The One with the Most Authority Wins: Best Selling Author vs. Podcast Host?

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Hey everyone, this is Tracy and Tom on the feed you'd brand podcast and we are going to talk something a little bit controversial today.

Yeah, it's going to be fun. I enjoy this debate and I do think it's a debatable subject, although I think we're right about it, but it's a debatable subject.

So yeah, so we're going to talk whether you should be a best selling author or be a podcast host or both is okay too.

But yeah, both is okay too.

Both is okay too.

Although I would say you should be a podcast host.

Which one has more authority?

Right.

Does podcast host authority weigh heavier than a best selling author authority? I'd say right now where we're standing and what we're hearing from booking agents, event promoters and all of that. And if you check out just the late night guests, like the list of all the late night guests on political shows, just your regular late night shows, the number of podcast hosts who are being featured by all kinds of podcasts.

That are being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, by Jimmy Fallon and other shows, they are increasing in frequency and popularity tremendously.

Right. And that's on both sides of the aisle. We're not taking any.

Yeah, it's not a political statement.

Right. This is just, it's increasing all around. The same thing is happening in events and we hear people who are podcast hosts being sought after speakers for events all around. That's one of the things that we get that coming back a lot, that it's actually really easy. So a lot easier to be a podcast host and get an event invitation than it is to just be a best selling author. And so I want to talk a little bit about why that is. I think.

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think we all could agree or at least admit that being a best selling author today is a lot easier to achieve if you've got the money to pay for it. There are ways to game that system and be on the New York Times best selling author list.

Well, they've made it more difficult. So both. Well, just kind of like Amazon has done on the Amazon seller side of like reversing the reviews and other things. So New York Times has done something similar. So they just changed their complete algorithm. I have been invited to hear Michael Drew, who author of Pendulum. And I mean, that's pretty amazing, but he's done like a hundred New York Times bestsellers in a row. Like, it's an amazing amount of New York Times bestsellers, not all.

He's not the author.

He's not the author. He represents authors to go into that. So he's like the top agent to be able to get people to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. And they have just changed their algorithm and made it incredibly difficult. And they still are able to do that. They still have been able to do that. So it's a combination of who they choose. Right. Because they know that they can achieve it and get ahead of it. Because what they have is a platform underneath them. That is the big difference. Because the New York Times algorithm is also checking to see not just who you are as the author. Do you have a lot of listeners? Do you have a lot of viewers? Do you have a lot of readers already? But they're then checking and cross checking that against real social profiles. So they're making sure that those people who are buying the books and reviewing the books as a part of their algorithm actually exist. Now, Amazon was easier because they were in control of that. You have verified buyers. Verified.

Verified, yeah, yeah.

Purchasers, yeah. So when they skew heavily to that, they can do that as well. But there's still ways to gain the system and end up in Amazon because they have the categories. So you can be the best seller in a category that only needs you to sell 10 books in a day to outrank the top seller. So because they have so many categories.

Sure.

So I mean, to me, and obviously I'm just one person, it's just my opinion, but it means less to me when someone says they're a best selling author. I mean, if you're a real best selling author and I know of you because you're really a prolific author, like a Malcolm Gladwell. Yeah, of course you're a best selling author and I've read a bunch of your books and they're fantastic. But if I've never heard of you before or your subject and you're a best selling author, that best selling author tagline or qualifier doesn't mean as much to me.

Right. And so that's really where you hear it all the time. It's a glorified business card. Nowadays a book is a glorified Business card now, actually, Tom and I have not put out our books. We have been doing this a long time and I get invited to events. I'm speaking at like six events in the next eight weeks. So we get invitations all the time. And why is that? Because there's a significant difference in weight to podcast hosts. When you hear that we have a show that has 480 episodes and we have 100,000 listeners or downloads or plays, whatever that is. Even if you don't believe that statistic of 100,000 like that people listen to.

All of it, which is a monthly stat, by the way.

Right, It's a monthly stat. And so even if you say, okay, well 100,000, well, she's still gotta have like 10,000 listeners. Right? You still gotta have.

Even if they're all listening to like multiple episodes.

Exactly. You still gotta have a lot of listeners. And if we can command that in what's happening, in our case in a binge able way. Right. Because people listen to many episodes at a time or in a month, when you have that and you can carry an audience for that long a period of time, it says three things about you. You must be entertaining or edutaining. Right. You must be delivering good value or people wouldn't stick around. Right. And the third thing is you can command an audience. You have audience authority. So all of those things are what event promoters want. Right. You must know how to promote yourself because you've gotten yourself that audience because itunes didn't give it to you, Stitcher didn't give them to you. Right. We have to seek our own audiences as podcast hosts. So all of those things hold a very high value with event promoters nowadays. They know that. And they can also just really easily. Much different than picking up a book and looking at it. Right. They can see how articulate are you going to be on their show? How easily can you speak on the fly? Are you going to be able to answer questions? How good are you at what you do in an event situation? So it bodes much higher speaker profiles.

I agree 100%. Because a lot of people, let's face it, who write books today don't actually write themselves or write them all themselves, like the hard way, the old school way. Right. And oftentimes it's either a ghostwriter or they're recording their book and somebody's prompting them with questions to try to pull the information out of them. So I dare to say you can fake it being an author and not necessarily be a writer, but as a podcast host, creating an audio show. You're you behind that microphone. People are going to hear you and know you and you can either do it or you can't. That corresponds to being able to speak from the stage or not quite often.

Right. So in our minds it's like, well, I think that being a best selling author is wonderful and good for you and congratulations. But it's not enough. Nowadays. It's not enough. There's everyone is a best selling author. I have met thousands of them. Literally the last three years alone. I've met thousands of best selling authors and I can tell you that I'm in and I read a lot, that there's not maybe 2% that I've read their books.

Well.

And that's the other point I want to make, Tracy, I was just thinking about as well is that I would bet that the majority of people who bought the books or given them or bought it doesn't even matter if you bought it, who are in possession of those books. I think that a smaller percentage of those people have actually read that book or read it its entirety. Now contrast that with the hundred thousand downloads of the podcast episodes of ours in a given month. I guarantee you that all those downloads, the vast majority of them were actually listened to because people want to listen to these things. They want to hear what you have to say. And quite honestly, it's a lot easier for them to listen to it, especially while they have busy lives while they're commuting or even while they're at work having lunch or something washing dishes. Yeah, that you can listen to it. Heck, you can say to your Amazon Echo, hey Alexa, play me the feed you'd brand podcast. It'll play you the latest episode.

You can really do that, by the way. Interested? Yeah, go ahead and do it.

And every one of our clients who has a podcast is also available over the Amazon Alexa. That's one of the platforms that we put you on and it's very powerful.

We also put you on Google Play. So that means hey Google would play you as well by the way.

Yes.

So you can do that on hey Google if you're a hey Google person. We happen to be an Amazon Alexa household.

We definitely are.

Although we may have to change her name because our Alexandra is home. Too often it's getting confused.

Yeah, Alexa does mistake one of her kids names for her own name at times. But anyway, take the good with the bad.

So the point is, is that really that we are getting this author versus host kind of dynamic going on and reality is that what we're seeing is a much higher elevation and a much quicker adoption of podcast hosts as having authority. So podcast host authority translating into speaking engagements, into getting more stages and to getting more. And in a sense, if you are already an author, then. And a podcast host getting more books sold.

Yeah. And in fact, if you are an author first and either are not a podcast host or maybe have become one, I would argue that taking your book and breaking it chapters down into short subjects and making a podcast out of every one of them is going to be much more effective for you than just putting your book out there.

Please don't read your book, though. No, don't do that. Yeah, we just use the same topic and then talk off the cuff about it. Expand on things you couldn't put in the book, on the things that your editor would have cut out that you should have cut out. Right.

Or tell stories that are in it or about it, but tell them, don't read them. Don't be like, what did we hear? Hillary Clinton reading her own book for the audiobook thing.

And yeah, we mentioned that already on the show.

Very effective.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So definitely don't do that. I just want to mention that we actually have many of our podcasters and we actually ourselves producing books from our podcasts. That is a very common occurrence here. So we're actually in the midst of building three books at once. So we've done zero books up until this point, and we're doing three books all at one time. We're doing a book that came from my column, so it came completely from my column. So all the articles are being repurposed into a book and they're being sectioned into a way that makes a lot of sense for the way that I talk about innovation.

But that has nothing to do with a podcast.

But that has nothing to do with it. But what I did was I took interviews that I did that along the way because I recorded them and transcribed them. So even though I didn't use them in a podcast, which I could have, but I didn't. But I have those, and I turn them into secondary chapters within each of them. So there's like these asides about the interview subject that was written about in the article. So I've created that, and I created that completely from an interview and then the transcription from that which you have if you're guesting, if you have guest interview on your podcast. So you have something like that, and you can use them in conjunction with the stories or whatever the main topic is. So that's like a great way to interject your podcast into a book. Another way is we're taking some of our top episodes out of our 3D printing podcast. We're taking our top episodes and we're organizing them into a way that makes sort of a almost like a how to 3D print kind of book. So that's one of the ones that we're in the works on. I think we're probably going to have to add a lot of additional content because there's a lot of visuals required. So it's a little bit of a different book. So we definitely have to supplement that one. And then reality is that the product launch hazards podcast that we are doing for our private clients, that that has turned into a book in and of itself and that one was just actually turned into a book and a course all at once.

Yeah. So I think there's so much more power in speaking your content and being able to get so much more return for the time you invest in creating it and putting out there in multiple different ways. And it's just so much easier to convert it and get more out of it than it is to get as much out of a book. Plus, the process is so much faster.

Right. And if you are an author, like if you're an author that really needs to appeal to its fans, the podcast is a great way to keep that fan base going in between books. And I think that that's something that you really have to understand is like sort of that die off of they're not getting notified anymore and that's not happening. And so being able to keep that fan base going, I mean, that's one of the reasons Malcolm Gladwell did his little interjection of his revisionist podcast. And it really gave him such a great little boost in fan base audience. And then he is on his way to launching his next book, which should be coming out, I don't know when, maybe early next year or something like that. I had heard. Anyway, so the podcast gave it more fans. I mean, isn't that amazing?

Sure. Well, you engage with an audience on a different level and they get to know you better. Hearing you, they think they know you. It's emotional. You're connecting with an audience in a different way way and in a more meaningful way.

You say that like you're. But you're not a reader and I'm a reader. And so, I mean, I think a really powerful book connects to you like that. And I expect that from a book. But when you have.

But it's different though.

But it's different because it's a one time interaction. It's not a continual interaction. And I think that that's really where the podcast host authority is translating into more speaking gigs, more interviews, more press interviews, more articles written about you. And so if that's your goal and that's what this podcast is all about, feed your brand is about being that of brand authority. Right? You being the brand, brand casting you. And so we want you to have that constant authority. And so it needs to be something that's driving that all along the way. And so while I would say if you have a choice between starting a podcast or writing a book, start the podcast. It will help you write the book, but it will also give you authority to be able to pitch that book later.

Yeah, authority. Not just authority. It gives you a lot more reach to be able to push that book later, promote that book later. It's just more people are going to know about it because you've already got an audience who wants to hear what you have to say. You tell them you have a book, you're going to move a lot more books than you would if you didn't have a podcast.

Exactly. So anyway, so yeah, it's a sort of versus because we're saying that because we know it's a little controversial out there because bestselling authors love their bestselling author title. And I don't blame them. I'd be proud of it too. And many, many of our clients have found that that podcast host title is very powerful right now. And you should use every bit of authority you can get in this marketplace to be heard, be seen, be invited, and then be sold. Right. So have those books sold well, but.

You may not agree with us and that's okay. We can have that discussion. I invite you to come to the blog post@brandcastingyou.com and you can leave a comment down at the bottom of this post, right?

Or on the Facebook page. Feed your brand.

Absolutely. So hey, let's keep talking about it and that'll be a fun conversation. So thanks for listening, everybody. This has been Tom and Tracy on.

The feed you'd brand podcast.

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