Forget Amazon. This 30-Day Method Gets Your Book in the Right Hands

Welcome everyone to this free workshop, From Book Idea to Launch in 30 Days. You are in the right— or you are here because you signed up and indeed have showed up for this presentation. You're in the right place if you would like to get some insight into how I successfully launched a book without any legacy social media, without Amazon, without ads, or without a very big list. Uh, what What you should do next is probably make sure that you have something to write with and take a few notes on. You can also prepare any questions that you want to ask during the Q&A portion. When we are all done, this recording will take an hour or so to process. When it's ready, I will share a link to the, to the replay. I'll share my presentation notes, and if there are any links that I reference along the way, I'll be sure to share those as well. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into it. So as a lot of you know, I launched my most recent book, which is titled Intrepid: Dare to Make a Difference. And I did this without any social media. I did it for the first time without launching it on Amazon KDP. I did it without any ads, which is something I've leveraged to pretty good effect in the past. And I have a subscriber list that is at the— was at the time just a little over 1,000 subscribers. So today what I'm going to do is show you why this launch was successful, even though I did not launch it in the way that I had proven, uh, to myself over and over again. And I'm going to show you the philosophy and the principles behind it. Those of you that are familiar with the Clarity Hierarchy know what I'm referencing there. And, uh, this is not necessarily a step-by-step tutorial. That will come next week when we gather in the Circle and Inner Circle community of subscribers to go into a much more detailed discussion of the tactics and the tools and the strategy for how I wrote and launched a book in 2 weeks without abdicating my integrity and my creativity to AI or Amazon. Um, so Circle members are the people that are subscribed to the Substack as annual or monthly subscribers. Inner Circle are the founding level of subscribers, if you are not familiar with those tiers. The first thing, and this is the most important thing, is that I did not start this whole journey in writing and launching Intrepid with tools or tactics. I started with two fundamental questions that really changed everything and informed and inspired the entire process. And that question— those questions were not, how do I sell the book? But instead, the questions were, What idea is this book delivering and who needs to hear it? And before I show you how I promoted the book by answering these questions, I need to show you how I thought about the book, because the promotion strategy was baked into the book's design from the very beginning. So let's begin by talking a little bit about what a book that matters actually is. So the philosophy question is, what do I believe? What do I believe to be true? What do I believe? And the question that I was asking myself about the book is, what is a book really? Most of the time folks look at their book or writing a book as the book as product. Uh, for me, the book is not a product. It's a delivery system for a story, an idea, or a change worth spreading. And while most people do look at a book launch like a product launch, I where they will build it, then figure out how to sell it. And that's the great trap of writing a book. A lot of folks hear gurus saying you have to write a book. It's authority building, it's your business card and all these other things. What they don't tell you is that writing a book is really, really frickin' hard, even if it's a short book like Intrepid. And by the time you have exhausted yourself or by the time you finish writing the book, You have exhausted yourself. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. And when you're— after you finish writing the book, you just feel like you finished a marathon. And then someone walks you to the starting line of the next marathon, which is how do you market and promote the book? I treated Intrepid as not a book, writing a book or launching a book, but as creating an idea and launching the idea. And so I defined an idea worth spreading. Then I designed the book as the package packaging as the way to carry that idea into the world. What was Intrepid's big idea? The idea at the center of Intrepid was very simple: you don't have a motivation problem, you have a commitment problem. That the gap between caring and committing is where the difference only you can make often goes to die. So for people that are in this room that are part of the Circle or Inner Circle community, I know you to identify in part, at least, as purpose-driven people that want to do meaningful work, that want to have an impact. We often refer to ourselves as difference makers. And for most of us, the gap between where we are and where we want to be with that difference that only we can make is significant. That's a gap that we have to define and then try to close. And motivation, willpower is not going to get you across that chasm. It's not going to build the bridge that you need to get to build from where you are to where you want to be. You have to have a way of defining the goal and committing to the practice that will get you from I have a great idea to I have, or to delivering that idea to the people whose lives would be enhanced if they were able to collide with it. So you don't have a motivation problem, you have a commitment problem. That's the idea virus that I was trying to, to share. It's short, it's compelling, it's sticky. The moment someone hears it, they either recognize themselves as resonating with that idea or they don't. If they don't, that's great. They can move on to whatever idea they need to collide with to help motivate them or, or give them the insight or inspiration they need to pursue their goals. But if they do, they can't unsee it. And so for those of you that have been following along with all the lives I've been doing on Substack, you have seen at least half a dozen, maybe 8 or 9 even, of the folks that are interviewing me talk about how this idea of not having a motivation problem but having a commitment problem has really resonated. So I've identified an idea that was resonant, that was sticky, that was compelling, that was easily spreadable. And what I did was I used Seth Godin's idea virus framework. Some of you here know me from my time as a head coach and coach in Seth Godin's Akimbo workshops. I've been following Seth's work for a long time. I've worked with them both as an Akimbo coach and an alternate, uh, Alta MBA coach, but also on some other prob— projects like the goodbids.org project. And I spend a lot of time reading and rereading Seth's work. And the Idea Virus framework is one that we've talked about quite a few times in the Circle and Inner Circle community, because it helps you identify and pressure test an idea before you create a single piece of content, whether that's a, a social media post or a, a PDF or checklist or guide or something like that, or even just something like a book. So if you want to explore the Idea Virus framework, Seth has a free condensed audiobook edition of Unleash the Idea Virus available online. Just go to Seth's blog and put in Idea Virus and you'll find the, the audiobook. He also has a physical book called Unleash the Idea Virus. I think it's the I think it might have been the first book he wrote after his, his time as a book packager. I think it was a book, first book that he wrote that became part of his whole 21 bestseller journey on the New York Times and various other bestseller lists. So Unleash the Idea Virus, I think, precedes Permission Marketing. But those two works are two of his seminal works that are worth checking out. If you are in the circle or the inner circle, there is a full workshop replay of how to create your own idea virus, a little, little one-line, two-line manifesto of the idea that you're trying to spread, the difference that you're trying to make. That includes a worksheet and a custom GPT that you can use to walk through the process. Instead of taking 10 hours to try to do it using Seth's book, you can do it in about 10 minutes with the worksheet and the GPT. So once you have the idea, once you have clarity of the idea that you're trying to put forth in the world and trying to connect with the right people, the people whose lives would be enhanced by colliding with it, you need to answer 3 questions that will define everything else: the writing, the structure, and the promotion. And for those of you that know me through my time coaching the marketing seminar, you probably know what's coming up here. We are talking about Seth Godin's marketing trifecta. If you're not familiar with the marketing seminar, the marketing trifecta, Seth put it all in a book called This Is Marketing. And the marketing trifecta, as the name implies, is just 3 questions. And I'm going to teach the entire framework another time. There's already a workshop that's published and available. For those of you that are free subscribers, all of these workshops have extended previews that you can check out. Uh, what I want to do here is just show you how answering these 3 questions informed and inspired Intrepid Success as a book and through the book launch. The 3 questions and what they gave me. The first question is, what change am I trying to make? This is not what the book is about. It's the transformation on offer for anyone that collides with and engages with the ideas inside the book. So for Intrepid, I did not say I write about purpose. Purpose would be just a topic that I'm writing about. The transformation on offer is moving someone from a frustrated but well-intentioned difference maker to becoming a committed practitioner who ships meaningful work. That's the before and the after. That's the change. The second question in the marketing trifecta is, who am I trying to change? And the who needs to be specific. You're not trying to change everyone. You're trying to change specific someones. And I'm not talking here about ideal customer avatars. I'm not talking about digital marketing BS around trying to create a little AI image and give them a name and post all their demographics and all their psychographics. That's all stuff you can do. It's stuff that I've done in the past that has actually been able to work, but it's a lot of effort to create this fictional persona and dial it into the point where you're actually generating content that resonates with the kind of person that rhymes with that persona. For Intrepid, I was writing for people who feel the tension of untapped potential. They feel called to make an impact. They're allergic to the performative hustle that they see on social media, and they're tired of borrowed formulas, blueprints, roadmaps, etc. The people that I'm writing for are people who care deeply but haven't converted that caring into committed action. The third question is, what promise am I making? This is not hype. This is not a power offer. This is not a no-brainer offer. I'm not saying, hey, you can earn $10,000 a month in less than 30 days or double your money back. I am offering honest results that I know that I can deliver. For Intrepid, my promise was if you answer the 27 questions, it's actually one question. Do you care enough to commit? It asks 27 different ways. If you answer the questions, what I am promising readers is that they will have sharper self-trust, clear commitment, and a practical path. And by picking a meaningful goal, building a purposeful practice, and keeping the promise even when it's hard themselves, they will be able to close the gap between where they are and where they want to be as Purpose-Driven Difference Makers. No magic, no hacks, no blueprint checklist, no framework adopting of some— somebody else's framework necessary. You can do this. My promise is you can make the difference only you can make in the way only you can make it by actually playing your game on your terms without compromise. The payoff from answering the marketing trifecta questions is before I wrote a single word of the book, I already knew exactly what the change the book was going to promise, the people who it was written for, and articulated the specific promise that I was making to those people. And that clarity didn't just shape the writing of the book, it shaped the entire promotional path and all the promotional decisions that followed. So here's how you can apply all of this to your project, whether that's a book project or maybe it's just a little handbook like the one I wrote. Maybe it's something even smaller. Seth has discussed the marketing trifecta, has discussed the marketing trifecta in the marketing seminar. And This Is Marketing. There's a free preview of the workshop around the marketing trifecta that we discussed in the Circle and Inner Circle community for subscribers. Circle and Inner Circle members get the entire workshop. Along with the worksheets, along with a GPT prompt to put in the Cornerman app. Again, you can walk through the marketing trifecta questions for your own writing project in under 10 minutes if you are a Circle or Inner Circle member. If you're a free subscriber, you can go, uh, get Seth's book and work through this stuff on your own. So how did I turn the clarity that I just found through the marketing trifecta and through my idea virus into a launch strategy without any social media, without without Amazon and without ads and a list of only 1,000 people. The, the permission asset is the strategy. The list that I had was my entire strategy. Again, what do I believe? What's the philosophy behind all of this? Seth Godin writes about this in Permission Marketing. A permission asset is a group of people who have raised their hand and said yes I want to hear from you. I give you— I trust you enough to give you permission to deliver anticipated, relevant, and personal messages to me. And that's— this has nothing to do with your impressions on social media. This has nothing to do with the follower count that you have on Substack. This is trust earned over time through kept promises. With people who are opening the emails that you send for your newsletter, for your Substack publication, or maybe it's just from, uh, through marketing emails. My permission asset was 1,000 subscribers, which is not a very big number, but these are the people who have opted in, opened my emails, and who already have familiarity with and a relationship with my ideas and the way that I show up and do my thing. And so it's not really— I don't think of it as a small list as much as it is a mobilized list of people that are eager to hear from me and interested in the ideas that I have to share. The principle that I'm using here, the thing that I know to be true, is that you don't just use your own permission asset, you borrow the permission asset of other people. And this is the part that I see a lot of folks miss— I see some of the folks on the call who I have worked with or am working with miss this opportunity— is that you can ethically and generously and with integrity tap into the permission asset of other people if you structure it as a mutual benefit and not as a favor that you're asking. So I do this in two ways. The first is I partnered with a bunch of Substack influencers. You have seen some of these broadcasts already. David McElroy, one of the biggest names on Substack. Claudia Faith, who has something like 35,000 subscribers. I have one coming up with Karen Salmonson. I was mentioned in Veronica Lorca Smith's publication where She shared my book as a book that she was reading. I partnered with all of these influencers in a very simple, repeatable live format. I, I asked them if they would be interested in having hosting me on a 20-minute broadcast where I would provide them with a list of questions and they could choose 3 of those questions to ask me to share a little bit about the book. They didn't have to prepare anything.. I gave them a quick overview of the book if they didn't have time to read it. I made sure that I only reached out to people whose work I had promoted already. And when they went live, they brought their audience to me and I brought my audience to them. Their audience in these cases was much larger than mine. And we had this very specific, bounded, and mutual beneficial live exchange where I was able to tap into networks that were much larger than my own. The second asset that I built was a launch team, and I called it Team Intrepid. And the team's primary action was simply restacking some of the notes and some of the posts that were promoting the book after it was published. I was not asking them for likes. I was not asking them for comments. I was asking them for restacks because that's what Substack explicitly rewards and distributes those, uh, restacks into the note feeds of other people. And so my little team of dozens became a distribution network that again tapped into the network effect of tapping into other people's distribution network. So how can you apply this? Well, if you apply the idea virus approach, if you have an idea that's compelling sticky and worth spreading, and that makes it not just easy for other people to, to spread, but makes it worth their time and worth their effort if it enhances their reputation to spread your idea. And you couple that with the Marketing Trifecta questions and your permission asset, you can leverage all of that to validate your book idea, to build a street team, and to connect with other influencers in the spread that will help you get the word out about the work that you're launching or the work that you're thinking about launching or the, the work that you're in the process of launching. The fundamental question for you to answer here is what's in it for them? I made sure that I explicitly in my ask made sure that it was very clear that there was value for the folks that I was asking to take the 20 minutes to host me on a call. And for a lot of those folks, in fact for all of them, it was because I had already hosted them on my broadcast. I had already made my network and my audience aware of their work. They're people that I follow on Notes and follow on Substack and comment and, and so forth. Um, this was a way of they could provide a little reciprocity. But they also knew that by going live with me, there was a lot of energy behind the launch, and I was going to bring my audience into their world so that they could connect at a deeper level, at a deeper level of proximity and access to those influencers. But here's the thing. I didn't just say, help me spread the word, because that actually produces nothing. I structured the whole launch around a principle that made it work. And that was this idea of mobilizing the smallest viable audience and doing this in a way that was tiered. So the principle, the thing that I know to be true is that not everyone wants the same level of involvement. And that's not a bug in the system. That's actually a feature of the system. So I built 3 tiers within my quote unquote street team, uh, and each provided kind of the right-sized ask and the right-sized reward for their participation. The first was the Founding Fellowship. I see some of them here. MJ and Sandra and Penny are currently on my screen. They all participated in the Founding Fellowship. This was like the inner ring, the, the, the followers and subscribers and clients and community members that had the greatest exposure, proximity, and access to me. They all got to read the first draft of the book. And in exchange for just providing a 9-word blurb that I could put into the foreword, and they committed to a specific number of restacks during the launch window. It was actually just, I think I asked them to restack 3, notes and/or posts. And in return, they got early access to everything. They got the audiobook before anybody else did. They got the ebook before anybody else did. I also included them in the foreword. I provided them with copies of the book when the paperback was available, and we had 3 exclusive coaching calls just with members of the Founding Fellowship. So these people were all inside the story before the book was actually even finished. And launched. The second tier was paid subscribers that didn't want to commit to everything that the Founding Fellowship was committing to. But these were Circle and Inner Circle members who committed to restacking a couple of posts during the launch window in exchange for early access to the ebook and the audiobook. And they had access to the launch chat that we had going in the subscriber chat. As well as they were invited to attend the coaching calls, although participation was limited to the Founding Fellowship members. So it was the same structure as the Founding Fellowship with just a lighter level of commitment and just a lighter level of access. And then the final piece was the free subscribers who got the introduction and part one of the book early, and the only thing they had to do was restack with OneNote during the launch window. So it was a very low barrier, which just provided me with a little bit wider reach. So the principle here is the specificity, specificity is the engine of action. Every ask was bounded. It had a clear boundary, clear boundaries and guardrails. It was all happened within a specific date timeline, a time horizon, and it was purposely made to be very doable. I wasn't just saying, hey, tell all your friends about my book. I said, hey, if you post 2 restacks with a note between March 6th and March 20th, here are the rewards that you're going to get. And the people that— what I found is that people will follow through on a specific commitment rather than just drift on a vague one. The other principle is that assets prevent vagueness. So I Some of you saw the notes that had little blurbs, little quote, quote images, and that those were easily swiped. And I also included notes, text that they could add to those. And without those, even your most enthusiastic supporters will just default to kind of bland, vague, hey, that's a great book, check it out type of comments. If you give, give them some scripts or templates that they can follow, they're going to post more meaningful comments and be more, more likely to actually share the content and do so with a little bit more enthusiasm. So that's the philosophy and principles behind the launch. And let me give you the shape of the strategy now just to see how the pieces all fit together, and then we'll get to the Q&A. So this is the architecture of the strategy. The launch was not just a day. The book was released on March 20th. It was the vernal equinox. But what I did was I created 4 weeks ahead of the publication day and 4 weeks after the publication day. So it ran from late February through early April, and I broke it into 4 phases. Phase 1, this was when I was still drafting the book. I built the team that I was going to rely on to validate the book idea and also promote the book by creating the Founding Fellowship. I recruited the members, I collected the blurbs, I launched the, the chat and opened it up for those folks. Then in phase 2, I equipped the team with early access to the book. Early access to the audiobook, gave them the quote images that they could share, held the lives that they booked, the live broadcast with the influencers and members of the community and with my clients. Phase 3 was the actual launch window, the 2 weeks of coordinated restacks, lives with the influencers and team members, and the daily notes. And then phase 4 was the day, the days after the publication, which involved one final ask, which was basically just help me find the others. And that's when the team restacked a final note about the publication of the book. I shared the testimonials, I shared live clips from all the lives that I had done on notes. The key insight here is that every phase was built from the same logic. Give people a clear role, make a clear ask, and give them a clear reward. The promotion didn't feel like a promotion because it wasn't. It was an invitation to participate and contribute to spreading an idea that was worth spreading. So the principle here is that the platform is the strategy. I didn't fight Substack's scaffolding or architecture. I leveraged it. I use free posts to build trust. I use the paid tier to deepen the relationship. I use the that to create community and culture. I use Notes as a distribution network. I use Restacks as the leverage and Lives as the catalyst or the accelerator. And the book was the bridge linking all of those pieces of the Substack architecture together. So I know some of you are thinking, that's great for the launch, but what about the book? How did you actually write it? That's what's coming next. So A week from today, I'm going to host another workshop for Circle and Inner Circle members where we will talk about how you can actually create your idea and your launch strategy in as little as 2 weeks. Just for transparency's sake, I actually— for those that don't know the backstory, The whole reason I wrote this book is because my daughter-in-law— well, for those that don't know, my whole business is organized around being full-time daycare to my grandsons. So my wife and I take care of our grandkids 5 days a week, about 9 hours a day. And in order to do that, I have designed my business so that I can work for 2 hours in the morning before they get here from 5 to 7 AM and put in a little bit of time in the afternoons while my wife and I juggle the kids back and forth. And during 2 weeks over the winter, we didn't have school because of the snow. And so there was a 2-week period where we didn't have the grandkids coming over. And I literally was losing my mind because I was I was so bored because I had nothing to do. So I decided to make good on a promise I had made myself several years ago, which was to write the third part of a trilogy that began with my books Endeavor and Onward. And I literally came up with the idea, shared the idea, started building the team, validated the idea, started writing by creating a basic architecture. We'll talk about all of this in the next workshop. You created the idea virus that I wanted to get across through the book, answered the marketing trifecta questions. I'll show you how I completed that whole process in very little time, how I used a GPT to help me refine the architecture of the book, just create the scaffolding, and then it over the period of 2 weeks. I wrote for an hour and a half, 2 hours a day, finished a 100-page book in less than 2 weeks. So we'll talk about all of that next time. But just to give you a little bit of the highlights, here's what I believe most purpose-driven solopreneurs get wrong about writing a book. They think that they need to start writing, and that's actually not a good idea. You have been— if you are on this call and I'm just looking at the folks that I can see, you all have been writing a book for years, whether you know it or not. You have been doing what you do and becoming the very best in the world at doing what you do in the way only you can do it for a very long time. And so every framework you've developed, every client you've ever coached, every post you've ever published, every conversation where you explained your process, That's a book. It's already in your head. And the problem isn't writing it, it's creating the scaffolding. And then I'm very fond of saying, because I've written several books very fast, most of my books have been written in under 30 days. It's like, I don't write a book in under 30 days. I've been writing a book for 62 years. I type a book in 30 days. So I use the Idea Virus framework. I use the Marketing Trifecta to define the book's intent. In just a few days that I used Claude AI not to write for me, but to create the architecture and the scaffolding of the book, create the three-part arc. I helped it refine and create the 27 questions, and then I simply wrote a short, essentially blog post for each of those 27 questions. And that gave me 3 sections, 9 chapters per section. And all of that made the book feel like I was simply typing out things that I already knew, that I had already organized in a way that I knew made sense and would land. So that's all in the next workshop. And if you're a Circle or Inner Circle subscriber, you will be able to access that and access the replay. It's called How to Write a Book in 2 to 4 Weeks Without Abdicating Your Creativity or Integrity to AI. Or Amazon, and I'll show you how to build the full tactical promotional playbook and create all the tiers and the share kit and the launch calendar, the lives and the whole thing in the next section. So let's go ahead and wrap this up and get to the Q&A. Here's what we covered. A book is a delivery system for an idea worth spreading, not a product to sell. Clarity comes before tactics. The Idea Virus framework and the Marketing Trifecta gave me the change, the people, and the promise before I wrote a single word. Your permission asset is your strategy. A small mobilized audience beats a large passive audience anytime. Creating tiered commitments, specific acts, asks, and real assets turn supporters into a distribution network. The platform isn't the strategy. The strategy is make a meaningful change for specific people through a kept promise. If you want to go further, if today gave you any clarity, the frameworks that I referenced, the Idea Virus and the Marketing Trifecta, are already available. Free subscribers can watch the extended previews. Paid subscribers can access the full workshops plus the worksheets and GPTs. I'll share those when I share the replay. I would start there. And I just want to interject here something that I'll cover in more detail next time. But don't get too attached to what you think a book is. For those of you that have been paying attention to my notes and to the subscriber chat over the last few days, you've seen that I've been— now that I've kind of got The Intrepid already out there, launched to the world, I'm going back through some older IP. The Art of Encore Living is a book that is exactly 38 pages, and I am releveraging that work. And then just the past few days, I have added 30 free subscribers and 3 paid subscribers just by repurposing a book that shares 9 ideas over 38 pages. That's a book. My very first book was a 3-page pamphlet that I launched on Amazon. I know some of you have it. Penny, I can see you here. I know you have it. It's called Isn't That Interesting? And it's just basically a way of how to, how to overcome fear, how to overcome anxiety, how to embrace possibility and step into your potential through asking a very simple question that has 3 parts to it. A 3-page exercise that makes a meaningful change for a specific kind of person and delivers on a promise like overcome your Your Anxiety in Less Than 3 Minutes is a book. It's an idea worth spreading. It's an idea worth sharing. It's an idea that will enhance the lives of the people that collide with it. So don't get all hung up in, well, this all sounds great, Scott Perry, but I can't write a 100-page book or a 300-page book or whatever it is. You can start very, very small. You could literally start with a 3-page document. Uh, I think I've already covered the rest of the things that are here. If you want the full workshop replays, those are available in the Circle, uh, for, for Circle subscribers. Free subscribers can access the, the extended previews. The worksheets, the GPTs are in the inner Circle vault. They will also be released to the Circle next week when we have the workshop, uh, and that's where the principles and tools will be available that you can use to Launch your first 3-page book, 30-page book, 300-page book. And if you want to do the deep dive on how I wrote the book in weeks and how I built a promotion playbook piece by piece and how you can do the same, that's next week. Same bat time, same bat channel for Circle and Inner Circle subscribers. And here's the final question that I want to leave you all with. It's the same one that I asked in Intrepid. Do you care enough to commit? You don't have a motivation problem, you have a commitment problem. And it is literally as simple as making the decision and acting on the decision that you care enough to commit. And with that, I'm going to stop the screen share. So I did— I came in at 40 minutes, so I, I'm counting that as a victory. And in Scott time, that's actually less than 30 minutes. So there you go. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. So I'm free for about the next 25, 30 minutes if anybody wants to ask any questions or make any comments or share a bad joke, or it's a good-looking bunch. Sit here and stare at each other. You're welcome.

Is that Shannon? Yeah, it's awesome information.

You're very welcome. So are you gonna rethink your book, Shannon, and make it just 3 pages long?

Well, actually, I mean, you, you say that as a joke, but I've got little Post-its because, um, it's a book about traveling to Scotland, but I could make a smaller one just about making your travel to Scotland sacred. And my brain is firing off lots of Well, here's the thing, that that could come out exactly.

So, you know, one of the things I know from our conversations in the circle and inner circle, Shannon, is that, you know, you've been, you've been struggling with developing your practice. How do I sit down and get, get my pages done day after day? So for those that aren't following Shannon, she is, uh, writing. She, she, she's writing about goddess heritage.

I don't know, what am I writing?

But it's, it's really fascinating stuff. And she, uh, I mean, it's, it's just fun to follow her on Notes and so forth, but I'm actually reading her Substack as well. But for those of you that are wanting to create a longer, more extensive, extended book, uh, or project. Doing those little projects like you just were sharing, Shannon, like creating a one-page or three-page— here's how, you know, 10 things you need to see when you visit Scotland, or here's 3 reasons why you should book a trip to Scotland in 2026. Like, you can start to think about those kind of things, and they become big-time levers in terms of getting people interested in your book before you even publish your book. And so, and the other thing is, and this has happened to me many times, is I start sharing the content that I think is going to be the book that I want to write. And then I start getting feedback from my subscribers. And they basically tell me that they want me to write a very different book.. And then I can make a decision. Do I want to write the book that I want to write even though nobody wants to read it? Or do I do a little shift? Do I make a little pivot and write the thing that people are already asking me for? And I will tell you that if you think that, you know, I'm an artist and I only do what I want and take it or leave it, that's fine. I'm You know, art for art's sake is, is a beautiful thing. But if you're worried about, um, feeling rewarded and motivated by writing something that somebody else is asking for, uh, when, when you start making money giving people what they actually want, uh, suddenly it becomes something that you become increasingly purposeful and passionate about. So just throwing that out there.

So, Scott Perry, um, can you talk a little bit about your experience with Lulu, or is that for another conversation?

Oh no, that's fine. No, I'm happy to. So a big part of my positioning for the last year has been my journey getting off of social media. Going all in on Substack. Uh, I recently, about a month ago, I read a book by Cory Doctorow called Enchidification, which talked about all the ways that Amazon has become evil. Um, and even though I have had real success launching books on Amazon and leveraging social media and leveraging ads on social media, you know, like a lot of folks, I'm just tired of Amazon's BS. I can't even watch a— I can't even— even though I pay for the privilege, I can't even watch a movie without getting 6 ads in the middle of it. So I decided that with this book, I would just try as an experiment, can I do this without launching on Amazon? To be transparent, if you haven't noticed, I've quiet I also released it on Amazon. There's strategic reasons for that. Amazon still provides a portal into my world, and there are readers of mine that prefer Amazon and ordering on Amazon or using the Kindle. But the, the goal for the launch was, if I launch the book without Amazon, can I meet or beat my Amazon launch numbers. My best-selling title ever on Amazon, and I've released several bestsellers on Amazon. Here's the dirty little secret. They've all sold about 100 copies on publication day. It doesn't take that many units sold to get a bestseller badge from Amazon. So 100 was the number I needed to beat. Lulu provides the print-on-demand feature that Amazon Publishing also makes available. It provides— you do have to have your own, um, what is it called, ISBN number, or you can also publish without it. I chose to publish on Lulu without it. Um, their turnaround time was just as fast. The quality of the book is just as good, and they're— the, the percentage that you make per book is on a $15 book about a dollar and a half more than I'm going to earn on Amazon. So I couldn't be more happy with Lulu delivering on all the things that I wanted. What it does not do nearly as well as Amazon is promote the book, you know, through even through organic means. Like when I publish on Amazon, I always show up next to Seth Godin or Michael Bungay Stanier or the other people that are, you know, whose universe I hope I am rhyming with. And I don't have— there's no access to like Amazon ads or anything like it with Lulu.. But, you know, by and large, I mean, I certainly have no complaints when it comes to having used Lulu. I would highly recommend them with the caveat that you are giving up some marketing and promotional features.

And the size of the universe as well. Exactly. But I was really impressed with Lulu's site. It's very clear. I was impressed with the look of your book, the production. The paper is really good. I don't know if you use the 60-pound or the 80-pound or—

I think it was a 60-pound. Basically all of my books, I go for a glossy cover and I go for the step right below the, the highest end when it comes to, uh, paper quality. And I use non— I don't know what it's called— the, the non-glossy paper for the interior.

Uncoated.

Yeah, uncoated. Thank you.

Yeah. Um, could you— just one more question about this— could, could you set your price, or do they formulate it?

You set your price.

Okay. All right.

And that's actually a good question, Judy, because it is a question that comes up quite often. I've played a lot with pricing over a number of books. I'll honestly tell you that for me, uh, you know, $15 for a $100 paperback is on the higher end Yeah, um, I also include a link that gets you the ebook and the audiobook, um, so I feel like the price is justified. I also— and this is true for pricing whether it's a product or a service— people are not buying the, the, the packaging, and they're not even purchasing the information. They are purchasing the transformation that they want to experience.

Yeah.

Which is why I go for books that are 100 or less pages, because people will actually read it, and if they engage with it and activate it, they will actually experience the, the change. Um, and I think on onward, I I priced it at $10, sold 100 units. With Intrepid, I priced it at $15, and I sold a little, a little over 100. I think it was like 112, 113 units on publication day. So, and, you know, I make, I think I make $8.50 per book on Lulu. I'll make $7 or so on Amazon. Um, the, the just, you're not gonna like, don't count on your book income to actually make a significant dent in your revenue goals. I always, I joke that, you know, I sell enough books every month to take my wife out to dinner. On some months we go to McDonald's and on some months we go to an Italian restaurant with white linen tablecloths and napkins. I mean, it's, you know, it's But in terms of selling the backend offers, I have seen a dramatic uptick in subscribers' interest in the paid subscriber community. And I, I have 3 conversations ongoing with people that are new to me that are interested in one of the coaching programs. And that's the real benefit because the lifetime value of someone that purchases a coaching offer from me is somewhere in the neighborhood of, um, $3,000 or $4,000. I'm happy to give away $15 knowing that I have a chance that someone is going to over time invest, you know.

As you know, I'm an editor, so I'm always scouting for my clients, and I think Lulu looks good also for people who are doing illustrated books. Oh yeah, yeah. The higher quality production, which I think is impressive. I have one more question on Amazon. First of all, it's a really good deal that you're offering the book and the audio and the digital edition. For the $14.99 amount. Are you, are you doing the same on Amazon or can you only sell one thing at a time on Amazon?

Amazon, if you are in the KDP Select or something like that, you are committing to only sell on Amazon.

I do not.

I didn't check that box when I launched Intrepid on Amazon and I'm not using Amazon Audio. Um, I did use, uh, whatever the, the services— it's the same one that Seth Godin used, 11— 11 something— 11 Labs. 11 Labs. I used 11 Labs to create the audiobook, um, mostly because I had to expedite the audio. Writing a book is really hard for me. Narrating a book is really hard. It's 10 times as hard as writing. When I provided the, uh, the audiobook for Onward, it— I literally thought it was going to kill me. I will eventually do my own audiobook narration for Intrepid, but, um, and just to get it all out and not create— not give myself a heart attack, I just went ahead and used ElevenLabs. Um, KDP now offers a feature where they have a narration service that will, um, create, you know, use AI to create an audiobook edition if you want to do that. Um, so yeah, uh, and I know of at least two folks that have done coloring books using Lulu, and they are thrilled. I have one friend that has created a journal on Lulu, and they are thrilled as well. Okay, uh, Juliette— yeah, you're very welcome. Good to have you here, Judy. Uh, Juliette says, fantastic, glad I joined, love your approach, especially on the marketing side. First-time author, just published this week. Congratulations, Juliette. Started with Amazon. I think that's a great place to start, super easy. Uh, my next step is to get them out with Instagram's IngramSpark. I looked at them as well. I plan to publish a photo companion book for the paperback, but that will be expensive. I still have a good bit to learn.

Cool.

Yeah, thank you, Julia. Yeah. So yeah, companion projects. How many people here downloaded the reader's guide along with the book? Paul, Judy, cool. Yeah. So like, you know, things like that, they're, they're kind of nice to have. I didn't invest like a ton of time in all that because in general, I find that people, they either want the audiobook or the paperback or the— fewer people want an ebook than a paperback or even the audiobook in my experience. So all of my effort goes into that. But when you're doing the companion pieces, just I would say it's worth validating the interest before you invest the time and effort into the companion work. But what you're describing, Juliette, sounds really, really interesting. MJ, what you got?

Two quick questions, Scott Perry. I assume because you refer to it often that one could insert a different word for the word book, like project, initiative, class, seminar, whatever the thing is. And I think this— I've gotten that from Seth over all these many ideas. The great thing about the idea virus is it really is an idea, and how do we package and ship it? And this seems very relevant. Am I right about that?

Absolutely.

Okay, that's— there's that. This— that's— I mean, I'm not a book author at all, but I have found Intrepid and everything in Creative on Purpose such a help in framing my ideas, my initiatives, my projects, and launching them into the world. So there's that. And then I guess my second question really is, how are you defining success for yourself?

That's a great question. Um, so interestingly, my daughter-in-law published her first book, uh, just a few days after— we didn't know that each other was writing a book. It came up, I think, so Oh, it came up during my, my son's birthday. So it was like around March 13th. And she, so she wrote a romance novel. She started publishing on Wattpad. I don't know if anybody here is familiar with that. It's for people that are much younger than most of the people in this room. It is kind of for the romance serialized young adult content crowd. She is has since published her— she grew an audience on Wattpad of like thousands, launched on Amazon. She is 2, 3 weeks into her launch. She is still earning hundreds of dollars a day.

A day.

I am earning— I'll earn hundreds of dollars, period. So And so if I were measuring— to your question, MJ— if I were measuring success compared to another, like, in Seth Godin's releasing a book, he's going to sell thousands of copies on his launch day. Like, there's no comparison.

Oh, no worries.

Um, for me, success is I begin— and this is, I think, worth So MJ referenced Idea Virus and the marketing trifecta. You, you should use those two frameworks for any meaningful, significant piece of content project that you're creating, whether it's a course or a talk or a coaching program, a consultant offer. Class, whatever. Like, the frameworks are really super helpful for dialing in how do you share what you're doing, and how do you share it with the right people, and how do you share it in a way that is easy for them to understand, engage with, and reach— and, and motivates them to reshare it. Like, It really doesn't matter whether it's a book or anything else.

And I would plug for you, Scott Perry, that that IdeaVirus GPT is really worth anyone's few dollars to subscribe because that thing is money. It is so great. And if you want to crystallize your idea really well, it's fast, it's correct. It's just great. It's a great tool.

Yeah, the, the— I am very proud of the Idea Virus GPT. I mean, you can crystallize your idea, whether it's for a blog post, a book, or a global cause, in just 10 minutes. Um, so thank you for that, MJ. When it comes to success, here's it. So those things will help you create the idea and the packaging. To start validating the offer with the people that you've defined as who you want to change. I'm a big fan of first 10. If I get 10 people to commit to the thing that I want to build, I will build it. My very first book is called The Stoic Creative. Before I wrote a single word, I created an Amazon sales page and I told all the people that were telling me I should write a book, I'm writing a book. Here it is. You can buy it for $10 now. You can, you know, presell it. 11 people bought that book before I wrote a single word. I was on the hook to write a damn book. I wrote the damn book. I shipped the damn book. And you know how many people bought it the day after it was released? And as I continue to refine that work, because anything that's digital can be iterated, improved, any old time. I actually leveraged the 10, 11 readers to help refine and improve the book after it was launched. Many of them bought multiple copies and distributed them to their friends. That book continues to sell copies every single month. And it's, you know, the book I'm least proud of. It was my first book. Your first book is never going to be your best book. So 10, first 10, Seth Godin idea is a huge one. And then the next step for me is 1,000 true fans. 1,000 true fans doesn't mean literally 1,000 true fans. Kevin Kelly wrote the PDF. If you get 1,000 people to buy something from you that's $100 and they do that every year, you have a viable, sustainable business. It is equally true that if you get 5,000 people to buy something that costs $200, or one person that buys something that costs $100,000, or 10 people that buy something that's like— there's like, just do the math. I actually literally think this way when I'm creating offers. Like, if I'm going to put together this, you know, if I'm going to reach my revenue goal, which is much more modest than $100,000 a year, You know, what's— how many things that are priced at $15 do I have to sell, plus this number of things that are $100, plus this number of things that are $300, and this number of things that are $1,000. Like, you can very quickly reach that number with much less than 1,000 true fans if you are very strategic and purposeful about how you, again, how you create the idea virus, how you answer the marketing trifecta, and how you package that idea and connect it with the right people. So for me, if I sell 10 books, I'm thrilled. Success for me, to be clear, MJ, I wanted, I was very determined to sell at least 100 books. I wanted to prove to myself that I could, sell 100 books without Amazon. So when I sold over 100, that was— that to me, that was the big win. I knew that I was going to get more subscribers, more community members, and more clients because that has happened with every book. But for that particular project, it was, can I outsell my best sale on Amazon? And now I'm going to get all those Amazon sales in addition to that anyway. So, Victor, that's really helpful.

Thank you.

Uh, Sandra, my question is a just an inner circle type question. So I, I made it as far as partway through the Forever Offer ChatGPT, but so when you— when we put an idea through and go through the process with the, the chat— your Scott bot, ChatGPT. Can we go back, revisit that, and, and do it again, or is it a— it's a one-time?

No, it should be able to—

IdeaVirus, for example, we can just plug in whenever something pops up. We can— okay, plug in. Thank you.

The IdeaVirus GPT is the— what is it— the IdeaVirus Architect GPT that you all have access to as Inner Circle members, um, is probably the GPT I use the most, even more than my own super-powered Scott bot, which is the Cornerman. For those that aren't familiar, the Circle and Inner Circle members have access to a coaching bot built entirely of my IP so they can take any of the ideas that they are getting from the Substack and often with a prompt that I include for paid subscribers. They can put the prompt in and work through and come up with what they need to come up with in just a matter of minutes by using the Scott bot. Somebody, I don't think they're here, but Lisa was asking about, there is a publicly available GPT called, the Bootstrap Builder. It might be called the Weekend Bootstrap Builder. Go to the GPT store and you can find it. And her feedback was that the GPT did a great job of ideating bootstrapping ideas, but it did not do a great job of pricing her artwork appropriately. It's a GPT. It's like it doesn't know you. It doesn't know your talent. Like, you know, my suggestion to her was have a conver— like, the whole point of using GPT is not you give it a question and it gives you a perfect answer. You give it some information, it gives you answer, you tell it, yes, this is right, this is wrong, this needs refinement. If you have a back and forth, you will get very good results from any of the GPTs that are available in the Circle or the Inner Circle. And for those that want that, that are not members, um, check out the BootstrapGPT if you want to see how the, the GPTs work. Is that helpful, Sandra? She's back to her movie.

Yes, thank you. I'm eating. I just don't want to eat.

I know you don't want to make us jealous. Uh, Paul says a great presentation, grateful to be a part of this community. Shannon— oh, Shannon's just saying that she's got to go.

Okay.

Okay, I don't see any other hands raised. Anybody have any last questions before we wrap it up and move on to next time? So just to, just to put a bow on it all, again, to MJ's point, it doesn't matter if you want to write a book or just create a decent lead magnet or some sort of asset or resource that you can use to attract more subscribers. If you check out Seth Godin's Idea Virus audiobook, it will give you everything you need to create an idea that is compelling to the people that you want to reach. And put it into a package that is easy for them to understand, engage with, and spread. The 3 marketing trifecta questions will— if you answer what change am I trying to make, who am I trying to change, what promises am I making, if you answer, do those 2 exercises, you will have all the information you need to start testing whatever your project or endeavor is with real people, validate the idea, get the information you need to iterate or improve that idea if necessary. And then if you want to revisit this replay, there's some good insights on how do you get— generate some excitement and some support for that product service idea. Ahead of the launch so that when it's— when you're pushing it out into the world, you're actually leveraging the power of collective momentum. The biggest danger for purpose-driven people that are independent operators or solopreneurs is this idea that just because you're a solopreneur, you have to do everything yourself. Just because you're doing everything yourself doesn't mean you have to do it all alone. If you tap into the network effect and you tap into the networks of other people or a community of fellow travelers like The Circle or Inner Circle, you can actually amplify your efforts and get a much bigger return on investment for the same amount or even less time, attention, money, and effort invested. So I would strongly encourage you all to pay attention to that piece in particular. And with that, I will thank you all for the gift of your time and attention, and I'll see some of you next week. And for the rest of you, I hope you all got something out of this. Thanks for all the hearts, and we'll see you all next time.