MBA1763 Must Read: The 100-Page Book by Mike Capuzzi
2 Feb 2026 · 12 min
Omar Zenholm reviews Mike Capuzzi's The Hundred-Page Book, which argues that short marketing books are faster to write and easier for busy readers to consume. A 100-page book can be priced at $3.99 on Kindle to drive volume and hit niche bestseller lists while serving as a focused sales tool for your business.
Questions this episode answers
2021-04-12
Omar Zenholm
About 90 reviews
4.5 stars
$3.99 (noted as '399' in transcript)
Chapters
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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hunter RMBA Show. Practical business lessons delivered on a silver platter every single day with their daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014 and today's episode is a must read episode on our Must Read Episodes. I share with you a book that I've read that has influenced me, has helped me. I share with you its insights, its takeaways and why you should read it too. Today's must read is the hundred page book by Mike Capuzzi. I stumbled upon this book on Amazon in the Business section. The subtitle of the book is what grabbed my attention. The Business Owner's Guide to Self Publishing. A customer attraction book that sounded really interesting to me. Writing a book with a specific purpose to attract more customers. Many people think that successful authors are ones that aspire to be on the New York Times Best Sellers list, Wall Street Journals list, or to be windows of major book retailers. This book says you don't need all that to have a successful book. You can actually write a short book that can help you get more clients. Despite the fact it didn't hit any best selling lists. In today's must read episode, I'll give you my takeaways from this book. Why you want to consider reading it and possibly producing your own short 100 page book to promote your business, your services, your products and and what are some of the advantages of going down that route? I was intrigued by this book. I read it and I wasn't disappointed. Can't wait to share with you all that I learned. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.
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Wanna start today's must read episode with a little tidbit? When I read the reviews of this book, I was actually really curious because a lot of interesting reviews. There weren't thousands of reviews, about 90 reviews on Amazon, but it had a total of 4.5 stars. And everything that people said in those reviews were really unique. Everybody got a different perspective from the book, different takeaways. And I really love books that actually have different angles and can teach different people different things depending on their needs. This book at its core, really demystifies the whole process of writing a book or becoming an author. It also simplifies it. It actually just kind tones things down and says, hold up. You don't need to be, you know, Stephen King to be an author to have a successful book that can serve your business. But he's very upfront in the book about the purpose of this book. He actually says in the book at the start, warning, this book is not for everyone. This book is not here to convince you to write a book or show you how to make money selling books instead of instead, this book is about how to create a strategic sales tool for your business in the form of a book. So you're writing the book with the purpose of allowing it to help you sell more of whatever you sell. Your products, your service, your coaching, your courses, whatever it is, it's a vehicle, it's a way for you to sell more of what you do. And immediately I thought this is going to be an Interesting book because I'm a big fan of educating your customers to sell. I really believe that teaching is a new selling. And whether you do that through content marketing, with a blog or a podcast, or through webinars or through a book, it's a surefire way to build trust with your audience and make more sales, at least in my experience. So going down this road, going down this avenue of hey, what about writing a book to sell your products and services was really intriguing. So let me share with you some of the things that I really loved about this book. First of all, the author, Mike Capuzzi, he drinks his own Kool Aid, right? He eats his own dog food, meaning he has published several small books, or what he calls Shooks, short books that are around 100 pages long. And his arguments are proven through his own experience. His arguments for why you should write a Shook he says, first of all, writing a hundred page book is faster and less effort for you to get real big results. And it's true. Writing a hundred page book is not that daunting. I've written blog posts that are longer than that. Number two, a hundred page book is a faster and easier read for your potential customers. They're able to consume your information and get a win quickly. Number three, he says that, you know, a hundred page books are short and sweet and perfect for our daily commutes. For busy people in this world, in today's day and age, 100 pages can really be consumed quite quickly, maybe in two or three commutes. And lastly, what I thought was really interesting is that because it's a short book, because it's a purposeful book, it has a very narrow focus. You're writing this book to be able to educate your potential customer so they can take the next steps to take on your product or service. It's very, very easy for you to be able to accomplish this. Go writing this book when it's focused, when you're not trying to cover a huge topic, when you're not trying to do too many things. It's not your memoirs here. You are on a mission here and it's a lot easier for you to complete the mission when you have a narrow scope, a narrow focus. Some big takeaways I found from this book is he really just boils down what it takes to write this book and just gives you what you need to hear. This is what you need to focus on. This is the purpose of the book. Don't worry about xyz, all these other things, these distractions, all the other Things that people are doing in the book world, authors that are trying to hit lists, try to get on TV shows, all that kind of stuff. These are distractions. Just focus on this. I really love how focused this book is and the strategy behind it. What I also liked about this book and the concept of a shook a 100 page book is that you're not over promising with a small short book. People are not expecting too much. So it's kind of easy for you to over deliver. It's a way for your potential customer, for your reader to be introduced to your market, to your topic, to your subject. For example, if I wrote a hundred page book on webinars, it would be an introduction to webinars and how you can run more efficient webinars. If people want to learn more on how to do that and implement what I talked about, I don't need to jam that into the book and make this a 500 page book. I can just tell them hey, learn more on my website. We got free courses, we have a great software for you to use, we got member webinars, all that kind of stuff. So it's a good way for somebody to get started and you hand them over to your business to take on the next steps. If people choose to go deeper on the topic you explore, they have a way to do that. You're not leaving them high and dry and they're not going to expect you to cover every single thing under the sun in your topic in a short book. He does get into in the book some technical aspects of how you can self publish your own short book. And it's pretty easy to follow. I felt very much ready to get started after the book. I was ready to kind of say okay, I think I can write a hundred page book. Let me narrow in on my focus. I have all the steps that were outlined to me. I know how to kind of publish it, how to price it, all that kind of stuff. That was another thing, the pricing. When you have a short hundred page book, you don't necessarily have to price it that expensively. Remember this is a marketing tool. This is a sales tool. You're not trying to make money with this book, okay? In fact, if you make any money with this, that's gravy. With a short 100 page book I can easily price it at 399 for the Kindle version. Pretty inexpensive for a book. And I'll be able to move more units, get my message out there to more people, get more reviews, get more feedback and it's justified. It's not seen as a cheap book. This is a short book versus if I wrote a traditionally published book that's 300 plus pages that has a hardcover version and all the bells and whistles, typically I wouldn't be able to price that book less than $15. So what he talks about it's actually quite easy to be an Amazon Best seller in your niche because you're selling so many books because of the low price and you're getting good reviews because it's well written and it's really focused and you're under promising and over delivering. So even though we're not after any kind of list rankings, a possible side benefit of running this type of book and selling this type of book that you can sell more units and become an Amazon Best seller with some pretty minimal effort if you market the book properly. He talks a little bit about how you can market the book to be able to do that. Now what I found really interesting is that I constantly would see examples of what he was teaching in the book, in his own career, in his own life as an author. When I finished this book, I immediately went to Amazon and searched what other books does Mike have? He's got like half a dozen short books you can buy. And it's funny because I always heard from other authors like Ryan Holiday say that the best way to sell a book is to write another book. And that's a lot easier to do when they're short. So one book's success will help the next book's success.
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To wrap up today's a must read episode the Hundred Page Book by Mike Capuzzi if you always felt like you want to write a book but you're not ready to write your masterpiece, you don't need to wait for that masterpiece to be ready to be written. You can start now. You can start with a marketing book with a sales tool. Like I mentioned, this is a great book to kind of just dip your toe into being an author. Heck, I was one of those people. I thought, hey, I want to write a book one day. It's going to be amazing. And maybe that's true. Maybe I will write an amazing book in the future, and I'll dedicate the time and the focus to do that. But it doesn't mean I have to wait until I'm ready for that book to write my first book. I can write different books for different purposes, and if it's quality, it doesn't really matter how long or short it is. In fact, if it impacts many people and it's short, it's even more impressive. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I highly recommend you pick up the hundred page book by Mike Capuzzi. Make sure you smash that subscribe button so you don't miss our next episode. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. It's absolutely free to subscribe on any podcast app you like. Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Himalaya. We're on them all. Go ahead and do that right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I actually discovered this book through Kindle Unlimited. Now, Kindle's not a sponsor of today's show or anything like that, but it's a subscription. You pay 10 bucks a month and there's a whole library of books you can borrow. You can borrow 10 books at a time. And there's a lot of great best selling books, useful books that are in Kindle Unlimited. I highly recommend you just try them out. I think they have a free trial for two months that you can check out. And I wrote a lot of great books through Kindle Unlimited. It's really well worth it. As friend of the show Ramit Sethi says, you'll rarely regret paying for a book, right? It's always going to be a good investment. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.
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