The Future of Publishing with AI: Dan Curran

Admit it.

If I injected you with truth serum, you would confess. Yes, I really do want to be an author. I really would like to write a bike. Write a book. Write a bike as well, but write a book. It's something almost anyone has thought about from time to time. And yet it's never been easier. Why aren't you doing it? Well, where do you start? Do you do paperback, hardback? Traditional publishers, publish, Publishing consultant. Where do you go with all this? It gets wildly confusing. Our special guest today is an expert on publishing. I'm very happy to announce Dan Curran, who's the co founder of Chapters IO, an innovative AI company that's helping business leaders and others communicate effectively through the medium of books. Dan, thanks for being our guest today.

Yeah, thank you. Appreciate being a guest.

So let's step back a minute. Why should someone be excited about book publishing? Conventional wisdom, and I'm not saying I buy this, the conventional wisdom is nobody reads anymore. Everyone's just looking at 10 second TikTok videos. Nobody buys books, nobody reads. Everything is about video, video, video. And then here you and I are talking on video. Tell me why that's wrong.

Well, I think it's a shame that people are not sharing their wisdom, life experiences, perspective. We have 23andMe that collects your DNA that tells you about, you know, where you came from and how you're predisposed from a biological standpoint. But all that, you know, thoughts in your head, you know, is it once you leave this planet, is it just gone forever? And that's, that's really, you know, one of the top few reasons why we created Chapters is to democratize and remove that stress of, of grabbing, you know, this, this precious genius that, that each of us have. And so I think as far as becoming a bestseller and making millions of dollars, well, that's, we're a capitalist society and that will take care of itself. But as we all know, most books are not bestsellers and, but we all have families, friends that, you know, that should, should learn more about, you know, your perspective. So we're, we're really, it's, we're just out even, even.

A bigger secret is there are best sellers out there that don't really make money.

And I've had one or two behind.

Me that are technically best sellers. But did I really make money? No. I mean, it helped with business and other things. For people who want to know a little more about this, we're posting links to Dan's website and company in show notes in the description. I'm going to Just show it briefly. Right now it's chapters IO and we're going to talk about this more in a few minutes and go into deeper detail. But first, why did you decide you want to be focused on books? We live in a world today where there are fewer gatekeepers than ever. In every medium. Anyone can start a podcast, anyone can start a YouTube series, anyone can start a streaming service, pretty much anyone can start a fast TV network, people can do online courses. What brought you to this particular medium? And also, let's just step back. How do you even define a book? Does a book these days can be text on a digital format? It can be an audiobook which used to be called CD or an audio cassette. There's paperback, there's hardback. What does it even mean to you to say something is a book?

Well, there's a lot of questions there and a lot of, you know, kind of things to ponder actually that we're all pondering, you know, what is a book and what's. But I, I'll give it to you this way. I do believe the movie industry, although I'm not in it, but just the optics. The newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the music industry especially has really evolved dramatically, obviously like Spotify versus, you know, the typical buying albums and so forth. For some reason the book publishing industry, in this person's opinion, my opinion, has not gone through that type of complete paradigm shift. And I think that is about to change.

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, it has in the sense that, you know, hundreds of publishers have gone out of business.

Yeah.

But 10, 12 New York City publishing houses and it's down to what, maybe four.

Yeah, but if you go to your the smartest person you know, and I bet you they do not have a book, but they own a company or they're a doctor or they're just really wise people, your neighbors, relatives. I would bet anything that they don't know anything about publishing. And if they do know a little bit, it's very intimidating. And that's kind of the point. It's a very red ocean, intimidating, you know, multi step process. And I, I believe with AI it's definitely intimidating.

You know, I started seeking a publisher 35 years ago. I published my first book 30 years ago. I've done half a dozen books or more and I find it intimidating. So it can be intimidating.

So if you look at the kind of the supply chain, you know, starts with an idea, someone writes the book and then it's published. And marketing, you know, four or five steps, six Steps, that's, that's a fact where everything is clogged, especially is with the manuscript writing because it's hard, you know, fine motor skills, the time, the confidence, all these things that go into it. So that's our, that's that swim lane that chapters is in is how do we reduce that stress? How do we get the, you know, brilliance out of your head? And so the rest of it we're going to tackle in the coming months and years of Chapters. But right now we're trying to just make it much more delightful to be able to share your wisdom. And fortunately the technology is a big part of it, but so is human editorial rigor and excellent. So it's human and robot, so to speak, that we think is a good solution.

So who is the sort of ideal client for Chapters IO and how do they typically benefit? I mean the traditional reason for many business people doing the book is hey, it becomes your calling card. It makes you more credible, you can charge more for speaking engagements, consulting, et cetera. Is that still your model or who is your ideal fit?

Well, I'll give you two. One is we want everyone to write, to write a book. So that's one, but that's not really a target Persona or you know, we'll focus on someone, something that everyone would understand and that is, let's say it's an executive entrepreneur, someone that has lived life experience and has something to share. Creating a book, marketing, publishing is absolutely still very, very worth the time if you are looking to monetize it. Yes, I guess one word to use is a loss leader. Statistically, quantitatively it is a loss leader or it's you would break even at best. And I can get into some of those numbers in a second. But more importantly it even in this digital world we live in, it is stature. When you have a book, there's no doubt now if it's full of just, you know, you know, very top line thoughts and not very deep. Yes, it probably will not serve you well. But generally people have something very unique to share their life experience or their how to or some process. So having that book is an amazing foundation. It was five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. And I would even say even more. And I'll say one last thing. It is the found. It's either it's term in marketing is atomization. That book can serve and you're doing it with your business model here on our conversation. You can atomize it to where that content can turn. Blogs, white papers, speeches, videos. So I cannot Be a bigger advocate for people to write a book if they really want to grow their brand or their business.

And will you help them publish in other areas? I mean, how much of what you do is turning the book into, say, an audio book, getting that distributed on 50 or so platforms that take audiobooks versus just the book? And are you Amazon specific or are you trying to go wide on every platform?

So as I. So excellent question. So as I mentioned before, the holdup is with the manuscript creation process. Because it takes months or years typically to create a book or manuscript. All the publishers are just waiting for the good content. Just like Netflix is waiting for good scripts. The publishers are waiting for books to be written. I'm just going to talk about chapters for a second. Half of our business is helping you create that manuscript, making it delightful, easy, and we use technology and human editors and it's, we think, a really enjoyable process. It's not taking the nine months or three years that a typical ghost writer would take or you take on your own. That's half of it. The other half of the business is that we. Let me step back. We're putting it all in your own personal AI large language model. So I don't need to get too technical here, but it is. No, it's not plagiarizing. It doesn't. Your, your vessel, so to speak, doesn't know the rest of the world. It's just your brains that are in that vessel.

Our audience is very familiar with that because about 90% of the time I'm talking about digital cloning and specifically my own digital clone at tjwalker AI, which has sucked in every book I've ever written, every online course, every video. So we're used to that model. Is that your starting point? You take everyone's speeches, blog post, social media, and you suck it in and you create is it their own GPT or what format are you using?

So as you know, it's really training that model, right? And one analogy is just Oscar or Otter or Fireflies. These transcription services that a lot of us use when we do zoom calls, et cetera. Well, they've trained after that, you know, call your zoom call that you get a transcript that shows meeting notes, who's responsible for each task. Somewhat similar to what we've done, except we've hyper focused to create the input that you give us. We're asking you questions, we're grabbing old blogs, but we've trained it to do a story arc for a nonfiction business book. So it's maniacally focused on an amazing book for you to be able to profit from later on. And we use editors to help the process. A very concierge and enjoyable process. But once that manuscript is done, typically 90 days, that's the other half of our business. You can then go back to that large language model or that vessel and ask it create a blog, white paper, speech, all from that manuscript. So we're trying to again atomize all of your knowledge. So we're really a receptacle, we're transcribing, organizing and then helping you distribute.

And are you creating your own proprietary technology or you're just pointing people and guiding them, holding their hand to use OTTER and other pre existing systems?

No, no, no, there's no. Ours is what's proprietary is the training of what we've done. So it's taken about a year and a thousand hours to train it to be able to digest, to capture digest and, and to create the manuscript. As far as the other part that is proprietary is really just the interface, the user experience. So combining the training with the user experience creates, we hope, a wonderful experience creating a book. So when people talk about proprietary technology, we're on the back end of some of the large language models like OpenAI and their playground. But really what we're doing is what's proprietary and amazing and we trying to get better every day is really the user experience that we try to eliminate any stress for the editor and the author, the two humans that are really involved in the manuscript writing to make it very intuitive. And that is proprietary. We hope we do it better than anyone else. So you're not even thinking about it because we. One other quick note. One reason why we didn't create just a software like, you know, one of these AI writing software is it's very crowded, very confusing, it's diy and the people we're dealing with are busy. They're building companies or doctors, etc. So they don't want to get it, do it yourself software. They just want a very concierge environment to share their thoughts. And that's what we're creating.

We're speaking to Dan Curran. He is the co founder of Chapters IO, a new type of publishing company. And something we like to do here, because this show is about communication skills, is we like to give people just complete free reign, 60 to 90 seconds to pitch and talk to their ideal customer who might be lurking in our audience. So no questions, no prompting, I want to just turn the screen over to you and let you say anything you want to. Let People know about your company, why they might want to reach out. You feel free to be promotional, hold up anything, hawk any website. And I want to let you do that starting right now.

Okay, well, thank you. So I mentioned earlier about removing the stress out of writing a book. And we really, that is our mission, that is call it a vision or mission, is really to remove that stress. And so if you take a step back and you look, you know, how do I write a book? Do I go in the woods for six months and write this book? Yes, that's one way, if you have the time and the fine motor skills to write or type. Another way is to hire a ghost writer. And there's some amazing ghost writers, but let's be honest or frank, that's a forced dating relationship that you have to be very intimate and transparent with this person. Over many, many months, we have found that your average alpha male, female entrepreneur or highly successful person, or just someone that wants to share some wisdom, gets very fatigued with that relationship. So how can we do this better? How can we, yes, have the human interaction, in our case an editor, but how do we accelerate the time to write the book and make it much more pleasurable? So that's really what Chapters IO does. And if you go to our website, especially how it works, you'll see that you can do it in a couple of different ways. We transcribe through video questions that we're asking and you, when you're driving, when you're, you know, before you go to bed at night, wake up in the morning, you can answer these questions that we're creating, that our human editors are creating and AI is creating and you are recording those. And then we get those transcripts and we organize it into a manuscript. You can even talk to us over zoom. Again, we're recording, transcribing and then organizing the thoughts. And then through this process, it's not nine months, it's not $50,000 for a ghostwriter, $100,000 for a ghostwriter. It's 90 days. And the cost is approximately, you know, half of what you would spend for a good ghostwriter. So that's our.

They spend a lot on ghostwriter. One of my friends is one of the most successful ghostwriters in the world these days. Although now they put the ghost name so I guess it's not completely invisible. Yeah, his name is Alice Hannigan and he just finished a ghost written book, well, a co written book for Tom Selleck, but he's done Daryl Waltrip, he's done Chris Christie. He's done a lot of the most famous people in the world. And he's a natural gifted storyteller. He's kind of got. You got to have lunch with him or dinner. You're going to have the time of your life.

So he's easy to talk to.

So for him it's all about. He has to establish a relationship with them and have a lot of conversations. Sometimes in person. He's got to pull the stories out. Do you have human editors talking at length to pull stories out or is it prompts through videos or digital questions sent to them?

So it's a yes. And they're very important. And maybe the nomenclature isn't quite right. I mean, the Ghost Rider, like you just said, it's almost a cartoonish term. It's. It's. You know, now hearing you say it, it's like I'm even thinking myself.

It's.

Is that really. You know.

Well, sometimes people do leave the name off and that's the person.

Yeah. It just even goes. It's just the whole thing. I mean that when we talk about. We're so. Just to take a step back here too is. You know, we're so anti plagiarism 100 attribution. This is your thoughts. We're just recording them. Basically. You know, ghostwriters. That is ethical as what we're doing is. That is honest. You know. So I think the lines of ghost. Is the ghostwriter writing the narrative or. And I appreciate they're getting the story. But we're trying to really capture your words and just organize them. But what AI does better than anything. And then we get back to your question is it really finds gaps. It can say, hey, you were. You were. You repeated yourself here. Or can you expand more upon this? So AI is really involved in and how we use it. But the editor, they're meeting this developmental editor every single week. We're just don't. We just don't need a year and going out to dinner and grabbing some stories. We can really do it within three or four months. And their role in all this is. It's magical. It wouldn't even work unless we had the. You know, just like your ghostwriter friend. They just. They have so much experience in writing. They really ask wonderful questions. So I think again, the nomenclature. Our editors are like the ghost, like your friend. They just. They really know how to really pull stories so well. The technology and the questions. Yeah, that gets us about halfway there. But wow. That a really good. Almost like a journalistic agnostic Concierge counterpart that our editors serve, they really are able to pull some magic and it's wonderful. So those two combination, 90 days, a third of the cost. Not saying we're perfect, but you know, paying 100, you know, $100,000 for a ghostwriter, I don't know if that's perfect.

And when you plan on working with a client, are you going to do print on demand? Are you going to assume they already have such a huge, huge following? You're going to work with them to do direct sales, so they're selling the first 5,000 to their customers, clients, friends. I mean publishing is wildly complicated and it's incredibly easy to lose a lot of money. Yeah, let's be honest. And I will be forthcoming with you. I mean I published half a dozen books, just published this one last week on how to build an AI video clone, paperback and hardback available in online audiobook on Amazon as well. So I mean I've done self publishing, I've done small publishing. Wiley has given me a large advance before. I've done hybrid. Whether you want to call them vanity publishing or not, I've been around a lot and I'm still learning how it goes. Where I have been wildly successful is publishing online video courses, not books. If I had to survive and, and feed my family or myself based on book sales, I would be a very, very thin person right now.

Yeah, you just did every, you just perform, you know, provided a great public service announcement to everyone. Everything is, is true.

Help me understand something here because this isn't exactly what you want to hear, but I have talked to countless business people in the last 30 years who've done books. Most of them kind of regret it now. This is still back in the day when people would fill up, you know, they'd buy the 2,000 copies, it's in their garage, five years later they're moving and their spouse is screaming at it, you idiot. Now we have to throw them all away because it's really, really hard to sell a book. That's, that's kind of the bottom line. And what my advice and it's changed recently. But I'll tell you, the advice I've given people before is don't write a book until you have a significant following tribe of people who like you, care about you, respect you and you know, the classic model is someone like a James clear of atomic habits. He didn't just start writing books at age 23. He wrote a fantastic, fantastic in depth 2000 word article on blog post and email newsletter every 10 days or so for four years. He built an email mailing list of between 500,000 and a million people. Then and only then did he write a book. And now it's sold, you know, 30 million copies and he's fabulously wealthy and set for life. And I always ask people like, who's gonna buy your book? And if you look at any best selling list these days of non fiction, pretty much everybody on the list is a famous celebrity. It's a Howard Stern, it's a Sean Hannity, it's a politician who's running for president. People who are already in the media have millions of followers on Twitter, Facebook, millions on their, on their YouTube channel. So my recommendation for the last, you know, 20 years or so has been a book isn't going to make you famous the way it could. You know, 45 years, you could be Wayne Dyer, be a nobody, go on the Tonight show, one appearance or go on Oprah. Boom, you can become a bestseller and make your career. These days I see books as ways of monetizing a relationship you have with an audience already. That's my advice. Tell me where I'm wrong because I think that it. Well, I think congruent with your mission.

I think we agree 100% and disagree 100%. That makes sense. So I think that's one Persona that's. And I think if you have aspirations to really get that book out, mass distribution, I mean, there's a couple of things here, so just bear with me. Number one, there's been developments in the last even six months. I believe if you go to old school brick and mortar, that business section will get smaller and it will be full of the Howard, not Howard Stern, but, you know, more business. Elon Musk know 89 books.

89 books by Rich Dad, Poor dad.

And yeah, it'll be that if you. Yes, and Rich Dad, Poor dad and Seven Habits will still be there. I mean they'll, that's what that section will look like at Barnes and no, it will not get bigger. It will get smaller, high profile names, actually nicer, thicker books because that's how they're going to make their money at Penguin or Random House. It's not going to get, you know, broad. So where are all the other books going? Why am I so energized about it? Number one? Number you don't have to have those type of aspirations. I think if you built a big manufacturing widget company and you really, really were an innovator in your niche space, I think you don't owe it, but it would sure be amazing to your orbit, whether it's 50 people or 500 people to create that book and to capture that wisdom. So I'm just a big advocate of you being able to, for us to make it easier for, for you to share your wisdom if you want to go down the route of really monetizing it. It's everything you said and that I saw, I saw a study that just came out and I'm sorry for the people that put it. I was listening to the webinar yesterday. Your ROI is really quantifiable in the positive bucket. If you really put your work behind it. Not the book itself, but the speaking engagements, your business, if you really evangelize that book and atomize it, you know, it's still a great, a great tool. But if you're wanting to be a New York or Amazon bestseller, then that's, that's a very thin swim lane and, and there's a formula for it and you can do very well. We'd love to help you do it. But we're also helping other people that, you know, we're working with scientists, leaders of billion, you know, billion dollar company person. We're working with that founder, you know, his, his aspirations are just, hey, let's capture the manuscript first and then we're going to worry about distribution later. So there's a broad spectrum of aspirations, whether modest or aggressive.

If you have a question for our guest today, Dan Curran, you can type them in the comments section. You can actually push the link and join us right on screen and ask him a question. Talk to them yourself if you like. Jules linkredual has written really interesting subject and information. Thanks Jules. Thanks so much for watching. If you have any questions for Dan, let him know. So some business owners like a Richard Branson is so well known that he gets, he probably gets 10 offers a day from publishers the traditional way. And he has written, written 20 books. There's a lot of other entrepreneurs no one's ever heard of, but they have compelling stories.

Who's sort of.

Do you have someone on your dream list, either a profile or someone you think is a good candidate so people can identify, maybe think that sounds like me?

Well, I, that's a great question. I am so not focused on the kind of the pop culture entrepreneur. I, you know, I've met a lot of these people and have you ever heard, you know, a celebrity, you know, an up and coming celebrity and they go, oh yeah, I met my favorite celebrity and at a party and I really didn't care for that person. I've had a bit of that. I, how can I put this diplomatically? I think there's a lot of people that are not the smartest people or the wisest. Maybe they're all smart, but that are the most interesting people that have bestsellers, I'll put it that way. So Michael, is, are the people that you haven't heard of that I think have built massive companies that haven't for their ego built a big social following, but they're just wise, wise, wise. And so I don't have any names to drop. I do follow a lot. I'll push a book right now. Not always a big fan of private equity and venture capital, but I read a great book called Pattern breakers just came out and it's a venture capital, a venture capitalist that is really shaking up that business model and really shared who is really being disruptive in the business environment. How to leverage chaos. And really not so formulaic compared to other private equity people. So I tend to look for the misfit toys, people that are really, you know, you know, truly change agents. But they're, they're not so alpha that they want to tell everyone how great they are. So that's, I'm trying to uncover those people.

Dan, you mentioned the phrase atomized several times. I, I think I know what you're talking about. You can take it an intellectual piece of intellectual property, a manuscript, you can sell it as an ebook, you can sell it as a paperback, you can sell it as a hardback, you could sell it as a, is an audiobook, you can repackage it as a speech, you can repackage it as a webinar. If I've built the biggest widget factory in Cleveland and I just kind of want a legacy and I'm already worth 100 million, maybe I don't care about any of that. But let's look at someone who has maybe put together an eight person management consulting firm and spending 25, $30,000 to publish is still somewhat significant. They would love to be able to point to a return on investment three years later and say, okay, I did this, I put in a lot of time, but hey, I got 200,000 back. What are you most excited about right now? What other individual strain of or atom of revenue do you see as untapped at the moment when it comes to authors monetizing their intellectual property? Is it the audiobook download? Is it, is it using AI to print in multiple languages? Is it using print on demand to do large print? There's so many options. Now what excites you the most for those, I guess smaller entrepreneurs who, you know, they're not trying to get rich off their book but they would like to actually monetize it. Not just through the sense of Well I lost 30,000 and only sold 40 but I got one client and they, they became a billion dollar client for me. Yeah, I mean it's so level. Anyone can win a lottery ticket. But short of that, what revenue streams from a book? Are you excited about that? Maybe people haven't heard of or thought of much.

Well, one thing I want to reiterate something you said that aligns with this all of those options, the ebook, the multi language, the audiobook, they're all very doable and getting easier to execute day by day. But it's still confusing saying that you still have to lean in. And I'm going back to a couple of comments ago that you had. You have to participate if you want to be successful. Yes. The CEOs that you've talked to who look back and said oh, it wasn't quite as successful. I promise you cannot outsource all of this to anybody. You, even if you go to a publisher, there's a lot of gripes about kind of the traditional old school publishing, the big companies that they don't support and that's whether true or not, you have to participate, you have to lean in. You have to.

Personally, by the way, there's only one time in my entire life I've ever met an author who didn't basically hate his publisher.

Yeah, right.

Having lived in New York City for 20 years, 25 years and spending a lot of time in network TV studios speaking circle. They met a lot of authors. Everybody hates their publisher with one exception. I was talking to Frank Rich, the famed theater critic of the New York Times and a columnist who is these days he produces shows like Succession and he had a new book out. So I just said hey, every, every, every author I know hates a publisher. How's it going with your publisher? He's like, oh they're great. It's really good.

Yeah, but it's, it was easy to.

Get a lot of publicity if your client has a, you know, a three times a week column in the New York Times as he did. But just, just an aside there.

No, no.

And Mary's writing in. We have some comments from viewers Mary writes in. Thanks to both of you. Have a question here. Is it possible to use AI to publish and your and promote your book or product? I know Dan, that AI is very much a part of your business. But you're not just saying to chatgpt, write me a book, cut, paste and publish. It's not quite that simple. If you could elaborate on Mary's question.

Yeah, so Mary, whatever your niche is, your background, your audience that you're trying to connect with. Yes. AI on the publishing, the atomization, you can take a book, you can turn it into blogs, white papers, you can, you know, do that, some of that with or without chapters. Right now you still, I want a public service announcement. You still need a human editor. You still have to go through. You want it to be very authentic and, and read well. But it's very contextual to answer the latter part of your question to the who you're targeting. So run away from anyone that says that they can use AI to clone your voice and to completely distribute all your content. Yes, they can do that. But is it going to be the quality that you want? So again, lean into it. I think you're going to see in the next year AI really, really disrupting on the distribution. So I kind of have a half answer that I think that is the next frontier is, you know, right now we're working on the manuscript process, but on the distribution, the, the wonderful thing that is happening now and will continue happen is you don't have to spend a lot of money. And Brent, you mentioned earlier, you can waste a lot of money on the distribution and marketing especially. There's a lot of people that will hold their hand up and say, hey, we'll do all your social media, we'll do all your blogs, pr. Be very careful because you can actually do a lot of that yourself by using AI to, you know, kind of get your marketing plan in place. So I don't know what, what the downside of you going to chat, gbt, Claude, etc, and asking it to help you build this marketing plan, you're gonna have to still go over it, review it. But I, I think that's a place I would go first as kind of a foundation and then, then do it yourself. I try not to spend any money until you have to on, on all that, you know, but that does.

This is a slightly uncomfortable question, but I guess like my question to you is why if someone is, let's say they've started a factory in their town and they want to really share their ideas, their thoughts, their successes for their family, their extended family people in their town, they're not expecting to be a New York Times bestseller. Why do they need to spend money with You, I mean they can hire a freelance ghostwriter and, and these days it's pretty simple. I mean I just did it with fiverr myself for a couple hundred bucks. I prepared the manuscript and I had a consultant format things covers, put all the self published book, but still it looks pretty professional. And the whole thing was only a couple hundred bucks.

Yeah.

Why does someone need to then spend, you know, 20, 25,000 with you when they really could do all these things themselves and find editors and use print on demand services from Amazon and other places like that?

Well, I just, I encourage them to do it. I mean we all have our own target Persona. So our Persona is someone that is insanely busy. They don't have the time. They, all those words and acronyms you just used, they know nothing about. And they come to us as we're leaning into technology to make their life easier and we have so much editorial rigor and concierge help that they love what we're doing. What you just described is perfect if you have the time, the wherewithal and you know, where all the landmines are, which you, you just told me earlier, you know, the land mines because you've done so many books and I'm sure that you got some battle scars, but I'm a big fan. Go, just go, you know, do all. As long as it's honest and it's your thoughts and your wisdom. Now has never been a better time to do that. So. Yes, but there's, you know, there's different, you know, a big Richard Branson is not going to do that. So he goes to another extreme. You know, he wants the 150, 200 thousand dollar ghost writer to do his book. So it's a spectrum, you know, on how in all of this and then.

How do you differentiate yourself from others in your space? They are. And I'm not putting you in the category of the vanity publishers who, they're just trying to take every single penny from someone. Oh, I'll do your website, I'll do such. I mean I've seen people go to a so called publisher and they've spent six figures and they sold two copies. I'm not suggesting that you. But there are a lot of companies that are sort of hybrids. I mean I've used one before. Greenleaf Publishing. Yeah, there are a lot of incumbents in this space who've been around a long time doing similar services. How are you differentiating yourself in the marketplace?

Well, from kind of how the sausage is made and us, you know, selling a company and getting into this industry a few years ago, but always, you know, I knew a fair amount of book publishing, and so. But we kind of parachuted in, and that was good. We, we did not want to be part of the old guard. We wanted to reimagine the industry. None of these people are dumb. They're all smart. Greenleaf, there's lots of them. They, they're all smart. I, you know, the traditional kind of old school. The Penguin Random House. They're, you know, I wouldn't want to be them. They got to figure out how to navigate this new world. But they're. No one's dumb. They're all very, very smart. I'm just, I'm just focused on us. And what us it means is that we are trying to democratize, get more people to tell their story. We have to be for profit. We're not a nonprofit. So we elected to go after a certain Persona that sees 10x value in what they spend with us and what makes us different. Our ip, all that, all that kind of stuff is only that we spent a year training the large language model and two decades of working with the world's best search editors and bringing those people to, you know, technology and editors together to create chapters and what are the name of our company? Of course, it's like a book chapter, but it's really about the chapters of your life. So we want to be a receptacle to really capture that and to make that much easier.

How do you anticipate advising people who do want to go wider and reach a broader audience and sell a lot of books? Because. Because a lot of people, in my experience, they'll say, oh, I'm very humble. I don't have a big ego. And I just wanted. But you talk to them for a little while, they do have a big ego. They wouldn't have accomplished all of this. Yeah, sure. And certainly when I was a kid, and maybe even when you were still a kid, our perception of an author was a big celebrity on the Tonight show or on some video on Oprah. And they got this, you know, 10 million people watched it, and they sold lots of books. Those days are gone. I mean, Oprah doesn't have 10 million people watching your show anymore. When she goes on, you know, her cable channel, wherever that is, it's a lot smaller. Johnny Carson, long dead. And I mean, I've certainly heard from authors like Tim Ferriss who say, wow, I go on the Today show, sell five books, I sell a lot more. Going on a podcast like the Art of charm and I'll sell more books than ever. How do you anticipate advising clients on how to promote themselves on podcasts, which a lot of authors would say now is the preeminent way? If you don't have a built in audience with your own millions of followers, going on podcasts that really align with your audience is the best way. Are you going to offer that as a PR service or connect people with the best publicists for that sort of thing? Because PR is another thing where people can be sold easily, spend $50,000 and get actually zero coverage.

Yes. And you know, I come, you know, a couple of decades in the marketing world and have seen PR evolved and just, just like you said, you said it very well. It's, you know the nomenclature. We use the same terms but they mean different things. Media means something different now than it did. And you know, Howard Stern was big, well, he'll soon retire and be gone. Joe Rogan's big well, he'll soon retire. There'll be another Joe Rogan. There'll be this stuff is just not going to stop and it'll be organic and go its own way saying all that back to podcast in general, I think they're amazing. I think if you really want to to use a hybrid publisher, self publish, basically not going to the traditional publishers and creating a book publishing and marketing. Now has never been a better time and tomorrow will be better than today. I think it's. I was listening to this old marketing podcast which is Joe Polizi this morning and they were saying they are tired of brands complaining, big brands complaining they don't have enough budget to make market. They were very articulate, more than I will be. But it was basically like, look at all these solopreneurs, these content entrepreneurs as they call them, individuals that are just exploding onto the. And you know what you do, it's still elbow grease. You know, you're not you. I know how much you're not you without all the elbow grease that you put into it. Brandon, I, I know I don't know you that well, but I know how much work that goes into it and that's. That doesn't leave. You're willing to work, create a marketing plan, have some sort of budget.

Let's go a little deeper in marketing because you're the former president of the American Advertising Federation.

Well, I mean a regional.

So here's my big question for you. I'm hoping I'm wrong.

The traditional former for reasons, but go ahead. Okay.

The traditional article of faith in the Publishing world is unless someone is a super famous famous celebrity, you can't advertise for a book without spending more than what you would recoup from any sales. Now, there's a lot of different ways of doing it on Amazon these days. I know some people, at least for six month, eight month period.

Tell me.

Okay, TJ, for every $5 I spent on ads, I did get $8 worth of sales. So it worked. Based on your background as a marketer and advertising expert, do you have new techniques for how someone. Let's say I'm a business executive and I say, hey, I want to write this book. 30,000 all in is okay, but you know what, If I could spend 10,000amonth on advertising and bring in 11,000 back to me and not lose money, I would do that. Do you have any system of doing that with advertising for books?

Well, I have empirical evidence and that is the authors that we've worked with and that we are working with and a lot of other authors that come from like Greenleaf and so forth. Here's the big news. I don't have any new words to use. Every word I'm about to tell you is words that have been around. It's just the cake recipe has changed. One is good old fashioned email. So all of these publishers, I forgot who you mentioned, like atomic habits and all this, I assure you he had an email database that started with one person that probably went to tens of thousands. But you have to start building that pre launch of your book friends and family podcast. You have to get all of that lined up. So at the end of the day, it's a good old fashioned Excel, Sprint spreadsheet or Google sheet. And it's a marketing plan. And Whether you have $500 to spend or 50,000 or more, you, you break up that recipe and you work harder than you've ever worked to evangelize that book. If that is, if that's your purpose. And then from that, yes, speaking engagements and consulting jobs and everything. So the recipes are all there, but the elbow grease is the X factor.

The company is Chapters IO if you want to check it out and learn how they work. If you're thinking about publishing a book and the prospect of sending letters to literary agents for the next two years and not hearing anything doesn't appeal to you, you may want to check them out as a part of your due diligence in the publishing world. So special thanks to Dan Curran. Any final message you have final words for anyone thinking about becoming an author?

Yeah. So yes, again. I love the conversation today, so thank you again. My email is dan chapters IO and then you can find me on LinkedIn as well. If you'd like to talk about AI publishing, the ethics of everything. If I could help connect you to self publishers or publishers, just, just let me know. Don't, don't know if I can help, you know, check all the boxes. But I love talking about it and I just encourage people to, to capture their wisdom and write a book.

Dan Curran, thank you for being our guest today.

Thank you.