Charlie Hoehn: Write Something People Want to Read

In this episode, Charlie Hoehn explains the secrets behind why some books are unforgettable, and others no one seems to remember. He shares his journey of helping authors transform their ideas into best-selling books and provides actionable advice on structuring, writing, and marketing a book. You'll learn how to craft titles that make people want to read your book, design compelling covers that stand out on the shelves, and use certain strategies to engage readers effectively depending on the ideas you communicate. Hoehn also shares the psychology behind book promotion, how to leverage feedback, and the dynamics of traditional versus self-publishing. Whether tackling a novel or email, this episode will transform how you write and communicate. Charlie Hoehn is the founder of Author. Inc and a 3-time New York Times bestselling editor. He's the mind behind some of the influential books from Tim Ferriss, Ramit Sethi, Codie Sanchez, and Noah Kagan. Charlie's expertise has helped sell over 10 million books. Newsletter - The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it’s completely free. Learn more and sign up at https://fs.blog/newsletter/ -- Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of the episode, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://fs.blog/membership/⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. -- Follow me: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://beacons.ai/shaneparrish⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- (00:00) Intro (03:04) Helping Authors Succeed (03:38) Writing for a Specific Audience (07:14) The Importance of Real Feedback (10:18) Traditional vs. Self-Publishing (20:50) The Economics of Self-Publishing (24:42) The Art of Book Cover Design (30:29) Crafting a Compelling Title (36:42) The Importance of Book Structure (47:22) Editing: The Final Touch (51:35) Book Sales Percentiles (52:32) The Harsh Reality of Book Sales (54:20) The Emotional Impact of Writing (55:12) Dealing with Compliments and Criticism (58:24) The Quest for Bestseller Lists (1:00:04) The Complexities of Hitting the New York Times List (1:12:25) Leveraging AI in Writing (1:20:21) Effective Marketing Strategies for Authors (1:28:14) Creating Evergreen Content (1:35:30) The Importance of Authenticity in Writing (1:40:54) Final Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The title is the most important marketing decision the author can make for the book because virtually all books that sell more than 10,000 copies are driven by word of mouth. The title has to do a lot of things. When a person says it, it has to evoke curiosity, FOMO, some sort of emotional reaction, whether it's intrigue or even repulsion in some cases. It should be almost a tip of the tongue thing that gets triggered regularly in conversation. An example we used was Meetings Suck by Cameron Harold. Even if he didn't necessarily like the

• 0:42Speaker 00

  book, people would complain about meetings. Meetings were a constant in companies. And so this book would just kind of organically come up as like, you ought to read this and it would just naturally be recommended.

• 1:04Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. Today's episode will transform how you write and communicate. My guest is Charlie Hoehn, the secret weapon behind bestsellers like The Four Hour Work Week and dozens of other books that have collectively sold millions of copies. While Charlie isn't particularly well-known to many people, he's the book whisperer to the people in the industry. Whether you're crafting crucial emails, high stakes presentations or reports, or that book you've been meaning to write, Charlie breaks down exactly what makes writing connect and convert. We explore everything

• 1:45Shane Parrish?

  from hook-driven titles that grab attention to structures that keep readers engaged, to marketing strategies that make ideas spread. We also dive into the real trade-offs between self publishing and traditional publishing, what actually makes book covers work or fail, and how AI is changing the game for writers. This conversation is packed with immediately useful insights on how to make your ideas stick, something Charlie has helped authors do repeatedly at the very highest levels. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:22Shane Parrish?

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• 3:05Shane Parrish?

  How would you summarize what you do?

• 3:07Speaker 00

  I help authors go from idea to successful book. It takes a variety of shapes. You know, sometimes I'm helping them with the actual production of the book, sometimes just editing, other times focusing mostly on the launch. I'm an author myself. I've done 20 years in video productions, but mostly it's I'm just helping authors with their books.

• 3:33Shane Parrish?

  You're a three times, if I understand this correctly, New York Times bestselling editor. What have you learned about writing that you wish more people knew?

• 3:41Speaker 00

  The best books are written for one or two real people on the other end. And a lot of authors write as though they're speaking to a huge, general audience or to their perceived fan base, the entire fan base. It's the fastest way, in my opinion, to kill a book because it's not interesting. They start speaking in terms of, we need to do this. We should be like this. And it's like, who are you talking to? There's one person on the other end of that book. Speak to them or speak about yourself. I learned this. And if you want to apply it, you can do this.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  So the most powerful, interesting books tend to be written for one real person in mind. And the paradox is they tend to reach a lot more people that way. And that person can be the author. Are you making something that you want to consume repeatedly? And if you are, it's probably pretty good. It'll find an audience eventually.

• 4:44Shane Parrish?

  Do you think most authors, especially in nonfiction, are sort of like working through the subject that they're talking about? And that's the writing? Mark Manson, like he cares, right? So the subtle art of not giving a fuck is sort of like him trying not to care as much. James Clear was really working on his habits when he was writing about habits and sort of like, so you're writing the book you almost want to consume?

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Yes and no. So it's, you have to become the embodiment of the book first. So you can't really write it as though you're that person that you haven't become yet, or the person that you're becoming. You kind of have to write it from a place of, I've already become this. I've already grown into this and I'm the embodiment of this. Naval Ravikant had a great quote where he said, "In order to write a great book, you must first become the book." I work on prescriptive nonfiction exclusively. I don't help with memoirs. I don't help with fiction, just like business books, self-help, personal development, that type of stuff. If you think of the author, their expertise is a ladder, right?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  And so they've climbed so many rungs to where they are. If they're trying to write for people on their rung or above, it will not be a good book. They need to write for the people below them and address those people because they can pull those people effectively up to their rung. They can't push somebody who's on their rung up further. You know what I mean? Because they're not there themselves.

• 6:17Shane Parrish?

  Is that the transformation for the readers? Like I start at X and now I get pulled a little higher?

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:23Shane Parrish?

  And I might not reach the level of the author, but I'm moving forward or towards them?

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, or I have a blueprint to get me there.

• 6:30Shane Parrish?

  How do you write for a particular person? Like, what does that look like?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Well, there's a variety of ways. One, you can be talking to them in real life, right? So a lot of authors who've written good books are like, yeah, I've been coaching clients or consulting with these companies for years. I have this stuff down cold. I know the questions they ask. I know their, their common emotional challenges, the technical obstacles they face.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Those, that is a great way to write a book is like you know that person very intimately or that avatar and um other ways are you can do it kind of online now um you still need that real feedback though from actually helping a person transform just to clarify on that like you could in theory be writing for an online audience right in helping them with a particular topic and seeing oh they left a comment here about this they had a question about this okay but when you go to to write the book you're not actually witnessing

• 7:39Speaker 00

  what they're going through it's similar to for like software development you think you have a good app that you've developed and you're like this is awesome cool go put it in front of somebody and watch them use it and watch how quickly they get stuck or they're confused or they're bored it's the same with books and so I I think it's important to get that real you know personal feedback that you can see here's where this person is struggling here's where they're succeeding.

• 8:09Shane Parrish?

  How does an author do that with their writing the whole book right so like you can't write the book publish it then get feedback and sort of like okay now what do I do with this?

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Um, well, you can, but I'll I'll circle back to that. Uh, the my, the the method I encourage is teach it in real time first and ideally you're somebody who's already transformed numerous people at least three with the transformation that you're trying to codify into a book so um generally speaking you ought to have coached consulted helped at least three people achieve the transformation you're you're trying to make into a book you can in theory publish a book and then see where people are getting stuck see their reviews and then adjust the book.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Afterward, I don't recommend it. It's not as, it's not a strategy that most authors will stick to. But like Hal Elrod, who's based here in Austin, he did that with The Miracle Morning. And so in the first year, he promoted that book, sold like 13,000 copies or something like that, which is quite good for its first year. With every negative review that he got, he went back into the manuscript and made revisions so that that feedback couldn't be given again. So that review couldn't be given again. He just kept doing that until the negative reviews stopped. And to date, it's sold millions of copies.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I think he said in year six, it sold its millionth copy. But he, he stuck with that book and he was like, I really believe in this. I'm going to keep modifying this as though it is software. I'm going to release V1, V2, V3, V4, et cetera. Most authors don't do that. One of the reasons that I, I am reluctant to advocate for the traditional publishing processes, like your book is set in stone there. You, you might, if you're lucky, get a 10-year update, you know, the 10-year anniversary, but you're, you're not going to touch that book again.

• 10:20Shane Parrish?

  What's your take on the pros and cons of sort of self-publishing versus publishing? What are the considerations that you look at? When does it make sense? When doesn't it make sense? How do you think about that?

• 10:32Speaker 00

  I agree with my buddy Nat Eliason's take on traditional publishing. He, and it's a very simple lens to look through, overly simplistic, I guess. But if you can get a publisher to give you a $100,000 advance or more, you should probably do it. I mean, if you have millions of followers, 100,000 is not enough, but like you get the general concept. You want them to have enough skin in the game to take you seriously. You want to get as substantive of an advance as you can to actually, you know, put some money into doing the book as well as you can and launching it as well as you can.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  For 95-plus percent of authors I talk to, I tell them, it doesn't really make sense for you to do that. There's a number of reasons. Most authors care about financial ROI. We can start there. Granted, the worst way to make money with a book is by selling lots of copies. With a but with a traditional publisher, they're going to be taking, you know, I think it's upwards of 90% of your royalties. It may not be quite that high, but I remember talking to James Clear. Uh, and, and we were talking about how much he would have made had he gone the self publishing route with Atomic Habits. And I did the math and it was like, ah, it's about three X more per copy.

• 11:59Shane Parrish?

  But would he have sold as many copies?

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Exactly. Would he have sold as many? It's a great question. We'll never know. The distribution is much higher with a traditional publisher, right? You're getting into retail stores. That's not an easy game as a self published author. But my argument is over 90%. I believe it's, it's at minimum of 80% of books, book purchases are through Amazon online. So if you're applying the 80 20 to book sales, self publishing typically typically makes sense. You should invest in making the best possible product. Other things to consider with traditional publishing, what a pro is like, they'll assemble your team, your production team. So they'll help with editing.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Uh, they'll, they'll prevent you from getting into legal issues in their editing process. They will, uh, help you design the cover. The con is I've seen their processes. It's not that.

• 12:58Shane Parrish?

  We've seen the cover of my books. Like you know how terrible it can be.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  I won't, I won't say a bad word about your book. Uh, but yeah, I mean, what is your, what was your experience actually?

• 13:11Shane Parrish?

  I don't know. The whole thing for me started in 2018 when the New York Times wrote this article about me calling me out as a spy who helped people on Wall Street. And within 72 hours after that became public, we were the, I was the number one story on the new york times.com for two days. I had all of these inbound contracts, basically from publishers. No book title, no book, a lot of money.

• 13:41Shane Parrish?

  And I was like, oh God, I don't even know what to do. I don't have an agent at this point. And so I remember Nikki from Portfolio had come to one of my events in 2015 or 2016. And so I just reached out to her and she's one of the people sort of like bidding on this too. And I was like, hey, can we chat like as friends, right? Like not as you as an editor trying to buy a book, but I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know like who to talk to. I need an agent. Like, do I even want to do this? Do I don't have a book idea? And so I finally ended up interviewing a couple of agents, got an agent, and then the money was, I mean, it made sense in my case to do it, but I didn't take the money and use it. I just sort of like put it in the bank. So this was a weird thing, too. Like as an entrepreneur,

• 14:26Shane Parrish?

  I don't want a boss. And for four years, I basically felt like I had a boss, right? I would get this email, you know, the start, it's like this trickle once every two or three months. And it's like, where are you at on the book? And I'm like, I don't know, I haven't even started the, I don't even have the idea yet. You know, like I have some ideas. And then all of a sudden, towards the end, it was like weekly, you know, it's like, where are you at? And finally, I was like, do you want your money back? Like, I'll just give you your, your check back and we can just call it a day. Uh, because I don't want the pressure. It's going to be done when it's done. I know I agreed to a timeline. COVID happened, timeline changed. Um, and the process from there was actually pretty good. Like Nikki's an amazing editor. She added a lot of value to the book. There's

• 15:08Shane Parrish?

  pros and cons to it. You know, I sort of ended up with a cover that I, I don't personally like. I don't think it did the book justice. Sort of like the titling could have been better. And I don't know what I don't know the first time. And so I'm relying on the recommendations of sort of the publisher and they do know. I mean, they have a lot of data. I don't know how accurately they use that data, but my experience is pretty good. And I know people have different experiences with publishers, but we also got worldwide distribution. We're in like 28 languages now. And I don't know if that would have happened if I self public, I might've made more money, but the goal wasn't sort of make. Money. The goal was distribution. How do we pull people back into our ecosystem? So when I think of like Farnham Street as a, an ecosystem,

• 15:53Shane Parrish?

  remember that Disney map from like the sixties? It's like theme park characters. It's like, well, I want this to reach people that I haven't reached yet. And then a, a certain percentage of those people will come back to the website. A certain percentage of those people will listen to the podcast. And how do I pull people into our ecosystem? So I lifted the book as like, I don't want to make any money on the book. I really just want to grow the business and get better at what we're doing. Because if we get more, a bigger audience, the optionality for the future is huge. And the optionality is we get better guests on the podcast. We get more advertising revenue, which doesn't come out of any individual pocket. Sort of comes out of corporations in a win-win way. They're reaching an audience that's hard to reach. We have one of the smartest audiences on the internet.

• 16:38Shane Parrish?

  And so like, this is how I thought about it, which is like, how do I just maximize my optionality? And I don't know if that's right or wrong, because we never talked before I published. I wish we had, I would have changed the cover. So when the paperback comes out, we're definitely going to do that.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  So like what you said is a common thing, is just wanting to raise visibility and create opportunities or bring more opportunities in. So it tends to be like, raise visibility, bring in opportunities, grow the business, leave a legacy. Tends to be with, with nonfiction. I'm curious with your cover in the title, what was the process with? How, how did you end up there? Where you're publishing a cover and a title that you're not crazy about?

• 17:20Shane Parrish?

  Well, the subtitle came first, actually. So I had the turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results and I loved it. And then the title was like 10 people, basically brainstorming a title from my agent, to the editors, to people who work at the publisher. And we're just back and forth until, you know, we're like, Weeks away from printing. This is where it gets really tricky, right? So it's like in everything in my body and I'm writing a book about decision making. And you know, I'm like, this feels push and I'm like trying to pull back, right? I'm like, slow down. Like, it doesn't matter if we hit this deadline. It doesn't really matter, but they're like, no, we've got the book. Like you're booked into the printing queue. You're like, this is happening.

• 18:02Shane Parrish?

  And you know, effectively it's like, we will take over one way or another. And the book is no longer yours. And you sort of get this message and it's like, well, I want to slow it down. I want to test it. I want to sort of like figure it out and I want to come up with different options. Didn't have time to do that at that point in time. So the process sort of like you get to a certain point in that, no. Had that been three months earlier, I totally could have stopped it before it was sort of like booked into printing. Before we had the buyers buying it, before the bookstores had bought it, before the sales agents go out, you can sort of slow it down. But once that process gets rolling, you're sort of at the whim of them and you do the best you can given the situation.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:41Shane Parrish?

  Now, having written a book, if I write another one, that would be all take a different approach to that whole thing.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  So you lost creative control, which is like a common thing.

• 18:51Shane Parrish?

  Well, sort of, yeah. I, I mean, effectively that's what happened. I mean, that sounds a little, you know, on a continuum, it sounds probably very far right.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:01Shane Parrish?

  Where it's like slightly more pulled in than the screen.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Sure. You were a participant, obviously, and you were the main.

• 19:09Shane Parrish?

  But once they accept your manuscript, title or not, like they can pretty much do what they want with it.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 19:15Shane Parrish?

  Contractually.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's like two entrepreneurial people. I find that that is very difficult oftentimes. And like, obviously you and I are friends with people who thrive in that and like have done extraordinarily well. Ryan Holiday, you, you mentioned Tim Ferriss, James Clear, like these guys have, and continue to do well. I'm not taking anything away from that, but I have seen the other side as well, where entrepreneurs are dumbfounded by decisions made by their publishers or like creative control.

• 19:48Shane Parrish?

  Oh, yeah. In a way that they're like, this actively hurts us.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Cause both sides have pros and cons and both sides can be done wrong. I do wanna say like, most people screw up self-publishing.

• 19:59Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  They don't do it well. And so traditional publishers are right to stick up their nose at self-publishing. But it's like, to your point, if it's your first go-round as an author and you don't know what you're doing, the likelihood that you'll step on a landmine that hurts your book during the self-publishing process is even higher than if you're working with a traditional publisher.

• 20:19Shane Parrish?

  Well, I've done self-publishing too.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:21Shane Parrish?

  So we took the Great Metal Models. I created a publisher effectively from start to finish where we created content. We got creative. We laid it out. We found printers. We printed. We found distributors. We stored. We monitored story and we fixed the updates. We're constantly doing Kindle revisions. It's a lot of work.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 20:42Shane Parrish?

  It was like a full-time person, if not more, just from a maintenance point of view for four books, let alone sort of like doing any other books.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot. It's also expensive upfront typically.

• 20:55Shane Parrish?

  Totally. I was paying eight dollars. Like, people don't understand the economics of self-publishing. From a hardcover perspective, sort of like audio and Kindle are great because the margins are good. But from a hardcover perspective, we were paying eight dollars US, seven dollars US approximately for printing. We were charging thirty dollars for the Great Metal Models on Amazon, which means we get fifteen. Then the distributor takes approximately three dollars per book. Then there's shipping costs per book. There's storage costs per book. By the time like the hardcover sort of worked out, I think we made like fifty cents to maybe a dollar a copy from a hardcover point of view. And it wasn't worth doing, but we weren't doing it for money. We wanted these books to exist, still do.

• 21:39Shane Parrish?

  It didn't make sense from an economic ROI point of view to do what we were doing in any way, shape or form.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  You know, I would-

• 21:46Shane Parrish?

  It's a high production value.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  But I would argue that like the perception of Shane after doing those books was elevated.

• 21:55Shane Parrish?

  Well, I don't know. Like, we didn't, originally, we didn't even have my name on them. It was like, that's right. Like, it was all about the ideas. We basically created this niche encyclopedia of big ideas. And that, that's what it is today still. I mean, it's morphed into something. Hopefully they get better distribution, but... So we created this niche idea and it came from talking with Charlie Munger. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna, I'll do this. Like, why doesn't this exist?

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Did you actually talk to him?

• 22:22Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Amazing. So like, just a very quick side note, and then I don't mean to cut you off.

• 22:29Speaker 02

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• 23:29Speaker 00

  My, one of my good friend's moms was the CEO of John's Manville. And so she would hang out with Warren Buffett and stuff, and I was like, begging her, please tell Charlie Moker, when he was live, to publish a book on mental model.

• 23:44Shane Parrish?

  That would have been amazing.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:45Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, the closest he came was, I guess, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, which, if we had a fifth book in this series, like, I wanted to tackle psychology, but we couldn't do it as well. So he actually gave us permission to distribute, like, the accurate version of his talk.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:00Shane Parrish?

  Online, and if, as a bonus, if you sort of get, if I was publishing a fifth book, that would be, but I can't tackle psychology as well as he did.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  No.

• 24:10Shane Parrish?

  By any shape or form. I wish he would have done what we did in his words with his ideas. I mean, we did the best we could.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:17Shane Parrish?

  Took seven years to create four books.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Gosh, dude. Yeah, there was you and I think Michael Simmons did a course on mental models and it was like, I'm grateful you guys did that.

• 24:29Shane Parrish?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Munger, all he did was a poor Charlie's Almanack. I feel bad even saying that because he's so ridiculously great. Yeah. I so wish that he had done that while he was alive.

• 24:40Shane Parrish?

  Me too, a hundred percent. And so like my name wasn't even on it. I don't even know if it was in the original version. Like it was all co-authored. We had multiple people. We had no bylines. We're not into like that stuff. It's more like The Economist, right? Is like, let the ideas stand on their own. Uh, and we did that for three versions and we had three different people working on those versions. And now, you know, my name is on the cover, but there's massive contributions from everybody else. Sometimes I'm the least of the contributions, but from a sales and distribution point, it makes sense to have my name go first because we can't fit all three names on the cover the way that we designed them. And like the covers actually look really good.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're great.

• 25:19Shane Parrish?

  So where do people go wrong in self-publishing? You said like?

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Where to begin? Uh, I think there's, there's a lot of places they go wrong. From the reader's perspective, I would say that they typically don't have a good cover. And so they immediately kind of shoot themselves in the foot. Traditional publishers will typically put out solid covers. When you're self-publishing and you've invested a bunch of time and money and you haven't made any money on the work and it comes time to putting a face on the thing. A lot of self-published authors are like, I'll go to Upwork or I'll, I'll hit up my designer friend who puts together PowerPoints and I'll pay them 500 bucks. And it always results in something unremarkable.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  You have to pay an artist, a book cover designer specialist, to create the boldest thing that you possibly can.

• 26:18Shane Parrish?

  So go deeper on that. Like what does a book cover artist know that most people don't? What makes a great cover for a book? And does cover matter?

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this would probably be a conversation you'd want to have with like Pete Garcello, who did Adam Grant's covers, James Clear's covers. He's brilliant. Or Zoe Norvell. She created a great site called I Need a Book Cover. And it's just a directory of the top cover designers in the world who consistently work with the big five publishers. So they're specialists in cover design, not in general design, like they just do covers.

• 26:59Shane Parrish?

  What does that mean? Like, what are the nuances to cover design? I reached out to Pete, actually, because I was like, oh, for the paperback.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:06Shane Parrish?

  But we're years away from that. But for the paperback, I was like, I want to work with you.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  I think it was Chip Kidd, the guy who did the Jurassic Park cover, effectively said something like, it's haiku all in on one page or something. But it's basically the embodiment of the entire book within an image that you instantly understand what the book is trying to communicate in a way that compels you to pick it up and read the dang thing, which like, when I say it, sounds like kind of mechanical, because I'm not a designer. I'm not, I don't pretend to be one. But I've talked to enough designers to realize,

• 27:48Speaker 00

  like, this is a real legit specialty. And it's similar to YouTube, where the right thumbnail versus a average mediocre thumbnail that's clearly been created in Canva by the producer of the video, the right thumbnail will outperform a thousand X. And it's, and I'm not saying like, a cover will make or break a book. That's not true. Like, the book has to stand alone as a good product regardless of the cover. So I don't want to. Sound too cosmetic.

• 28:20Shane Parrish?

  You like pick it up.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Yes, and it's it's got to evoke the right feelings and from from the target reader, like your target read and it should be aligned with the story of the book and everything. So like, there's, there's a cover by, and I think he was in the FBI or CIA, but he was, he was basically, basically a guy who would build rapport with people in other countries and flip them, like make them into informants. So it's a very social or very specialized social skill to be able to do that. Very difficult. And so he wrote a book, I think it's called It's Not All About You, or It's Not All About Me. And this cover looks like it was created in Microsoft Word.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  And it's, it's the classic like white 3D clay, you know, image with like very basic arrows pointing out from it. It's an awful cover, but it's actually aligned because he wrote the book for people in the military.

• 29:23Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  And people who

• 29:25Shane Parrish?

  Aren't trying to appeal to a mass audience.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  No, but the book was so good that it ended up reaching a lot of people. But like, it was for the target reader. And they were like, okay, this is exactly what all military presentations look like. This level of design, a worthwhile expense that instantly communicates, are you legit or not? Are, is this a good book? The cover's a direct representation of quality inside. Yes.

• 29:53Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 29:54Shane Parrish?

  I wonder if we could go through, like, what makes some of the most popular books like great covers?

• 29:59Speaker 00

  And this is again, a conversation more with a designer, but I think there tend to be, they tend to be iconic in, in that it is bold and differentiated. A lot of cover designers find themselves being given creative direction of like, I just want it to look like that person's cover.

• 30:21Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  I just want it to feel like that. And, and that's useful on some levels of like, hey, kind of stay Within these guardrails and it's it's also helpful to give a designer like, hey, these are covers that I hate.

• 30:36Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Right. There's, there's kind of genres of, of cover design, like you'll see, um, kind of Malcolm Gladwell type rational optimist type where it's, it's all white and there's like one little image and then the rest is like kind of an elegant serif font. Right. That's, that communicates, this is an intellectual book. So you can give them kind of guidelines to stay with and to communicate, this is that type of book. But if you're, if you're wanting it to be too derivative of everyone else, it just kind of blends into the sea. So I think great covers often are iconic and bold in that they're, they're claiming that the most

• 31:23Speaker 00

  courageous representation visually that the author could possibly put forward.

• 31:30Shane Parrish?

  So like then title subtitle, subtitle promise sort of.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Titles.

• 31:37Shane Parrish?

  Walk me through titles, like what goes into a good title and subtitle?

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Title is the most important marketing decision the author can make for the book because uh, it's virtually all books that sell more than 10,000 copies are driven by word of mouth. The title has to do a lot of things. It is, um, when a person says it, it has to evoke curiosity, FOMO, some sort of emotional reaction, whether it's intrigue or even like repulsion in some cases, it has to be fun and easy to say. So like, I always struggle with that

• 32:23Speaker 00

  uh, FBI book that I mentioned. I always forget the title. I cannot remember it, but it doesn't really matter because there's a story that I'm telling with it. But with the title, it's, it's kind of like a, um, it should be almost a tip of the tongue. Thing that comes up that gets triggered regularly in conversation. This dovetails a little bit with what you what you've written about or like the problem you're attempting to solve. Right? So an example we used was like Meetings Suck by Cameron Harold would always come up. Even if you didn't necessarily like the book, people would complain about meetings. Meetings were a constant in companies.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  And so this book would just kind of organically come up as like, oh, have you read? You you ought to read this and it would just naturally be recommended. Authors also kind of need to take into consideration like what are the tip of the tongue conversations that are going to be happening? And how does this sound when it's being recommended? So a title can't be embarrassing to say either. Like Play It Away, a book that I wrote is like Play It Away. I originally was going to my working title was like How I Cured My Anxiety, which was like saying that is a mouthful. It sounds like an attack if it's recommended to you. You ought to read How I Cured My Anxiety.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  It's like, whoa, you're making.

• 33:52Shane Parrish?

  It's almost like you're making a statement about the other person and yourself when you say that. If you say read Meetings Suck, it's like, I'm not saying meetings suck, but this book might be arguing that.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  Testing titles in person and saying like, have you read this? And watching the person's reaction, like do their eyes glaze over? Are they curious? Are they leaning forward? Like, these are important things that you kind of have to measure before. Title is the thing that you should take a lot of time, invest resources in figuring out and gathering some data. Is this going to be the best option?

• 34:26Shane Parrish?

  How do you test it?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  I my process, I'll I'll tell you after after I tell this quick story about Tim Ferriss. So Tim and I worked together for years and one of the stories he told about the four hour work week, which I would still argue is in the top five titles of all time in the nonfiction space. He did tons of testing. He he tested. Like, I don't know, thirty to fifty different title ideas. A lot of them, he'll admit, were bad. You know, stuff like the chameleon millionaire, you know, drug dealing for fun and profit and like, and he tested them at the time on Google Ads. And so he would just see which had the highest click through.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  And the four hour work week, I think, had a two, two X over the second place highest. So he had some data to, to stand on. Other ways you can test is like, uh, is there a phrase that you're constantly using with clients? If, if for your book, do you find yourself constantly leaning on this one phrase? And that's like the unlock phrase for them. That's the one that they're like, ah, I always, I always return to this. Okay, that's memorable. Good. The process I use, I, I have like a list of criteria that I lay out, which is like FOMO, fun to say, memorable.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  It's, it's like seven criteria and I rate them all on a scale of one to 10. I plug it in, I, I kind of made my own GPT book title score. So now I just punch in, here's all the title ideas and it'll spit out, here's its score and here are the top ones. It's not perfect, right? It's not a guarantee, but it gives me some sense of like, okay, these, these ones are strong. These ones are weak. Anything that is under a score of 50, it tends to be like, that's probably not going to perform well. And then after I do that, I put them through pickfu.com, P I C K F U dot com. And that allows you to do real quick testing with audiences and polling

• 36:32Speaker 00

  and to see their feedback on why they like a title or why they dislike a title. So an example was, um, I was, I was working on a book that I was trying to, I was trying to figure out, should I call this paid to play or fuck work? I, I polled on Pickfu.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  And F-Work performed pretty well, but when I dove into the data, all of them had the wrong expectations for the book. That can kind of be solved with a subtitle, but not really.

• 37:01Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  It's showing that, oh, all these people want like a funny book about venting about how much they hate work. I'm not writing that book. That's not what this is at all. If that's their expectations going into this, that's going to equal negative reviews.

• 37:15Shane Parrish?

  Cause you're not meeting the expectation.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Precisely. Yeah. You want to get that data. You want to test your assumptions. With stand-up comedians, they'll sit and write a joke, right? And then they'll be like, that's pretty good. And then they'll go perform it in front of 10 audiences and they're like, oh, my assumptions were wrong.

• 37:33Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  This is off just enough.

• 37:35Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  And I think the title needs to be treated with that same kind of respect. It can't just be, oh, this, I like that. Like, no, you need to test it.

• 37:45Shane Parrish?

  How important is the structure of a book? Once you, so you've got a title, you've got a cover. Now it's structure.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  This is like the thing I geek out on a lot because I think this is the thing that if you over-index on structure, you'll, you'll be in a really good spot. Like, I can, I can send a self-published author confidently off to do their thing if they over-index on structure. So what I mean by that is you should be spending a ton of your time, you don't have to decide on a title till like the very end, really. You can be playing around with it forever, but like, you should not write a word until you have solidified your table of contents. Your table of contents is the thing. It is the structure, the makeup,

• 38:30Speaker 00

  the foundation of your book. And so the, the exercise that I like to do with the table of contents, how do I take my one reader, my perfect target reader from zero to hero? What are the exact steps? And it tends to be like the big milestones, there'll be two to four of those typically. So if you look in table of contents of bestselling books, they're typically divided into two to four parts, often three. So I just, as a general Rule and like just do three parts, right? So three big milestones that helped them go from zero to hero. Within each of those parts, you have these sub steps, right?

• 39:11Speaker 00

  These little things that they have to do during that major milestone to ensure that they get there. Or you have questions that they're going to ask during those phases. So you take your table of contents and then you spend a bunch of time talking to real target readers, showing them your table of contents before you write a word. And you say, which of these is a hell yes? Which of these is eh? And which of these is like not relevant? And that's the data you gather on early. And so like bloggers do this by writing articles and they see, oh, that one kind of, you know, that's a cock, that headline, and then that content is really strong.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Cool. That's potentially a chapter. The table of contents is this is the menu of the book. Do you want to eat here or not? If they say hell yes to everything, you have a really strong book on your hands. And it makes the writing so much easier after that because you're confident that you can help the person you're trying to reach and it doesn't feel like guesswork.

• 40:18Shane Parrish?

  That's so interesting. I mean, this is one of the big mistakes I made writing Clear Thinking. It's like I just sat down and wrote it like a blog article the first time. And then the second time and the third time. And even now I was like, the actual structure that I would do today is different than the structure of the book. But I felt like it had been published for two or three weeks. And then I was like, ah, I missed it. Like, I know exactly what it should have been at this point.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  How did you know? What was like the aha moment where you were like, ah, that's how it should have been?

• 40:45Shane Parrish?

  Well, I like the idea of showing readers. I think, you know, I didn't have a structure. I wrote the book, I deleted it. Had a loose structure. I wasn't confident with it, wrote the book, deleted it. And then I sat down and I was like, I'm gonna do that thing Ryan told me to do. And I'm like, gonna structure the book. And I sort of came up with something that made sense to me, but I never verified it with a public, like even my editor, with anybody else. And so I came up with it, but I have all this knowledge about the subject in my head.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:16Shane Parrish?

  Which is different than where the reader, meeting the reader where they're at and taking them from, you know, you said the word zero to hero. But like, that's different than positioning it for where they're at. I would not change the content of the book, but I would change how I structure the content of the book. And I think it would have made it an easier read for people. Because I do think structure does some of the lifting for you. If you let it, it's either a headwind or a tailwind. And in my case, it's probably neutral, but it could have been a tailwind. And I don't think I nailed it. But what's the difference between, like, if you're looking at a structure and I give you like four or five different ones? Like, what's the difference between a good and great structure?

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Hmm, that's a good question. Well, I'll, I'll say to that point.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  I had an author come to me recently and he was told like, hey, the, the publishing house that I'm working with, they gave me this as like the template to write my book. He said, I, I feel like, I, I don't know if it's a good book or not. I'm too close to it. What's, what's, what's your take on this? And I looked at it and within a few pages, I was like, dude, I'm sorry, your publisher screwed you because there's no structure here. The table of contents was literally like, it looked like an afterthought, like a thing. Here's what you fill in after you're all done. It's the exact opposite. It'd be like, uh, we're building a house, so I want you to start picking out light fixtures. And like your furniture.

• 42:50Shane Parrish?

  It's like, what are you doing?

• 42:52Speaker 00

  The like, no, your publisher it made a very bad move that wasted you a bunch of time. And now we have to figure out how to structure this. And like, that takes almost as much time as just like rewriting the thing.

• 43:07Shane Parrish?

  The writing is super easy, actually.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:09Shane Parrish?

  Nail the structure, because then let me just do a substructure. Like, what does a chapter look like?

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:13Shane Parrish?

  And then you can sit down and it's really easy at that point.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:16Shane Parrish?

  Sort of write it out. Well, not easy, but you know what I mean.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Right, it's easier. And so it's, I'd imagine it's pretty similar in like songwriting, right? If you don't know the concept of a bridge and a chorus and like all the like these beats, you have, and you're just told, write a song. You're probably gonna write a terrible song. But if you have the structure that you can lean into, it will at least be more representative of what humans process. Similar with stories, right? You talked to a storytelling expert recently. Story structure is always the same, pretty much. It's once upon a time and every day until one day. And because of that, and because of that, and because of that, until finally, and ever since that day, right? Or it's the three act structure, you know, climax, resolution, all that stuff.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  I think the best structures, quite simply, are what the reader wants. What the reader wants and needs. And so you can't get that if you're guessing. You said it yourself. You have the curse of knowledge, of expertise. And so you're so close to your topic. What is remarkable to you is confusing to who you're trying to reach. And what's boring and trite to you is fascinating to who you're trying to reach. And so if you're not having this be an interactive, communal process of producing a book, you're shortchanging yourself. And so this is another like common assumption that people have.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  We all have like the, the idea of Hemingway and J K Rowling in our heads of like, this is how to make a book where they're holed up alone. There being a tortured genius grinding through and like, yeah. That is how you can make a book. If you're a really good writer, you can do that. But I think people should lean more toward Brene Brown's production style, where she actually will come up with like her talking points and rent an Airbnb, bring her girlfriends and a bunch of wine and be like, can I just like present this to you for a day or two? And then they talk about it. They give her feedback and she's like, oh, okay, that works. Similar to stand up comedians, right?

• 45:30Speaker 00

  And so I think the, yeah, the great structures are co-created rather than isolated by the author. Created in isolation.

• 45:43Shane Parrish?

  Man, I wish we had met before I published that book. What about chapters? I mean, in nonfiction books, they seem almost formulaic now.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, they are.

• 45:51Shane Parrish?

  Here's a story. Here's the point I'm trying to make and here's like a summary. You know, that's sort of the, why does that work? And is there a more effective structure?

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Yes, you should lean into a formulaic structure for chapters when you're writing it. And I want to differentiate between writing and editing. Writing is getting the clay on the table. Editing is shaping it into the sculpture, right? And so when you're writing, yes, lean into this structure. You have a hook, something that grabs the reader, usually a story or a bold statement that feels novel or even dangerous, right? Then you have your thesis, which is in this chapter, I'm going to yada, yada, yada. Then you have the body, which is just making up all the points that you're trying to get across. And this can go on for a long time. This is the meat of the chapter.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  And then it's key takeaways and segue into the next chapter. If you follow those five beats, like you have a solid chapter.

• 46:54Shane Parrish?

  Things you know, thesis, body, structure, link.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Takeaways, segue. And you can, you can open the chapter with a hook or I'm sorry, with a quote. That can come before the hook if you want. You can pepper quotes throughout. It doesn't matter. But when you're writing, yeah, follow that formula. There are other slight modifications, but generally speaking, prescriptive nonfiction books tend to fall within that structure very consistently. It's in editing where you can make the chapter really sing. And so like we were talking about video before this, right?

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Similar in video, it's shooting in, okay, I want this act first, I'll shoot this next act, this next act. Just because you have the structure of the story that you're telling in the acts does not mean people want to watch that video, right? You now need to edit it to retain their attention and keep them going through it. And then in a book's case, you're doing the exact same thing with your editing. You're editing it in such a way that they are not only staying engaged, they're taking action and implementing when you want them to implement. They are highlighting stuff, like it feels important. They're maybe even taking pictures of stuff.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  It's like you have these key points that you know, similar to software, when the reader gets here, I know they will do this.

• 48:24Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about editing. So we have, at this point, we've got a cover, we've got a structure, we've got a chapter, and then we have a book. So we have a series of chapters, and so we have a rough draft and rough manuscript. Should we allocate our editing time, like 80% of your editing time? You have 100 blocks of editing, right? Like no matter what, it's a finite amount of editing time. Should you allocate 80% of that to the first like 50 pages? And then, you know, 20% to everything thereafter? So I think it's like the average person, I think Amazon released this once. It's like they read 15% of a book, 16% of a book. And they get all the stats from Kindle, they know exactly where people drop off. Just like YouTube gives you, like, here's the drop-off points.

• 49:08Shane Parrish?

  Spotify does the same thing. Amazon doesn't give that to authors, but there's drop-off points. And so should you allocate your editing time equally across the book or upfront?

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Upfront, 100%, you are correct. It's the YouTube hook, it's the retention graph. It's the exact same with books. And so with a book, if you assume that maybe 60% of readers are going to read the introduction, 100% of people who open the book are going to read the first page of this book. Can I get them to read past this first page and? Seer the message in the stor- the, the best possible story that's the embodiment of what I'm trying to communicate with this book. Can I sear that into their brain so that they can recall it five years later?

• 50:03Speaker 00

  James Clear with Atomic Habits, which is a great example because sold 15 plus million copies over the last few years. Been number one on Amazon overall for five years. Yeah. He starts his intro with a, a, a general recommendation I like to make, which is like, put them in the most intense moment of your life, basically. Put them in, in a situation where they're like, oh my gosh, like you grabbed them by the throat. And it's like, this was a personal thing that I went through. That's the introduction. That's an opening hook. In his case, I think he got hit in the face with a baseball bat and then he was, he had to do like, fight for, fight for life or something like that. I can't remember.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  So you're, you're like, whoa, okay. But that's just the introduction. The, the whole purpose of the introduction is just to sell you on reading the book. That is, it's the sales page convincing you this will be worth my time. Which is, you, you've got smart readers. The thing that they're going to value the most is, is this worth my time? Yeah. Right? And then the first story in chapter one, should be the encapsulation of the message that you're trying to get across. It should be the most memorable. It should be the thing that you're like, oh yeah, of course. And so like, if you look at great TED Talks, uh, Simon Sinek,

• 51:26Speaker 00

  if you just watch the first two minutes of his Start With Why, he does a dead simple, draws three circles that anybody, a five-year-old could remember and then draw and show their friends. Like instantly gets the point across. Similarly, that's, that's what you can aspire to with prescriptive nonfiction. What I think James did so well in Atomic Habits is he front loads the book with the best stuff. And a lot of authors make the mistake, both self-published and traditional. They'll bury the best stuff in the back of the book. And it's like, what percentage of your readers are even getting to that? You know, they'll, they'll start with theory of like, here's how we got here.

• 52:08Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  You know, here's the history of this topic. Can you believe the history of it? Well, guess what? Like, I'm trying to change my life and I'm busy and I have it right.

• 52:18Shane Parrish?

  Make it practical.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Let's go, dude. Yeah, like hit me with your best stuff right here. If you want to spend some time pointing out the stakes of how important this is, cool. Like, let's talk about that and I'll pay attention, but like, I'm on this journey. I signed up, let's go. Don't make me work for it.

• 52:37Shane Parrish?

  I love that.

• 52:40Speaker 02

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• 53:38Shane Parrish?

  We've talked about a lot of numbers. I think so far we've had like 10,000, 100,000, million books. We've used these milestones. How do we think about those in terms of percentiles? So like, what would be a 90th percentile and 99th? And I'm imagining a million is like 0.001%.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  0.003.

• 53:57Shane Parrish?

  Of all books ever published, right? Like, so, so what would be the 90th? Is that like 10,000 copies?

• 54:03Speaker 00

  I'd say 90th is 1,000 copies, probably.

• 54:07Shane Parrish?

  So you're in the 90th percentile of you've sold a thousand copies of your book.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, most books do not sell. There's a great article called No One Buys Books and it breaks down what the Department of Justice forced all the big publishers to like reveal their sales numbers on books. And it was like, oh, wow, this is shocking. These publishers are taking the the funds from books, book royalties that they published 50 years ago to fund all these little projects, right? And the vast majority of them don't sell a damn copy. Part of that is authors neglect marketing and sales and they just kind of like, they don't do it in the right sequence or whatever. Other parts of it is people didn't even want those books, like the market doesn't demand them

• 54:53Speaker 00

  and the book wasn't good enough to take off on its own. And so it's it's a mix of variables. But yeah, like the average book sells less than a thousand copies over the course of its lifetime. And so my focus with clients I work with is like, let's get you to that threshold as efficiently as possible. Anybody can do it if you're doing the right sequence of things. Most authors don't do it. So it would be a thousand for 90%.

• 55:17Shane Parrish?

  Okay, so what's a hundred thousand?

• 55:19Speaker 00

  Hundred thousand, um, that that I would probably put at 90, I I I'm just making this up. I don't know the exact, but like 98, 99% for sure.

• 55:30Shane Parrish?

  All books ever published?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  For sure. There's 500,000 books plus published every year.

• 55:35Shane Parrish?

  That's crazy.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  20 of them sell a million copies and most of those are fiction. You know, nonfiction tends to not move huge volumes.

• 55:44Shane Parrish?

  Have we lost track of sort of like what numbers mean? Like I think of this politically when we toss around billions, but in the context of books, I'm thinking like, people are like 10,000 books. That doesn't sound like many. I got 12,000 Twitter followers, you know, like, how, but it doesn't translate like 10,000 is a lot of books.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  It's a lot of books. Yeah. Especially if you've written one that actually impacts those people that they actually read, that they actually implement and use to get real tangible. Visual change in their life. I mean, that's what ultimately propels these books to do well.

• 56:23Shane Parrish?

  That can be scary too. Like I've gotten two emails now from people who've read the book and they're like, I broke up with my fiance after reading this book.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 56:32Shane Parrish?

  Oh, God.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Well, you you ultimately did them a painful favor, right?

• 56:37Shane Parrish?

  Maybe, but I've been like reading this going, oh, boys, like, what have I done?

• 56:40Speaker 00

  I would I would exalt yourself with that guilt because they'd made that decision already.

• 56:44Shane Parrish?

  But like we talk about inertia and how you take over a relationship.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:48Shane Parrish?

  So you end up just sort of progressing, but you're not consciously progressing, right? And they were like, yeah, I realized like this was just happening. It was like, oh, God, like. So these emails about usefulness, they they don't always put a smile on your face.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  True, but our brains unfortunately are hardwired to pay attention to the negative, right? So a palate cleanser, what what is an email that you were like stoked to get from a reader?

• 57:15Shane Parrish?

  Well, you know, I have this weird thing and just being a little bit vulnerable here, I don't hear compliments. And like my mind.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Like you reject them or they just pass through you or what?

• 57:26Shane Parrish?

  My mind turns off.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 57:27Shane Parrish?

  I'm working on this because I I do want to, I think at some point, like if you want to dive into the roots of it, it's like somebody used it against me or took took it away, rightly. Used it as power, which removed my freedom. If somebody says something nice about you and, you know, you believe it, then you want them to keep thinking that. And so if they're manipulating you, it becomes like a source of power of them over you. Well, this is how I I don't know. Like, I'm working through this because what happens with me is like the minute I think I'm predictive, right? Like the minute I think somebody's saying something nice about me, my brain turns off. Like it literally just passes through. But on the other hand.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  You have a program that says this is not helpful to me. I'm going to.

• 58:09Shane Parrish?

  There's nothing, you know, like, and I might love the person, I might respect them a ton, but like, oh, this is good news. Like, I don't need to hear the good news. But on the other.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  This isn't a self-worth issue. It's literally like, this is not useful to me. No, thanks.

• 58:23Shane Parrish?

  But I have a predatory, almost like instinct when somebody's saying something negative. It's like, what are they saying? Is that true? Is it not true? Like, how can I use this piece of feedback to, is there a hole in my boat? Is there, you know, do I need to? Fix this leak. And so it's like always skewed towards the negative. And I've talked to people about this. Like even James is like, I remember the negative reviews.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Of course, everybody.

• 58:46Shane Parrish?

  Positive reviews.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it is a common thing. I don't want to act like you're, you're completely normal in the front that you pay more attention to the negative than the positive. Are you that way in like sports and stuff? Are you, you'll, you'll only negative, only negative?

• 59:01Shane Parrish?

  It's almost only, yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  I would encourage you to consider, it, it sounds like a super boring book. Have you read the inner game of tennis?

• 59:09Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, a long time ago. Read that again.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Probably, right?

• 59:14Shane Parrish?

  At the wrong time.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, you've seen with kids, right? Like you, you're a dad. So do kids flourish under negativity criticism? Or under reinforced positivity? It's obviously a balance, carrot and stick, but like if it's all stick, it stops to work.

• 59:31Shane Parrish?

  But it doesn't, anyway, I don't want to go too, it doesn't impact my happiness in life, my satisfaction. Like if I see a five star review on Amazon, I'll read it, but it like has no, doesn't spick.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  Or is a part of you like, yeah, yeah, I know.

• 59:46Shane Parrish?

  No, not at all. It was just sort of like, this isn't necessarily useful. And please don't go leave like negative reviews now. Do you want me to read them and like assimilate the? And it works for any compliment in life, right? It could be like, you've hosted a good party. As soon as somebody's like, oh, I had so much fun, like my brain and I'm still paying attention. I'm in the moment, but I'm like, oh, this isn't.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  As long as it's not like a self-worth issue, like one of my best friends, like he, for a long time, he would reject compliments because he was like, you're wrong. You know, like that's not, and so now he has to like, repeat the compliment, sit with it and, but yeah, that's not your case.

• 1:00:26Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about lists. Uh, like a lot of authors have the goal of making the lists, right? So the most common ones being the Wall Street Journalist, which went away, which was a pure bestseller list. For people who don't know, that was statistically the books that sold the most, regardless of publisher, no editorial control. The New York Times list, which is. The only major list now, these days.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  That people think.

• 1:00:53Shane Parrish?

  That people think in their minds.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  That they hold.

• 1:00:55Shane Parrish?

  It's a mark of qualities, right? And that's an editorialized list. And so a lot of people set their goal as like, I want to be a New York Times bestselling author.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  I've helped authors hit the list in various capacities. Some a little bit, some like very intensively. I've had authors come up to me and say, my goal with this book is to hit the New York Times, number one New York Times, sell a million copies and get on Oprah's couch.

• 1:01:22Shane Parrish?

  You are going to be disappointed.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, the joke I make is it'd be easier for you to do six months of therapy instead. Because a lot of I want to hit the list is at its core. I want to be validated as super legit. I want to be picked. You know, it's, it's, it's similar to the traditional publishing in, in some ways for some authors, not all authors, right? But some want to just be picked by the tastemakers and say, you're good.

• 1:01:54Shane Parrish?

  There is a validation.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. There's validation, but I would argue that like, it's, it's so, let's get into the logistics before we get into like the psychology, I guess of it. So I hate hitting the New York Times bestseller list and, and how much effort and logistical headache that comes with it. You have to sell, um, if you, if you're going like in an average time of year, anywhere between probably 10 to 20,000 copies. A safe place to bet is 15,000 copies. So you have to sell 15,000 copies right out of the gate. How many copies did I say the average author sells over the course of their lifetime? Less than a thousand.

• 1:02:40Shane Parrish?

  Most weak sales, 15,000. People try to manipulate it, but you can't.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  It's very difficult to do. You can, but it's very difficult and it's, it's just, uh, it's a pain. Like there are service providers out there who will funnel your bulk orders. Let's say, let's say you do pull it off, right? You sold 15,000 copies. You know, that's times like 30 bucks, right? So you have sold $450,000 worth of books.

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  That's a lot. Now, you have to hand that money to a service provider who will then funnel it through certain retailers who will make it look like they aren't bulk orders and that they're geographically distributed across the United States. They need to couple those 15,000 copies with as many individual addresses as they possibly can and then send those books to those people. That alone is just ridiculous, right? Because you have to, you have to communicate, like, these are legitimate sales. There are other service providers, and I'm reluctant, I'll, I'll say Rory Vaden, he's, he's great. Like, he knows what he's doing. I'm reluctant to mention other service providers because this space of, we'll help you launch your book

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  and hit the New York Times, is filled with people who will charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars and not guarantee a thing. Like, the New York Times is pretty dang sophisticated.

• 1:04:13Shane Parrish?

  Well, they must be on to this, right? Because the worst thing that could happen to them is, like, people gaming the list.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Exactly. Exactly. So they need to have reputable choices. And they, like, they were sued by the author of The Exorcist years ago, and they, there was a big lawsuit. He said, you're, you're withholding, uh, because I'm, I'm out selling, I think, I can't remember his name, but he, he was selling tons of copies and they won the lawsuit because they're like, it's an editorial product. It is not a pure sales list. We get to decide. And so political things can come into consideration with the New York Times and them curating.

• 1:04:52Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  Are you a minority? Are you a doctor? Like, these are actual factors that influence whether you're on the list, allegedly. I don't want to say, like-

• 1:05:02Shane Parrish?

  I guess nobody knows, right? It's like, nobody knows how the Google algorithm works.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  Right. Well, like, at the end of the day, there's humans on the other end being like, should this be on the list or not? I think it was Dave Ramsey who sold 60,000 copies at his launch and didn't hit the list.

• 1:05:18Shane Parrish?

  Well, think of the psychology of money. It never made the New York Times by selling lists.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's happened to a lot.

• 1:05:23Shane Parrish?

  Sold 5 million copies of-

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  Ryan Holiday didn't- Hit number one on New York Times until his ninth book.

• 1:05:29Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I mean, but that he was trying to manipulate this. He was very not not on his book, but he had talked about all the ways he had manipulated media.

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  Oh, for his first book.

• 1:05:39Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, like, why are they going to validate him at that point? You know what I mean? Like, if I'm the New York Times, I'm like, I'm not.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  This is what I've heard. They have screwed over enough politicians and billionaires with their books at this point that they had to come up with a set of criteria that guaranteed you hitting the list. Not necessarily number one, but they can put you at number eight, number 10.

• 1:06:01Shane Parrish?

  What's the criteria? Do you know?

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  The criteria in this, again, is, uh, put a big asterisk of Charlie probably doesn't have this right at all. But it's a certain number of copies sold through certain retail people or retail that geographically maps. It is a percentage of those being eBooks, not audiobooks, eBooks, that have been read a certain percentage.

• 1:06:30Shane Parrish?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  And so you can't just buy a bunch of eBooks and they all register as 0%.

• 1:06:35Shane Parrish?

  Which would actually be a sign of you're manipulating it, right?

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  Correct. Yeah.

• 1:06:39Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  Again, New York Times, they got a budget to set up some sophisticated trackers and they've had this list for many decades. So a mix of traditional PR, legacy PR. So like you're on radio, newspaper, TV shows that are hitting a certain number of regions in the United States. You're hitting all these markets. Okay, that tracks to the number of sales that you have. Digital, a certain number of, and this is this pure guesswork, but like a certain number of blog articles that have come out, a certain number of podcasts that have come out, a certain number of Facebook engagements, Twitter engagements, like, and I mean comments and reshares,

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  not just like likes, right? And so it has to basically map, they have to be able to see on a holistic level, is all this tracking with the minimum number of sales that we require? Ali Abdaal, I don't know how many copies he sold, but it was it was under fifteen thousand at his launch. It was a lot, but it was under like the general recommended. This is the other thing you have to take into account is which month are you are you releasing the book? If you pick December, like my client Codie Sanchez, who is, you know, very confident she can hit it. But I was like, dude, like, this is the worst month you could pick because you have to sell double. It's a book buying. Book sales. Yeah.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  Whereas August is like for nonfiction. Atomic Habits will sell fifty thousand copies that month and like it's been out for five years. Good luck hitting number one in December. Yeah. Selling twenty thousand copies versus fifty thousand, it's exponentially harder. That doesn't guarantee you anything either, right? Like twenty thousand. You can do as much as you possibly can.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, you're right. Things, things go wrong too. Not everybody's publisher is like keen on you working with these service providers who who do these services. It's so much and I think it's just kind of not worth it. And so that's one of the, one of the reasons frankly, I like the self-published route is you don't have to play that game at all. Like it is a political logistical nightmare. And I will say to people who hit the list, like, congrats, it's hard to do. And you're probably going to make whatever investment you made into hitting that list back. But it won't be because of the list. It will not be because of the New York, it will be correlative.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  In other words, all the marketing that you had to do to get it on there marketed you in your business and you will reap the benefits of that. There's a great video by Anna David about the, called The Truth about hitting the New York Times bestseller list. She's hit it and she's like, it was the brokest I ever was. You know, I, I think she wrote a, she wrote a memoir, I think. And she was basically like, look, it didn't change my life. I eat out on the title and whenever I can, you know, and I'll, I'll say it for the rest of my life. It's a legit credential.

• 1:09:45Shane Parrish?

  So I made it.

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Shane Parrish?

  Congrats. Through luck, right? Like just totally didn't.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:51Shane Parrish?

  Didn't follow the publisher's advice on like how to go about it. Had a big list.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:09:56Shane Parrish?

  You know, sort of just marketed it to the list, but didn't do bulk orders. Just said, hey, you buy one copy, we'll give you the preorder bonuses, not by 10 or a hundred or a thousand. Like it was just sort of low key and I was.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 1:10:07Shane Parrish?

  If I make it, I make it. And if I don't, like I can hold my head high.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  What was your number? How many did you sell?

• 1:10:13Shane Parrish?

  I'm not gonna reveal that.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Oh, can you give a range?

• 1:10:15Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Shane Parrish?

  But so like I made it and the only change that I saw really, and you're right, like you do all the work beforehand. Like I did all the work when I was like, what's the key message of this book? Like, how do I market that to my audience? How do I get people to read it? How do I write a good book? And the only thing that really changed was the distribution in the physical stores. They moved it from like the shelf of like new to like a New York Times section for like a week or two.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Shane Parrish?

  And then it like goes back to the whatever. I think we made it twice or maybe three times. I think it was twice. I felt good about it. Like that was something where I was like, oh, I have this, this thing that I can't, I didn't know you could buy it. Like I, I can't buy, somebody's given me this thing and for the rest of my life, I'll forever be sort of like a New York Times bestselling author, which is kind of cool, but it doesn't, you know, my signature block in my email doesn't say like, you know, Times bestselling author. It's just shame.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  Right. There's a clip of Jim Carrey where he goes up and he's, he's introducing an award and he's like, I'm two time Emmy winning Jim Carrey. And he's like, when I dream at night, I think about being three time Emmy winning Jim Carrey because then I'd be enough.

• 1:11:33Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  And so I think it's, it's a cool credential. Like you can, you can add it to your thing or to your list, but.

• 1:11:42Shane Parrish?

  I will say the traditional publishers.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Shane Parrish?

  Cody's with portfolio, right? So like they definitely push you to, to try not to, I would say they don't cross the line in terms of like manipulating it, but they're definitely trying for you to hit that list. I don't know if internally they have some sort of. Incentive or bonus or something if their authors had it, but they definitely like, they give me a whole bunch of ideas. And I was like, I don't like that. I don't think that's like high integrity. I don't, you know, it might be right, but it's not something I want to do. I don't feel comfortable with it. So like, I rejected a lot of the, the things that they were sort of trying to get me to do. And they weren't crossing a line into like illegal. It was just things that made me uncomfortable.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Shane Parrish?

  Like, yeah, it's like, well, if I was the New York Times, I'd just put myself in their shoes. I was like, and I knew I was doing this. That's probably detrimental to their thought process on an editorialized list where it's like, they're trying to come up. You know, I'm like, what are the reasons that they would exclude you? But what are the reasons they would want to include you too?

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  And yeah.

• 1:12:45Shane Parrish?

  We, I didn't put a ton of thought into it, but I'm lucky because I have a big audience that I've built up over a number of years. So it's a lot easier for me to, to do that.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  Right. And well, like think your, your brand has a, has a prestigious reputation, right? Like Farnham Street is known as kind of catering to a very smart audience. The New York Times, that's like a good association with them, right? And so I'm not saying that's why they put you on the list necessarily, but certainly it's something they took into consideration of like, oh, they're showing.

• 1:13:17Shane Parrish?

  I actually love to see like, any book, little in mind, but like, watch the algorithm in process, right? And people involved that like, what are the considerations? That'd be fascinating to watch. It'll never be revealed.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  It would be. And but like at the, the, the whole, my whole feeling on these lists is like, you're not writing it for the list. You know, it's like you don't, you don't make a movie to win a trophy. You don't play a sport to win a trophy. Like you do it because it matters to the people that you're trying to serve.

• 1:13:48Shane Parrish?

  Am I helpful to the reader?

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  Right. And I don't think hitting the list equals you will get stronger visibility and reach more people for, for any significant period of time. The list is a byproduct. Uh, it should be a byproduct. You can do stuff at launch and you should, and like, I don't advocate not doing your best at your launch. But it's kind of like how Bo Burnham's like. If you can live your life without being famous, you should. I think if you can write and publish a book without chasing a New York Times bestseller list or any list, you should.

• 1:14:20Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, you shouldn't be chasing anything, right?

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  Right. Just your haters. How do I serve?

• 1:14:25Shane Parrish?

  The best book possible for me.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:14:27Shane Parrish?

  As a writer, how do you see the impact of AI?

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  The cost of writing dropped 10,000% with the advent of AI, which like historically it's been over a hundred dollars for, you know, writers to write.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  And then it just dropped precipitously. A few years ago, when ChatGPT came out, I would stay up after I put my kids to bed and I would just see what it could do. And it became very clear, very quickly that, hey, this isn't a great writer. It can be kind of an okay editor. Where I had an unlock was realizing, oh, it's really good at cleaning up transcripts. And if you give it a clean input, a clean structured input, it can do some crazy stuff.

• 1:15:20Shane Parrish?

  So take this and make it into a chapter.

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So now, the, not to plug my stuff or anything, but I developed a process called first draft in a week, where we overindex on structure. We get all the clay on the table as efficiently as possible. By using AI on the backend, like there's no interfacing with it, but like you feed it the right transcript.

• 1:15:44Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  And it will just spit out a book following all these prompts I've laid out using Zapier and ChatGPT and Claude and Airtable and all this stuff. But it's like magic. It's magic. It's, and there's been these book in a weekend programs forever and they produce garbage. The way people are thinking about AI right now, I've found in publishing, there's two camps. There's one that's like sticks up their nose at it. They're like, it's a parlor trick, it's garbage. And to those people, I say, you don't know what you're doing with it. You haven't experimented enough to make that claim. If you're making that claim. I guarantee you, you have not put in the hours and run the experiments.

• 1:16:24Speaker 00

  To the others who are AI enthusiasts, they're like, let's strip away the creative process entirely and generate books in 15 minutes. And it's also a disaster because they're going off minimal inputs. And they're like, fill out a form and you can create a book. Isn't that great? It's like, no, it's embarrassingly bad because AI sucks as a writer. It's not a good writer.

• 1:16:50Shane Parrish?

  I don't know if I agree with that, and I'll tell you why. So I put two paragraphs in Clear Thinking that are completely AI-generated. My editor couldn't tell, and to date, no reader has correctly guessed the paragraphs that are completely generated by AI.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  Keyword paragraphs.

• 1:17:07Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  You didn't write a chapter?

• 1:17:09Shane Parrish?

  No, I did it just as like a fun, because I thought it would be like a nice Easter egg sort of thing.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  That's my point. Yes, it works for a paragraph or two or three even. But once it hits a certain point, it stops being good. And you can run it through zero GPT.com and it will show you this percent was written by AI.

• 1:17:27Shane Parrish?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:17:28Speaker 00

  It can tell. And the data on this is readers will, as soon as they detect it's AI, their retention drops in half.

• 1:17:37Shane Parrish?

  If the exact same paragraph is presented to a reader, I say it's AI-generated, the retention drops.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  Not if you say it, if they detect it.

• 1:17:45Shane Parrish?

  Oh, if they detect it.

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. You have read blog posts and articles, I'm sure, where you're like, oh, this is AI.

• 1:17:51Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, a lot of them now.

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, exactly. And so if it doesn't feel human, if it doesn't feel conversational and accessible, people won't read it. And so that's what I mean by it's a bad writer. It can do a little bit. It can't do the whole thing.

• 1:18:06Shane Parrish?

  Where do you see this going though? Because I mean, this is the worst it's ever gonna get at writing.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. I honestly, I don't know if it'll be able to thread the needle for hundreds of pages. I don't. I, I, I'm not sure. But for now, what I do know is you can produce a book that is conversational and accessible, written entirely by a human being, but leveraging AI in the Right way to produce it 90% faster, at 90% less.

• 1:18:33Shane Parrish?

  So how do we leverage AI for writing? I mean, with my kids, I'm like, you need to do the work yourself. And you could submit what you wrote to AI and be like, where's it weak? Where's it like, what am I missing?

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Shane Parrish?

  And I keep the full history because I'm like, if I ever have to go to the school and sort of like argue. Because the school is like anti AI. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. So you're growing up and this is like telling me not to use Google.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  Don't use calculators.

• 1:18:57Shane Parrish?

  And so I'm like, you can, but I need the full chat history.

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:00Shane Parrish?

  So that if I ever have to go to the school, it's like, here's what you submitted. Here's what happened. But like, how do we leverage AI from a writing point of view today?

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  The ways that I have found that I really like are for idea generation, structured suggestions. I'll often tell ChatGPT or Claude, which Claude, by the way, I've found is the strongest editor, but it's not perfect.

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  I'll say, interview me on this one question at a time for up to five rounds. Until you can come up with the strongest, whatever I'm going for. Because people I think are either not very good at, or just don't want to go through the whole process of laying out, here's the precise context. AI is way better at like, let's pinpoint precisely what I need to do a decent job. So if you want to draft something, I would do that as the precursor move. It will yield better results pretty consistently. My favorite use is what I baked my process around is cleaning up transcripts. Because conversational is eight times faster than sitting and typing.

• 1:20:17Speaker 00

  And it is, very rarely do people get talker's block. They get writer's block all the time because the reason people say, but I'm such a better writer than I am a speaker. It's like, yeah, because you get to edit while you write. And you're so much slower too. And you're also hitting imposter syndrome, perfectionism. You're hitting these emotional landmines that are effectively emergency breaks on your process. So I say, do it conversationally, but structure it. And then use AI to clean up those transcripts and retain it in your words. You can crush with putting out content.

• 1:20:55Shane Parrish?

  That's crazy.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56Shane Parrish?

  One thing people don't understand about AI that I. Teach the kids is like, you can actually get AI to generate a prompt for you that you can feed into AI.

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Shane Parrish?

  I found this better because I'm like summarize a podcast. And I'm like, well, I'm writing, you know, summarize a podcast four word prompt. And I was like, well, one day I was like, okay, well, you need to write me a prompt on what matters that I can feed into AI somewhere. And it writes back like five or six sentences and it's like a way better job.

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:25Shane Parrish?

  Summarizing the podcast and what I was doing. What have you learned about prompting?

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, that's precisely what I do too. I say, give me the ideal prompt that will achieve this outcome. That's, that's really like AI is better at communicating with itself than you are. So just prompt it to do. I think the key is, is like, people just don't tend to experiment with this stuff. I think we're probably in a small segment of society that actually is like, a lot of people have used chat GPT. They know about it, et cetera. But it kind of in the same way that a lot of people know about Bitcoin. People aren't actively using it all the time. There, you might be around people who are, but the vast majority of people aren't.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  And so I, I don't know, we're in such an exciting, unique time where it's like, all you have to do is play around with this stuff on a regular basis. Like, that's all you have to do. Just see if you can like break it or impress yourself or whatever. And exciting things come from that.

• 1:22:24Shane Parrish?

  Let's switch gears to marketing. What strategies are most effective when it comes to marketing?

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  Most authors lose at marketing because they, they miss their shot during the production process to like sow the seeds with their readers. Here's the typical journey of a, of a self-published author releasing a book in the eyes of their friends. Their friends receive an email one day. Hey, I wrote a book. It's out today. Please buy it. Please review it. Please share with your friends. And their friends are like, where the hell is this coming from? Haven't heard from you or their business contacts. And so no one takes any action because all of a sudden it's just being thrust upon them that you're in charge of my success person that I haven't really connected with at all. And has no idea, right? And has no idea that I'm making this book or why they should even care.

• 1:23:14Speaker 00

  There's zero emotional investment into the book. And so I say, most authors lose because they could have been co-creators with their readers. They could have done really simple, easy things that would make the reader feel like, oh, this is just as much mine as it is the author's. Send a survey to your list and say, I'm writing a book on this topic. What are the two questions that you have on this? That if I answered them, it would make it worthwhile. Or what are the two biggest pain points you have in relation to this? The two things that you're most stuck on, that if I helped you with this, it would be amazing. That's an easy one to start with, right? Another, and just announcing it and like hinting at it.

• 1:24:00Speaker 00

  Movie studios do this, you know? They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on movies. How, it's never like, hey, the movie's out right now. You should go see The Dark Knight. It's like, no, they teased like little behind the scenes photos. They had little whispers the whole time. And then you finally got the trailer and the trailer was a big event, but the movie's still not coming out for months. There's this whole buildup of building anticipation and teasing and whispering that authors neglect. And so you could also send out, hey, here are some title concepts I'm thinking about. Can you vote on these, right? Get them involved in that. You don't have to do pick food. That's another alternative you can do. Hey, I just got my, I'm thinking about doing a cover. This is where I'm at.

• 1:24:45Speaker 00

  Like just sharing updates and being like, this is where I am in the process of this.

• 1:24:51Speaker 00

  Even sharing like, oh, today was horrible. This went wrong. Like they're not on the journey with you at all unless you are sharing those types of things. And it's normal to want to resist those during the creation process, but it's a lost opportunity. Right? Because you could be letting them in on showing how hard you're working on this. Or, or showing that you value.

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  What they care about. You could be using helpthisbook.com, which is a service for beta readers where you can upload chapters or your whole manuscript and see data on what they found confusing, what they found valuable, insightful, boring. You can see with very clear data where they're dropping off in those chapters. Right? You can, you can show them multiple cover concepts and have them vote.

• 1:25:40Shane Parrish?

  Do you think, I love the idea of going out and being like, hey, I'm writing on this topic. What are the two things that I need to include or what are the biggest problems you face here? Do you think you can do that at a chapter level or do you do that at a

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 1:25:52Shane Parrish?

  So you, oh, I have a chapter on focus. Like, what are the?

• 1:25:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. My point being, the more involved you can get your community into them feeling like, man, this is really a thing, the easier promotion is because when, when you, when you pre-launch, they're buying copies of your book. They're actually talking about it. They're like, this is, I've been so excited about this for months and like, it's a natural thing. It doesn't feel weird. It doesn't feel forced. They're like in it with you.

• 1:26:24Shane Parrish?

  So we have pre-launch, we have launch, and then we have post. So like, what do I do during launch and what do I do post-launch? Do you sort of make the book evergreen or constantly like bring it up without being obnoxious?

• 1:26:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I'll define pre-launch to,

• 1:26:40Shane Parrish?

  You're building up hype. You're like, the movie hasn't come out. You got the trailer. You got people invested. And then launch, like the movie's out this week. The movie is out right now, today.

• 1:26:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50Shane Parrish?

  What changes from a marketing perspective?

• 1:26:53Speaker 00

  I'm, I'll, I'll answer that. I just want to make one point about the pre-launch and the launch. These are the two windows where sales will spike. So the announcement of the book, basically that it's up for sale, and then the announcement that it's officially live. Those have the two highest conversion rates for sales. So authors need to optimize for those by offering, you know, basically,

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  There's a saying, it's people will buy what you're selling when you start selling what people are buying. If you can package buying multiple books with services or products that you know people are already buying from you, it makes it easier for you to sell a bunch of books during those windows.

• 1:27:33Shane Parrish?

  Basically, it's easier to sell a lot of books at once than one book at a time.

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  And to couple it with something that you know people value and purchase. So like coaching calls. You can just package those with buying three to 10 books or whatever. During the pre-launch, it's having that infrastructure set up so that they can buy more than one copy, basically. And then sending emails just leading up to it and then closing it out. It's, it's, it is boring product launch.

• 1:28:02Shane Parrish?

  It's like the X's and O's, like blocking and tackling.

• 1:28:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just setting, setting up those emails and seeing them through.

• 1:28:10Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Speaker 00

  And it's similar with the launch, but my philosophy on launches is if you're self-published, if you do not care about lists, your launch should be your victory lap.

• 1:28:22Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  It should be the least stressful week. The pre-launch is, is where you determine like, hey, I'm, I'm going to set a, a goal that's modest, but it's, it's a bit of a stretch. I'm going to hit it. And I'm going to go into launch week knowing I sold a thousand or 2,000 copies or 500 copies, whatever. And when you get to launch week, it should be a celebration.

• 1:28:45Shane Parrish?

  Not stressed.

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  Right. You're not stressed. It's, you just achieved a huge milestone.

• 1:28:49Shane Parrish?

  I know so many people who watch like launch week at like every minute of like, they're so stressed.

• 1:28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's horrible. An intellectual baby has come out of your body and you're like yelling at it to like grow up, you know, like be a fully formed adult. And it's like, dude, like celebrate, like this is, this should be a blissful week that you're celebrating with friends, with family, with peers. You just hit a bucket list item that most people never accomplish, celebrate. And so that's my emphasis during launch week. You can do an event. And if you want it to be a big thing, if you don't, doesn't matter, but I, I. I firmly believe the launch week should be as enjoyable and low stress as possible.

• 1:29:34Shane Parrish?

  And so what about post-launch? So like the book came out, it's like a week later now. How do I, as an author, published with a publishing house or self-published? How do I remind people that already know about the book, that the book still exists, that I haven't bought maybe? Or how do I let new people know about it without being like, I think we've all been on those email lists where we get like 30 emails about a book. And it's like, I got the hint, you know, like create products you want to consume. So like if you got 10 emails about my book and like they were dedicated emails with no other value add. Like I wouldn't want that as a review.

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:30:12Shane Parrish?

  And so like, how do we do this subtly? Like who does this really well? Like what can we learn from them?

• 1:30:18Speaker 00

  The launch week, the only metric I care about is reviews. Is hit, hit a certain number of reviews based on the number of copies. So 1% of copies you have out in the world, try and aim for that number of reviews.

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  It's a good metric because then you lay the foundation for the book converting indefinitely.

• 1:30:40Speaker 00

  Or converting well. So what do you do to, to set up kind of an evergreen system? You, you set it, uh, which is set up an email sequence, but have actual value from the book be delivering it. So it should be like standalone stuff from the book. So for Play It Away, um, I set up a 10 day series. Helping people who are struggling with anxiety and I've restructured parts of the book so that the quickest wins were first. So it was like, I know somebody who's anxious, all they want to start is give me a pill.

• 1:31:21Speaker 00

  So I'll recommend the couple of supplements that actually make a difference when you're in that state. And then we're going to go on to a little bit bigger stuff and it's going to be a 10 day journey, taking them from zero to hero. And in each email, I mentioned this is excerpted from the book.

• 1:31:36Shane Parrish?

  See, I like that because it's like, I'm offering value. It's a subtle, it's not overbearing. It's not sort of like, buy this book right now.

• 1:31:44Speaker 00

  It's an automation sequence so that I added it to a blog post that was doing really well for years. And so I think 30,000 people or something went through that series as this excerpted from the book. I think it was like every third email, I would be like, if this was helpful, this is from Play It Away. If you wouldn't mind leaving a review, that'd be great. I have a three times higher conversion rate from sales to reviews than a typical book because of that.

• 1:32:12Shane Parrish?

  Interesting.

• 1:32:13Speaker 00

  And it's sold plenty of books too. So I think it's just you, you set up that system that's effectively like a car wash that cleanses the person who signed up and introduces them to the best parts of the book and encourages them to grab a copy if they want. But then you move on. It's in your ecosystem now. So you should be focused on, let's keep creating and let's keep doing stuff. And you can be the person who keeps pounding the drum, the same drum for years and years, but like most creatives have other things they want to say. So let opportunities kind of come to you. Keep putting yourself out there, but move on, you know, to like that, that is my philosophy.

• 1:32:55Shane Parrish?

  What I kind of like about books and podcasts, at least if they're done in a certain way is that you do all the, you fight upfront, you do all the work.

• 1:33:04Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:05Shane Parrish?

  You launch, you have your systems and processes in place. You can go, you can earn money while you sleep at that point. Like this conversation, hopefully people are listening to it in 10 years. All the work's done, all the editing is done, all the costs are already incorporated. And then hopefully it just like. Keeps adding value to people, but you do that by not talking about topical things, by sort of being classical. What else do you think goes into like creating an everlasting book? Obviously, content matters. Your structure matters, title matters, but like, what makes a book shareable?

• 1:33:39Speaker 00

  I wrote an article that basically breaks down the 12 tests that consistently determine whether a book will sell a million copies or not. It's not comprehensive, but it's gives a good idea. The big ones are, like, does this transform the reader in a visible way that other people want to talk about and ask about? This is why a lot of diets will take off is because it literally changes the body of the person in such a remarkable way.

• 1:34:10Shane Parrish?

  Wait, oh, let me tell you about this diet I just tried.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  Right. I'm doing carnivore, I'm doing keto, I'm doing blah. And it's like, which diet's right? It doesn't, it doesn't matter. They all transform the person. Like, even David Goggins' book, Can't Hurt Me, which is a great book just on its own, but he used exercises in there and inspired people to do what he does. And so they would physically transform. I saw this consistently with a lot of books. It's like, do they provide a a quick transformation that the reader wants to talk about and the people around them can't help but notice and talk about?

• 1:34:47Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:34:47Speaker 00

  The other things are, has this kind of hit a zeitgeist of where it's kind of a contrarian message during a time of peak people grappling with this? It's kind of unexpected, or it goes against what most other books are saying. So let me give an example. So I thought Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art, came out at a time of peak social media awareness that this is creating a lot of mental health issues. It's like, it's too much. It felt like too much. It felt like it was finally under the, under.

• 1:35:32Speaker 00

  The microscope of like, how bad is this problem really? And Mark came in with a proven mass market product, Buddhism. And he millennialized that. He made it through, here's what's happening in the zeitgeist right now. I don't know how intentional he was around like, this is the zeitgeist. I think he hit at a perfect time for that book. It was similar to like, one of my buddies and a long, longtime clients, Tucker Max. He came out with, I hope they serve beer in hell at a time of kind of like, peak college partying awareness, I guess. No one had done that type of book before. It was like contrarian for its time.

• 1:36:15Speaker 00

  And so it was novel and unique in a way.

• 1:36:18Shane Parrish?

  I almost wonder if you could, maybe this is a great idea for people listening who are looking for book ideas. Like go back to like the 1920s, 1930s, like what are the bestselling books? How do I take that concept and sort of like reposition it for today's world? Where we have the core concept that still exists, which is timeless. Like you filter for sort of like Buddhism or something that like this is enduring. It'll be talked about every, I don't know, 100 years, 30, 40, 50 years. Like go back and then you take that concept and then you write about it now. But you're really just positioning the exact same thing for today's world.

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  It's possible. The challenge with it is the zeitgeist changes faster than her now. And it's, it can be kind of a dangerous game to play the topical thing, but I hear you. If you can root it in timelessness, this is, this was one of the tests I say, is it timely and timeless?

• 1:37:11Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:37:12Speaker 00

  So like Mark's book wouldn't have worked if it wasn't rooted in a timeless concept. People who write about like Trump, you know, when he was in office in like a tell all. Sales go up, fall crashing down and never return ever again. You gotta balance it with.

• 1:37:29Shane Parrish?

  So what else goes into making a book shareable? You had a list of things.

• 1:37:34Speaker 00

  Again, is the author the embodiment of the message? I think there's a lot of books out there where the author, and this is part of the problem with the creation process, if they isolate themselves. The author's trying to project that there's somebody that they're not. They're hyper aware that this is going to be read by people. And so they want to put on this false bravado and act like they've achieved more than they have. And it's like, no one wants that. It's boring. We, humans have really good BS detectors. We can tell when you're effectively lying to yourself.

• 1:38:09Shane Parrish?

  We sense it, right? And not even consciously, like we know when somebody's walking towards us and they're sort of like suspicious.

• 1:38:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Shane Parrish?

  And we're not consciously paying attention to it. We just feel it, but the same way we feel like it comes across, but not in a way that is necessarily quantifiable.

• 1:38:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:38:24Shane Parrish?

  But you feel it when you read it. Same as like, oh, I feel this is AI generated, even if I don't go to like this. I can't prove it, but I feel it. And the minute I feel it, I discount it.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. And one of the guys who's really interesting to watch in YouTube videos is Jordan Peterson, because he'll say something and you'll watch him check in with how he feels about what he just said. And he's like, that didn't feel authentic. Like you can see him being like, that wasn't authentic. And he'll pivot and say it in a way that he's like, that's truthful to me. It may not be the truth, right? But it's truthful to him. A lot of the stuff he says, it feels solid, right? And substantive.

• 1:39:06Shane Parrish?

  What are the, maybe a different direction on this is like, what are the tips and tricks that you see? Authors doing today that you're like, oh, that's really clever.

• 1:39:14Speaker 00

  The last time I was like, oh, that's, that's a clever way to go about that. Interesting. Was seeing Oprah and Tim Ferriss produce books that were interview based.

• 1:39:28Shane Parrish?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:29Speaker 00

  You know, Tools of Titans, and I forget, Oprah, I think has done a couple like. Like this and maybe that format was common before, but I just didn't notice it. I don't really know. I remember thinking that was a very clever way to produce a book that was fun, sustainable.

• 1:39:47Speaker 00

  And not a huge, heavy lift. I think it's a really hard to pull off for the average person. You've got to be a media. You have to have an audience, like listening to your interviews for you sort of do that. Exactly. I've seen other people try and do that and it doesn't, it doesn't really work. It's kind of very small segment that can do that. I, you know, I've been most impressed, Ryan Holiday and I, we started our careers at the same time and we're kind of on, we were kind of on similar tracks. He's always wanted to be an author. I've always wanted to be just like an entrepreneur who does creative things. I've just been super impressed just watching him through the years. It's been awesome to see his like just steady beat of the drum, coming out with books. Book a year.

• 1:40:33Speaker 00

  And what was, what people don't necessarily know or remember about him is he started writing marketing books. Yeah. And I think to this point, he's written like three, maybe four marketing books and they just don't perform as well. What he did though, was he created a category for himself with stoicism with kind of a dead or obscure topic and he revitalized it and. We were just talking about that, like going back, taking a subject and like putting it in position for today's world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Somebody might be able to do that for epicureanism. Who knows? But I thought it was a really cool to watch him test, test, notice that that's a thing.

• 1:41:17Speaker 00

  And then basically create this blue ocean category for himself. That would be like the ultimate tip and trick. And that's actually on my list is, does this create or revitalize a category? And so if you can do that, it's like winner take all scenario. Tim Ferriss did this with lifestyle design. Right. And so like. Tons of other books came out after him on lifestyle design and businesses, but he'd already won because he'd like named that thing. It was a new thing. Lululemon did it with athleisure.

• 1:41:52Shane Parrish?

  Mark did it with the subtle art too, because remember all those books came out after with like fuck in the title?

• 1:41:57Speaker 00

  Right. He created a category that swears on the cover.

• 1:42:00Shane Parrish?

  Yes.

• 1:42:01Speaker 00

  He was the first that I noticed that did that. Creating a category is difficult and there's a good book by these guys called The Category Pirate. It's called the 22, I think it's called the 22 Laws of Positioning, or it might be the 22 Laws of Category Design. That book, I think, was really smart of them to write because category design is super important. Positioning is super important. It's not intuitive. It's not easy. It's similar to like coming up with a book title where you're like, I know this is the most important thing I could do.

• 1:42:37Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:37Speaker 00

  I, it's not something you can just snap and figure out. You gotta really sit with it.

• 1:42:42Shane Parrish?

  Just don't sit down and, I mean, I don't anyway.

• 1:42:45Speaker 00

  Right. It comes with a lot of experimentation and I think that's the ultimate tip and trick. Experiment in public, see what hits and once you've found an oil well, just drill.

• 1:42:56Shane Parrish?

  Keep going.

• 1:42:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:57Shane Parrish?

  Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. We always end with the same question, which is, what is success to you?

• 1:43:03Speaker 00

  It would have been a different answer several years ago, but success to me now is just a house full of love with my kids, for sure. My kids and my wife, and that is my daily marker of success.

• 1:43:17Shane Parrish?

  What changed? You had kids or something?

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  I had kids. I had kids. For a long time I was just career focused. I felt like I was good at what I did. And then I had these narratives around having kids pulling me off of that track and,

• 1:43:33Speaker 00

  yeah, it's just realigned my values.

• 1:43:42Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. Recently, I've started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview after the interview. I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me, and I also talk about other connections to episodes and sort of what's got me pondering that I maybe haven't quite figured out. This is available to supporting members of The Knowledge Project. You can go to fs.blog/membership, check out the show notes for a link, and you can sign up today. And my reflections will just be available in your private podcast feed. You'll also skip all the ads at the front of the episode.

• 1:44:28Shane Parrish?

  The Frontam Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear. Until next time.