#47: How to Land that 6 Figure Book Deal

Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. I'm your host, Peter Kim. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe so I can bring it to you every week. Now let's get on with the show. Hey everyone. This is a very special week. By the time this podcast episode drops, we will have open registration for the Leverage and Growth virtual Summit for Physicians. Now, I know many people listening to this were probably part of it. Last year we had over 10,000 attendees participate in this online virtual summit where we shared stories of physicians doing some really cool, amazing things outside of clinical medicine. And the whole purpose of that was to take control of their professional lives, create multiple streams of income, and really reclaim their personal time. Now, many of them are as busy as ever, but they're choosing how they spend their time and I think that's extremely important. I hope you can, you know, participate with us this year. You can do that by going to leverageandgrowth.com Please tell your friends and colleagues there's gonna be tons of amazing stories. The community itself is fantastic and there'll be some resources for you if you choose to pursue something on your own. So I hope you head over there. Hope you participate in our summ. Registration will be going on for the next week or two and then we go live, so hope to see you there. Now, this week for the podcast episode, you're gonna hear me talk to Dr. Amy Shah. She's someone that was part of the summit last year and so many things have happened in her life since then, I felt that we needed to get together and just talk about it. She was on a Facebook live with us on my Facebook group, the Passive Income Docs. And we do some Facebook lives every so often to provide some education, provide some stories. If you're not part of it, we'd love for you to join if you're a physician and enjoy. We are extremely lucky today to have Dr. Amy Shah here with us. She was on the summit last year and she talked all about her brand, Amy Wellness, M.D. and so many things have happened for her since that. I felt it was really important to bring her on this year in some ways and get an update from her. If you don't know Dr. Amy Shah, she's a double board certified physician and MD. She's got an undergrad degree in nutrition. She has had just some amazing training all throughout. She's considered one of MindBody Green's top 100 women in wellness to watch and actually the coolest thing about her right now is that she is a published author. Her book, I'm so Effing Tired. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Just came out this past week. She's doing a whole media circuit and I was like, okay, do you mind if you give spare us a few moments to come talk to us, but so excited to talk to her. We're going to talk about how she got a six figure book deal and I think there are a lot of you that might be interested in this. Sorry, that's a long intro. Amy. Amy, how are you doing?

Thanks so much for having me, Peter.

Yeah, it's so great talking to you. Last year was a lot of fun. I remember we grabbed you, I think, in your clinic.

Yeah, I was like in the middle of my work day. So it was a very badly lit, stressful. Anybody who works in outpatient clinic knows what the days look like. So. So when I watched that video, I could like, I remembered my mind and my stress levels being like so high because people, you know, in clinic, it's always very stressful.

Well, you were so gracious at that time to come and talk to us.

Thank you for having me.

I mean, I hope I did you justice by, you know, when I introduced you, but do you mind just telling us quickly who you are and kind of tell us about your brand a little bit?

Yeah. So basically, since I was a nutrition major in college, when I was kind of feeling burned out and really fatigued during my first few years of practice, I started to write and read and trying to figure out why I was feeling burned out and what I could do to help myself. And so one time I was listening to a podcast and as I started to do to help myself with burnout, and I heard a podcast about wellness. And they said, anyone who knows anything about health, nutrition and wellness follows mindbody Green. And you're taking submissions, right? Jason. And Jason was the CEO of MindBody Green and said, yeah, of course. And so that day when I got to work and had breaks in between patients, I wrote a blog post of what you know, and it was so simple, but I sent it to them and lo and behold, about two or three days later, I got a message and said, oh, that sounds fun. We'll publish this. And it was like that moment where you were like, oh my God, I can't believe they liked what I had to say. And I used that as an outlet. I started writing like 2, 3 blog posts a week for them and literally just doing it for Free doing it as a creative outlet. And that's really how my wellness journey for myself and my creative wellness business started. About three months into it, the editor reached out to me and she said, well, you know, a lot of people are asking for your website and how they could get a consult with you. And I'm like, well, I don't have a website and I only see in person, like clinic consults for my practice. And so I literally knew that there was something out there, more than just clinical practice. That's, that's how it all started. And then it was years later, before I even thought about writing a book or getting a book deal per se.

Well, this session here, you agreed to make this more like a workshop or kind of giving people just these inside tips on this. First of all, if anybody would like to find out more about Amy, you can check out her website. I give you all that. But we are here today to talk about her book. I'm so effing tired. Before we go into kind of like the mechanics of how you got that six figure book advance and how other physicians can do the same, can you just quickly tell us what is that book about?

Oh, yeah. So basically what I did is my journey that I had from getting myself out of burnout and fatigue. I wrote it down and I tried it myself. Obviously I lived it. I made a ton of mistakes and then I tried it on other people through this wellness kind of online practice that I was doing, more like educational advice. And, and I basically boiled it down to the few things that actually do work and I put them in a book and the reason why, and we'll get into all the nuts and bolts. But the way it happened is just like real estate. There are agents that are buying and selling books. So the agents represent the author. They sell the author to the publisher, the publisher, like they negotiate back and forth. You give the agent a cut of whatever the final deal was. So one of the Mind bodygreen conferences, a long time ago, one of the doctors said, hey, you should meet my agent. And she's looking for some established writers, people who have some kind of platform. So biggest thing I will tell you is long before you want to write a book, whatever topic it is, you need to have a platform. So start today. If you are someone who's like, I want to write a book maybe someday, like five years from, it doesn't matter, you need to have a platform. Literally the only thing they were looking for is how many people on my email list, how many followers do I have. On my various platforms, who am I connected to? Who are my celebrities that I know? Because to them it's a numbers game. And if they can figure out what that would translate into, so they want like an audience that's ready to buy. And if you don't have an audience to show them, they're not going to give you an advance at all.

Do you mind if I ask? Do you mind if I stop you there? Real question, like, what platform do you feel? What platform did you use to kind of show them that you have this platform?

Yeah, so I showed them my Instagram platform, Astingmdash at that time. Right now I have about 116k followers. I think at that time I had about 60 or 80, maybe between 60 and 80k. And I had a pretty good email list. About 18,000 I had because of those mind bodygreen articles and a subsequent website. And then I had a pretty good celebrity connections because of some of the wellness work I was doing. I would get requests from some celebrities to say, hey, can you help me with this product? Or can you help me with this advice? So basically what the agent made me do is list out the celebrities I knew, the people that had any influence, meaning people who have audiences that you know well, that you could tap on if you were going to sell your book. And then the social media audiences all over and email lists. So those were kind of the people, they don't really care, you know. Yeah, you see thousands of patients in your office, they're like, we don't care. Like, they're not going to be the people that necessarily are buying the book unless the book is specifically for those patients.

Okay, so you got together with an agent, they saw your numbers, and then how did you actually translate that and turn that into a contract?

Okay. So she said to me, and this is just rough numbers and this changes all the time. This is just insider info for you guys. She said to me, you really want to be in the six figure mark when it comes to followers in any of your platforms. You want to be close to that or have really great celebrity contacts as physicians. Sometimes we do have people that we've worked with or are friends with or can tap on. I did have a few of those. Namely I had Bobby Brown, who's a big celebrity makeup artist, and she agreed to endorse a book and write a, you know, review. And like she. So I can use her as a big one. I had a few others like that, but she was probably the biggest. And then I. She basically said to me what we're going to do is we're going to give them your platform and then what is it? What is the message that you want to talk about? So usually what you would do without an agent, if you wanted to do it on your own, is you would write a book proposal. And I have written a book proposal, and I've done it the traditional way. I've written a book proposal that you can submit directly to publishers. They don't need you to go through an agent. However, if you submit right through a book proposal, that is a big document, usually like 75 to 100 pages of your work, and you probably had to get an editor to fix it. There's lots of book proposals out there that get rejected, and mine got rejected right off the bat with one of the big publishers, couple of big publishers. And so I knew that the agent probably could help me a little more. So what she did is we're not gonna write a. We're not gonna write a full proposal. We're just gonna present them with you, your ideas and your back, you know, what you can bring to the table, and then we'll talk through the book idea. So that's what we did. And so what we did is we said, hey, here's her platform, here's what people think about her. Here's her celebrity backing. Here is what she could bring to the table. Okay, do you want to talk to her? And then the publisher said, yeah, we'll talk to you. And so we had a few conversations on the phone and they said, what do people come to you for? What are you known for? And that's how we massage kind of the message. And then they came back to me with a deal.

Okay. So for most of us that aren't familiar with that whole book signing world, you mentioned that there are ways to get paid on those books, whether it's on the front end, on the back end. Can you explain a little bit of that for some people?

Yeah, if you go the route that I went, which is a traditional publisher, there's about six major publishers in the U.S. you may get an advance, and what they'll give you is a contract that says your book is. Now you're working with us solely and we're buying the rights to this book. And we will give you an advance. You will give you in thirds, so third after you finish the first draft, a third after you finish the second draft, and the last third when you publish the book. And so for me, that meant I had to use that advance to pay any of the editors or any of the things that I did to make the book the way I wanted it. So that would be out of my pocket. So my time, the editors for if you have recipes or any kind of extra work, or illustrations or graphs or anything like that, that's coming out of your advance, and then they will give you these payments in thirds, the agent takes a cut. And then you have, once a book is published, you have a contract where up till a certain number of books you get a percentage of the sales. And then after you've sold, I'll have to look, but after you sell thousands of books, then you get a larger percentage of your book. So really you're getting that advance. But they're going to get a lot of that back. Because when you sell your books, they're getting a good number, a good percentage of those sales back for them. So they're basically hedging, they're basically betting on you to sell a certain number of books. And if you don't, you don't, you don't have to pay back. But if you do and you outperform that, my agent basically said it puts you in the position to get maybe double, if not triple the advance the next time.

What was the purpose of writing this book for you? I mean, was it mostly financial or were there other reasons why you did that?

So it was not financial. I think a lot of people do know that. Even getting a six figure advance, which was great. I know that I worked really hard on this. However, I do know that if I wrote my second book now, this first book being mildly successful so far and internationally, pretty successful. I know that if I go for my second book deal, I will get maybe three times more than what I got on my first. And then I understand why physicians leave medicine. Because if you're getting 4 or 5 600k to write a book, then it makes sense not to do a lot of clinical time. So I can see how that can move forward. But of course, remember that even a book, so I can't remember the exact number, but 130,000, say you get 150,000, you use a lot of that in 40,000. And a really good editor, you use some of it with illustrations. So there is a little bit of. You don't get all of that back. But I can see that in the future if I write a second and third book, this could be a career path.

I mean, how realistic do you think it is for physicians to be able to produce a book like that? Do you think you're A special case or can anybody figure that out?

They're looking for people with great credentials. I would urge any of you guys that are interested, you need to build a platform first. You can't just go to them and say, hey, I'm Peter Kim, I'm really smart, my patients love me and I want to write a book. They'll be like, okay, well show me, Peter, how much like how badly do people want to see your book? Meaning that where's your audience? Who's your audience? It can't, some people say, like any private groups and stuff you can't really use to show them. You have to have a public forum. So like, you know, if you have a private group on Facebook or if you have a private clinic or whatever, you really can't share that info. Obviously you need to be in a public place, put yourself out there. So you know, and then grow that, and grow that a significant amount so that you can go to them and say, hey, here's my audience, this is my book. You don't have to go that route. You can just self publish. But I'll tell you that there are pros and cons. If I'm writing my second book now, I know how things work, I can definitely consider writing a self published book. But now that I know how this world works, I am actually going to probably go the route of doing this process again and going for that next level.

Okay, so, yeah, so I'm a physician, let's say I'm starting fresh, I'm building my platform. I'm thinking about whether self publishing or going into that. You're saying based on what you know now, you would recommend physicians try to go, at least attempt the traditional route of publishing a book.

Think about it. Depends on what your goals are. Peter, if your goal is to speak, if your goal is to sell product or make course, then a book, a successful book can elevate you to the next level. Right. We all know that most of the people who have successful products, successful courses, successful speaking, you know, contracts, those people have a book or they have some kind of. It's the easiest way to develop a platform for you. So when I now go to speaking bureaus, I can give them all of the media around my book and the speaking things that I did. It's basically if you are interested in those three categories, I would say that doing a book traditional way is the way I would recommend because then you have a chance to be on a bestseller list. You have a chance to go international. You have a chance, meaning international Bestseller list. And so that you can say, I'm an international bestseller, whatever it is. So those are kind of the advantages of going the traditional route. Going the self published route is faster. This process, this took over two years. Okay, because it was my first book. They usually publish things two years out after you've gotten an acceptance, because with new authors especially, they want to give them enough time to do first draft, second drafts, reviews, all that stuff. And so it's not the fastest way. If you really want to write a book fast, you probably want to self publish it. But as you know, you guys all know that publishing world is extremely competitive. And to have a big publisher on your side with a team, with a publicist, with a marketing person who's going to do Facebook ads for you, who's going to Target bookstores for you can be an advantage.

That's so cool. I mean, again, I've watched your whole journey. I've watched you build your platform. It looks like you've leveraged that now to write a book and do all these type of things. What part of this do you enjoy the most?

Honestly, I think I really, even though it was exhausting this week, I really enjoyed speaking to different people about stuff I feel passionate about. I do think I'm going to go either the speaking or the product, maybe the course route, like at least one or two of those three things. And so for me, this was a fun way to kind of get those opportunities because I do want to do more of that. If you are someone who, and I'm not saying I want to leave medicine, because I really don't, I still want to. Most of a couple of the doctors I've talked to, there's Will Bolsheviks, the Gut health md. He was one of the people I talked to because he still has a GI clinical practice, even after his book. And I think I'll be the same for many years because I like my practice, I like my patients, but I love having this other side of my career.

All right, well, now that you know what you know, you've told us all these great tips, but let's say somebody wants to start on this journey. Like again, what were some of the things that you wish you knew at the beginning of this that you know now?

I wasted a lot of time. I wasted time thinking I should write a full, like a full proposal. And that takes a lot of time. And I wish that I worked it backwards like I did eventually. I wish I went to the publisher with my ideas and let them kind of reject them right there. And not wait till I wrote a huge proposal. Because what they want, and I'll tell you a secret, and I guess it's obvious to me now, but it was a secret to me then, is that they want something that is novel, counterintuitive, fresh. And, you know, in medicine, things that are real, because we are doctors, right? We don't want to be selling, like, snake oil, right? Things that are real don't feel fresh and new and different to them. They are like, well, I've heard about eating more vegetables. I've heard about blah, blah, blah. So you really have to come to them with a different twist or a different look. And it's really hard because if you're doing something legit, legitimate work, often to them it looks like, well, that's been done before. So remember that. Remember when you're pitching it to them that they've seen everything. They've heard everything. They have rejected many people. They have seen all the books in your category. They'll pick something that is new, that is fresh, counterintuitive. They love counterintuitive. That's why in the health space, it's, like, infuriating how many books are written by people who are saying completely things that are completely off the wall. Because that's what sells. They know what sells. They don't care what's right or wrong. They want your opinion. They're like, what's your opinion? And make a case for it, and we can make you a book.

All right. Well, your book is titled I'm so Effing Tired. Like, why? I mean, you must have done something special to create that reason why you put that title kind of on the back of what you were talking about. Why did you create that title? Why'd you choose that?

Okay, this is a great question. Because there was a ton of time and energy that me, the publisher, the agent, and the sales team of the publishers spent on creating the title. Because they know that for most books, titles sell. They know that people often will pick up a book based on the look of the book or the title of the book, which, you know, was surprising to me because I read, but I usually don't. That's not how I do it. But they say in mass market that's how that happens. So there was a ton of research. They sent out their internal. There was like, all these different choices. And then it went from effing, like, it went from the actual word. F, U, C, K, I, N, G with a star. Like the.

I've seen those.

That's like Subtle art of not giving. You know, like that one. And then it went from that to like F with the underscore. Then it went to F. Why am I so effing tired? So it changed a lot. And the reason they picked effing instead of the F with the star is because that book was blacklisted on a lot of different sites. And Amazon even said they wouldn't let them do ads or Target because of the words. And so they. That was, that was kind of how they massaged the title. But remember, it's all about sales and psychology and what they think that people will pick up in a bookstore, at an airport or like at Barnes and Nobles. It's very traditional, right? Really old school thinking. They're really thinking not of Amazon. They're thinking of the old traditional bookstores, airports, indie shops, where people actually walk in a bookstore, they look at the shelf and they pick a book. And so think about all of that when you're going to a publisher. Think about how they think. They're thinking only sales. They're thinking what's going to get them the most sales, the most bang for their buck.

All right, so let people know. How do you, after having done this, after having published your book, after having gone through this process, like, how does it make you feel?

You know, I think, okay, I'll tell you, it's a big accomplishment. Somebody told me a long time ago at a conference, she said, you need to write a book. The book is your business card. You know, whether you want to or not, it doesn't matter. You need to write it. Because in order to do the things that you want to do, which I outlined for you before the speaking, the products, the coursework, you have to. She's like, that is your ticket to getting a bigger platform on those, in those arenas. And so I said, sure. Then throughout the writing process, it was grueling. And throughout the marketing process for the first week has been growing, the media process has been grueling. But honestly, it's like a fun work. It's like going on a show for me in Zoom, in my home, because it's 2021 is not that hard. I keep telling myself, like, this is fun. This is not hard work. I get to talk to my friends, I get to talk to people all over the world. I mean, it's not. It's work. It's grueling, but it feels really satisfying, really cool to be able to do things like that. I was sharing with you before we started that next week is Australia. Australia launch and to be able to go on Australia's. If they have a sunrise that's like their Today show, then I'm going to go on extra tv. Then I'm going to go on ABC News Sydney. I mean, these are opportunities that we may never have in our lives. Right? So I'm going to soak that up.

Well, I mean, congratulations on all your success. I mean, again, every time I talk to you, you're doing some other cool thing.

Same with you.

You're always open to sharing it with people. So I love it. Let people know where they can actually. I mean, meaning, it sounds like it's all over the place, but where can people find your book and find out more about you?

It's. I'm so effingtired.com and I'm @fastingmd on Instagram and I'm amyshawmd on Twitter and Facebook.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much again. I do this at the end of every summit interview, but I gotta do it again. What's the number one tip you have for someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?

Wow. Just do it. Don't be scared. I think a lot of us fear the naysayer. I'm like a pro at the naysayers now. The more you get out there and the more naysayers you have, the better it feels. So go for it.

That reminds me of this David Goggins quote. It's a motivational guy that says, like, yeah, don't kill him with kindness, but torture them with success. So, like, that's exactly what you're doing, kind of getting back and just crushing it.

Don't you agree? I mean, it's like, you can't. Please. They're gonna. They're gonna hate you whether you do it or not. So you might as well just do it.

Yeah. Okay. Well, congratulations. I mean, thanks for. I know people will love it. I'm sure. You know, Amy's been great. I'm sure people can reach out to you. And I really recommend everyone check out her book. It's actually a really fun read. We have actually have it downstairs in our kitchen, so.

Can't wait to see the summit this Monday. I'm excited. I know everybody is excited.

All right. I know. It's awesome. Well, thanks so much.

Thank you, Peter. Take care.

Take care.

Bye, guys.

Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Are you a part of our community yet? Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. You can join us on our Facebook group PassiveIncome Docs, and you can always learn more at our website passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.