the one to do because of the baked in nature of it, we're not. We're looking for maximal reach and in maximal reach you get maximal reach when you're with a publishing company. I would. I think you'd agree, right?

Yeah. The two. Just to crystallize this for everyone, like, the two criteria for taking a publishing deal in my mind is you're aiming for New York Times bestseller list. Like, you are playing the I want to write a bestseller game. If you're not and you're like, I want to make money from my book, you should just self publish. But if you want to hit a bestseller list, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, you have to be with a publisher because it's all a Ponzi scheme. And you have to play the game. Number two. It is. Number two is it has to be a book that is as top of funnel as possible. So you cannot hit a bestseller list with a niche book. You just can't. That there's a reason why all of the nonfiction bestseller books are personal development or personal finance. Everybody either wants to make their life better or make more money, period. And so if you're gonna play that game, know that you have to write a certain type of book in order to do that. And. And I think you're totally right, Dickey. Like, if that's. If we decide that's the game that we want to play, that's the book to do it with. Because it's the broadest and also because we have the leverage that we do, it would be very important to go. Because most publishing deals are like, we want to buy your life. It's like, sign here on the dotted line, and we own everything you create ever for the rest of your life. Like, a lot of these writers out here are getting screwed. And so for us, it's like, we will do this for one book. We're doing it for one book and one project. And this one project has one specific goal. And that's the only reason that we are doing this. Because otherwise, it's like, you know, like, I think publishing deals are fine. You just have to be very intentional with what and understand what you're saying yes to.

Yeah. The. The average writer who signs a publishing deal is only writing one book. So it is okay to sell all your future books because they don't plan on writing another versus us. We definitely plan on writing more.

What was the other idea?

The other one was five ways to make a million as a writer, which is from the headline that is now proven on Ali Abdul's video. Right. So for anyone who hasn't watched this, Cole was on a podcast with Ali Abdaal. It's got over 150,000 views. Just an absolute banger of a podcast. You look at the comments there of people being like this. I've never realized that you can make money as a writer, period. This was the best episode of all the deep dives I've ever heard. So first off, you crushed that one. That was cool to see. And second, we have an A B test or we have a data driven headline for a book where the YouTube thumbnail or the YouTube title that generated a ton of clicks is going to generate a ton of purchases via book. Literally just taking what are the five ways and walk through kind of the career paths of a writer that could lead to a million dollars. I think people would love. And that's like the second most top of funnel we could do.

It's so funny because I forgot even about that idea. And that's such a good idea. And it's like, yeah, talk about data driven. Like, that is by far the most successful podcast I've done to date. It's also the one that I've gotten the most engagement on. It's also the one that's it's causing art and business of online writing to surge in sales. Like, this is going to be the best month of book sales to date because of that podcast. And it's like you have all these data points and if we just drink our own Kool Aid, it's like, yeah, you should probably double down on that data point. And I just forgot about it because I have 20 other ideas.

That's why I wrote it down, because I think that one is the one.

That excites me the most great idea.

Add it to the later list that we talked about in the last episode, which, if you haven't watched, walked through our framework for taking ideas like this that we know will be successful in the future, rather than chasing the shiny object now, reframing it as, yep, we'll get to that eventually and it'll be lucrative when we do.

Okay, so this is a great place to put a fine point on everything we're talking about. So if, and you know, not if, when we do this again from your perspective, what are the things that we could improve at do better? What else could we do? Because I think we'll come up with different things.

If we could do it again, I would warm up the list for it and I'd for the giveaway and say, hey, this is launching on Tuesday next week and send three emails leading up to it and scarcity, limit the bonuses. So I would say only the first X people get it. And so right away people are like waiting for it to launch so there's more momentum when it drops. I think that's one thing we would do differently. The second thing is I would do some kind of coordinated launch with. I know we're working with Alex and books, some, maybe some other people who are just talking about the book. I would coordinate that to be all on the same day. So it would be all of that hitting at the same time. Those are the only two that come to mind right away.

I think my two are a. I know that Amazon really loves and prioritizes like pre sell orders. So how pre sales work on Amazon is you upload the book in advance and then you pick a pre sale date and what happens is everyone who pre orders it the day that it goes live, Amazon counts every single pre order sale on the first day. So what happens is the algorithm goes, whoa. You know, all these people are technically, quote unquote, buying on the same day, which causes it to surge in search results and things like that. Admit it, like, I sort of have. I've known for a while that that's probably the better way to do it. Admittedly, this is probably a fault of my own. I'm more just like when the book's done, I just want to put it out, you know, I just want to like get on to the next one because there's so many things I want to write and create. But I do think that if we were going to do a real book launch, like top of Funnel, even with a publisher like Big, you're just maximizing virality in that first week. You gotta do pre sales. I think you have to coordinate all of the, you know, so I think some of the best ROI for book marketing is going to like IG pages or YouTube pages where they review books and you pay them like a thousand bucks or five hundred bucks or two thousand bucks and they review the book and they create content around it, you know, and you go do five or 10 of those, that has a massive impact. And then if you also coordinate alongside of that a couple big podcasts and you have all of that drop on one week or one day, like that's really the right way to do it. It's just it requires a lot of upfront work and coordination.

Yeah, and the thing about that is you do that if you're really not sure that the book is going to have that good of viral word of mouth. In my opinion. You look at Hormozi, who I think is, it's interesting to watch him do $100 million offers in one way, which has been extremely successful. And now he's taking the complete other side, building as much hype as possible for the book drop. And I'm curious to know why. Like, I want to. I think he's, I'd love to hear his framework and thinking behind that of why this one not just put out there and make fire word of mouth. I guess he has a way bigger audience now and so he probably did the first one just because he didn't have the audience then. But you know, he's doing a webinar that's going to have hundreds of thousands of people on it to launch the book. And I'm not sure what that exactly is going to generate more than just a one day spike in sales. It's still going to have viral word of mouth, but the long term sales might be lower. I don't know, who knows? Interesting. I'm watching that closely because I think it's smart.

I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, it's a little antithetical to his idea of just giveaway for a dollar, you know, but I do think that at some point he's going to want the badge. He's going to want to say New York Times bestseller. So I wouldn't be surprised if he's using this as he's sort of perfecting his own distribution process, going through the motions, just like we just did, being like, what works? How do we align everything and then be proving it to himself so that he can, after this, go to a publisher and go, I sold $5 million worth of books in the first 24 hours. My advance is either 10 million or get out of here. You know, like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if he's sort of stacking the chess moves in that direction.

Nice. So I'm excited to see how that one goes too. All right, bro, that's a good one. I think we got some good takeaways. Hopefully this was helpful for anyone who's looking to launch something on Twitter. Looking to just capture emails, create something valuable, launch a lead magnet, launch a book launch course, whatever it is. Some small golden nuggets in this one. Think we missed anything?

I think that's it. Go grab the art and business of ghostwriting, dive in and obviously let us know what you think.

Go to Amazon. Ghostwriting art and business of ghost writing. You'll pick that up if you're on YouTube. Leave a comment, as always, with your three biggest takeaways. Hit subscribe, hit like and if you could share this on Instagram or text message whatever it is to share this podcast with someone else that way they can see it, hear it, learn it, love it helps us grow as well. If you're on Apple podcasts, Spotify, leave a review, leave five stars, all that good stuff. We appreciate you listening. If you have any follow up questions on this, leave a comment. We'll get to all of them and that's it. By the time people are listening this I'll be in London. If you're part of the ship 30 or Ptya community come to the meetup in London. It's going to be a fun time and maybe we'll record one from over there and I'll just do it from my laptop. That way we don't have to take two weeks off. All right y' all thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week. Peace.