227 How to Write a Book to 10x Your Income with Tucker Max

"Life is hard, so don't expect something else." - Tucker Max If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at http://lewishowes.com/227. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 227 on how to write a book with Tucker Max.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to the podcast. My name is Lewis Howes and thank you so much for being here. If you are a regular on the School of Greatness podcast listening, then thank you for coming back. And if you're brand new here, then thank you as well for being here and I hope you stick around and make sure to subscribe to me over on iTunes. We've got an awesome guest today. His name is Tucker Max and he came on about a year ago. We talked about book marketing and today we're talking about a couple of things. One, he launched a business a year ago on my podcast and now has done over a million dollars in sales on accident essentially from starting his business on the School of Greatness podcast. So it's a pretty interesting case study. We talked for the first few minutes about what happened

• 1:15Lewis Howes?

  once he mentioned something he was thinking about doing and how it blew up instantly and made him over a million dollars in the last year from the launching it on the School of Greatness podcast. So that's pretty cool. If you guys want to hear a case study there about what being on the show can do for your business. And then secondly, we talk about how to write a book. So if you're an entrepreneur, a coach, a speaker, an expert, you're a lawyer, a financial advisor, you've got some type of expertise and you're thinking about writing a book. We talk about the different ways to go about it. We talk about self-publishing it. We talk about doing an ebook. We talk about how to find a ghostwriter to help you write the book. We talk about going for a traditional publisher, which takes a couple of years

• 2:00Lewis Howes?

  and all the time and money and investment it takes in that. And we cover really how to write a book in a couple of short months with only using a few hours of your time. Creating something that can 5 to 10x your business by doing it. And Tucker's developed a system that he shares with you on this podcast. He gives you the system that you can do it yourself. And I think it's pretty powerful. So I hope you guys enjoy this episode. If you're thinking about writing a book, or if you've ever thought about it, this is the episode for you. And if you have a friend who is an expert and wants to increase their income or their business and their expertise and their authority with a book, then make sure to send them to LewisHowes.com/227

• 2:44Lewis Howes?

  and share this with your friends online. Because this is going to be a powerful episode for everyone who's interested. And without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into this episode. I'm so excited to share with you on how to write a book to help you 10x your income and your business with the one, the only Tucker Max.

• 3:04Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about our guest today. He's a good friend. He's been on the show once or twice at least.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Once.

• 3:12Lewis Howes?

  It's once, okay. No, actually, you've been on twice.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's right. You split it into two episodes.

• 3:17Lewis Howes?

  Double episodes. So welcome Tucker Max to the show.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. I'm happy to be back, Lewis.

• 3:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, man. This is the third time. So the last time we did one about kind of your journey from your writing days with the books that you did and also just your lifestyle from now, you know, not being in that lifestyle anymore with all the craziness that you did with the late nights, the drinking, the ladies and all that. We talked about why you stopped it all, The Changemaker. And then we did another one on how to write and market a book and become a bestseller. Because you've written two, we've had three books on the New York Times Bestseller List at the same time, right?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:59Lewis Howes?

  And only like two other people in the history of the world have ever done that.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  For nonfiction, yeah. Me, Knocking Gladwell, and Michael Lewis.

• 4:05Lewis Howes?

  So you've got a lot of experience in writing books. You've got, you know, how many books total have you written now?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Well, so counting the book that we just did for Book in a Box, it's five.

• 4:15Lewis Howes?

  Five books that you've done and three were New York Times bestsellers, right?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it was the, yes, uh, one of them was not released. It was like sort of a free ebook. So like, you know, it couldn't be. And then Book in a Box, uh, the Book in a Box book is, was a number one Amazon bestseller, but not like, we didn't put it in bookstore, so.

• 4:33Lewis Howes?

  Nice. Okay, cool. And, um, how many books would you say you've sold for your own titles?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Three million.

• 4:40Lewis Howes?

  Three million books?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:42Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy. What do you think was, what do you think is the key to selling millions of copies of your books?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Uh, dude, I tell every author the same thing. You want to sell a lot of books, you have to write a book that people want to read. Plain and simple. That's it. Like, everything else is details.

• 4:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, if it's a crappy book, then no, no, no one's gonna want to read it, so.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  You have to read a book, you have to write a book that other people care about, that helps them in some way, shape or form, that brings value to them. Cause why else would they spend money on something?

• 5:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. It's almost like you don't need to have, you know, a lot of people focus on this marketing plan, but it's almost like, I think of guys like Robert Greene. He has like zero marketing plan for all of his books, and they just sell millions of copies because they're amazing books and they're done really well. Wouldn't you agree?

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yep, definitely.

• 5:27Lewis Howes?

  But he's not like this marketing guru or has some big launch. He's just like, okay, it's out, you know?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I mean, that's, uh, actually, Ryan Holiday and I did the marketing for Mastery.

• 5:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Uh, for him. And, and it was like very casual. It was like, okay, like, uh, we, we did some stuff, but it was mainly just doing stuff with people like, uh, you know, like people like you or whatever. Where it's like, hey, I'm gonna go on your show. I'm gonna talk about what I do, what my book is. And then people buy it or they don't. And then more people buy it because everyone that buys it, reads it, loves it and tells their friends.

• 5:57Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. That's it. So that's really the secret is write a great book and the rest is details. Uh, but we decided to bring you back on because you told me, it was like a week or two ago. So we did this, we did this episode, episode 78, where you were like, hey, we're, we're thinking about doing this thing, where we help authors write their books and market it for them.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:18Lewis Howes?

  And, you know, help them get the traction and sell thousands of copies and become experts and have better authority. And the struggle is, we get so many authors that reach out to me that ask for advice, and they never write books, or it takes them three years, and they go back and forth with publishers. They don't know what to do. And so you decided to launch this thing.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Called Book in a Box. Yep. And um. We launched it on your podcast. It wasn't even a confirmed idea. It was like an opt-in, right? It was like. We were testing, like we testing one person at the time and we weren't sure it works. And then I went on your podcast and I remember dude, I remember how it happened. I think what happened was you were talking about writing your book and like how you're dyslexic. So it's so hard for you. And so I'm like, hey, I'm doing this interesting thing. We talked about it for like 20 minutes and that was it. And then the Lewis Howes effect happened and your podcast went up and we got like six clients off of your podcast. And we were, this is like, you know, 10, $15,000 package. Like we, what we're doing is expensive, but it works and it's amazing.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  And it, I, I turned to Zach, actually, you know what happened, dude? Here's what happened. So I went on your podcast on like a Tuesday. And then, you know, it, it doesn't go up for like a week or something or two weeks, right? And so the next day I got an email, uh, Zach and I got an email, uh, like a book in a box was in the sort of subject. And it's like, hey, like I, can I do this? How do I do this? Where do I sign up? And I turned to Zach, I'm like, I don't understand this podcast isn't even out. And, and Zach like emailed the guy back. It turns out it was your podcast editor. Oh, wow. It was the guy. That's hilarious. Know this. The editor of your podcast reached out to us to ask us about the service. And I turned, I remember I turned to Zach and I was like, dude, I think we're on to something.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  We need to get a landing page up really quick, uh, because Lewis has a big audience and let's see what happens. And so your podcast came out and then we were like, I mean, it, it was crazy. We probably had, uh, 30 or 40 real leads. And if we'd had a professional site and a real sales process, we probably would have closed half of those. But as it was, we closed like six of them. And, uh, like, uh, some of those people have their books out. Lucas Carlson has his book out. Um, who, there's a couple of others, uh, um, that, that I'll think of their names in a minute, but like, uh, And so after that, it was like a hectic two weeks.

• 8:44Lewis Howes?

  Cause you're like, all these people want books and we have no game plan.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, like, well, we, we knew, let's see, let me look, I'm looking at Nick DiNardo. We found from your podcast, Brandon Hampton, who's blowing up now, his company is Cole Hatter, who's, he's got a big conference coming.

• 9:00Lewis Howes?

  Speaking at, yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, I'm speaking at it too. Right. So all these, like that conference exists because of your podcast, dude. It's the Lewis Howes effect. And so all these people came to us and, and so we had it, we were like, all right. We've tested the process once, we think it's working. And so we, we actually charged, those people all paid way less than, than we're charging now. And, and we started working through it. And then it's like, so quickly, I'm like, Zach, this is a real company. We've got to stop everything else we're doing and this needs to be our pure focus. And he fought me on it for like two weeks. And then he was like, yeah, you're right. Everything else is a waste of time. And so we focused and focused and like built this up. And now as one year later, like the podcast, my podcast with you launched like sometime in August.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  One year later, we've done 1.4 million dollars in sales. Eight employees, we're about to hire two more and we're on a growth path to hit three million this year. And realistically, I don't even know. I mean, they'd be made up numbers, but somewhere between five and 15 million next year.

• 10:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  That's Lewis Howes, baby. Lewis Howes creating jobs for America.

• 10:07Lewis Howes?

  I love it. It should have been me at the VMAs instead of Kanye up there talking.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  I know, seriously.

• 10:13Lewis Howes?

  This is fascinating because you and Zach, you know, you were telling me he's just like, you know, a really smart side hustler. He came to you and he was like, hey, I just want to put something together. Let's figure out some ideas of how we can run a businesses together. And we, did you have a bunch of other ideas around that time or what were you guys doing?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  We were doing, we're essentially, we were doing a lot of consult, like I, I had my publishing company and I did a lot of consulting stuff. Like I helped James Altucher do all of his publishing stuff. And, you know, like I helped Ryan Holiday start his book marketing company and I helped, you know, like all this sort of stuff, right? So, but it was mostly just stuff I liked doing. It was fun. It was essentially just consulting and. So I was doing some of those things with Zach and we were starting to sort of productize some of it, but like, none of it honestly was that innovative and none of it was honestly that exciting. It was just like, it was better than what most people were doing, but it was still sort of the same thing. And it wasn't until we really kind of stumbled upon this

• 11:08Speaker 01

  new way to take someone's knowledge and wisdom and turn it into a book, that we realized we had something. And that, to me, that, here's the thing, you know you have a company when you have product market fit before you're even officially selling it, you know?

• 11:22Lewis Howes?

  When you pre, when you pre-sell it before you can actually deliver it, yes.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, well, that's, that's the definition of like lean startup methods and like Steve Blank stuff and Eric Ries and all those people, like test it out. And I didn't go on your podcast intentionally thinking, alright, we're gonna test this company out. I literally just floated the idea because it came up in conversation. And we were so blown down by the demand.

• 11:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, we were, we were talking about, you know, how you marketed your book and how you, you know, did all this and wrote great, how to write a great book. And then you were just like, you know, we're trying this out. If anyone wants to try it, you know, send us an email or something.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:56Lewis Howes?

  And it went from there. It was insane. Yeah, it was nuts. And so, what I mean, tell me about the evolution of Book in a Box since then. I mean, you know, the pricing has changed. You have a streamlined process now. Like, what can someone expect with this process? And who is it specifically for? Because, you know, there's lots of experts and entrepreneurs who are listening that probably want to write a book. And that, maybe they're thinking an ebook process, maybe they're thinking a publisher, they don't even know what to do. So first off, actually, let's, let's maybe talk about who should write a book? What are the different processes people can write a book? Whether they work with you or they do their own thing? What do you think is the best solution for people based on their goals?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Right. Excellent. Okay, good questions. Who should write a book? Uh, I think, right now, the best people to write books, um, are generally speaking, people who can in some way, shape or form indirectly ROI a book. Like, you know, get a return on investment, right? And so, that breaks down to, let's see, consultants, very clearly. If you're a consultant in any sort of field, whether it's fashion consulting, or financial consulting, or whatever, how do you separate yourself from the herd? Well, like, if you're really good at your job and you know a bunch of stuff, that, that's great. But how does anyone know? And a really great way to show the world and to show potential clients that you are

• 13:17Speaker 01

  the person they want to hire is to be the guy or the girl who wrote the book on your subject, right? And so, every consultant, that's probably 10 to 20% of our current clients are consultants, and every single one that's put a book out has seen their business double or triple or even do more. And it's not because, I mean, if you do a good book, it's almost inevitable that you're going to see your business go up as a consultant, right? So that's one, one big one.

• 13:44Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious, before you go into the next one, I'm curious, what if your book doesn't sell? What if you do a book and it doesn't sell? Is it still worth doing a book?

• 13:53Speaker 01

  So our very first client, Melissa Gonzalez, she is, she owns a pop-up, she's like one of the people who kind of invented pop-up retail or really kind of modernized it, and she has a pop-up retail consulting firm. And she has sold, I think, less than a thousand copies. Her book was the first book we did. She's the woman, I think I told the story in the last podcast, like she asked me how to write a book without writing it, and like I made fun of her, and then she like, she's like, she's like, are you an entrepreneur? I'm like, yeah. She's like, well, so am I. And my job is to help people solve problems. Do you help them solve problems? Or do you just lecture them about hard work? And I was like, ugh! And it was like that call-out that led me to kind of develop the book-in-a-box process, and it was for her. She sold less than a thousand copies of her book, and so far, she has tripled, I, we

• 14:38Speaker 01

  just talked to her, she's tripled her business year over year. The book came out in November of last year, tripled her business already. She's signed two multimillion-dollar contracts, like big ones, with some of the biggest retailers in the country, like Macy's or Nordstrom's or, I don't know exactly who it is, but someone like that. And she's now, she was one of the best people, but now everyone knows she's the best, and she's keynote three conferences about retail, because she wrote the book on pop-up retail. But only a thousand copies sold.

• 15:10Lewis Howes?

  So you don't necessarily need to sell tens of thousands of copies or millions like you.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  If you're in a niche, exactly. If you're in a niche, then then how many people actually care about your topic? Probably not a lot, but that's fine if you're a consultant because you don't make your money on the book sales. You make your money on the influence that the book uh creates and that the perception it creates. And then also people, a lot of people are going to read your the book and say, I need to hire this person. Get me, Melissa told us the story. She's like, there's two big things that happen because of the book. Uh, when she was speaking at conferences now on panels, she said before, like, you know, retail, you think it's a very female business, but she said it's actually at the highest level, still kind of sexist and old school male. And she's like, after she wrote the book, uh, like men would shut up when she was talking on panels.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Before they would like talk over her and be like, oh, you know, what do you know, little girl? And because she's the, no, seriously, that was the, she said that was their attitude. And now it they're like, um.

• 16:06Lewis Howes?

  They like bow to her because she's the authority.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  They treat her as an authority because she is, right? And then the other, the other big thing is people, exec, high level retail executives will say, like, they won't say, get me a pop up resale consultant. They'll say, get us, get me Melissa Gonzalez. I want, I want the, I want the woman that wrote the book. That's and and that's actually one of those weird things you don't think about. Um, but the number one sort of, you know what the number, number one search engine is Google, number two is YouTube. Number three is actually Amazon and it's the number one search engine for professionals. Because the thing, if I need, if I want the best wealth manager in the world, I don't know. You can't Google best wealth manager in the world and get an answer. It's going to be nonsense, right?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  But if I go to Amazon and I Google wealth managing books, I'm going to look at the authors and like the top 10 books, who has a wealth management firm?

• 16:58Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting. I didn't know that Amazon was the third biggest. That's great.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  It is.

• 17:02Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  For wealth managers. So, all right, so that's consultants, then speakers too. For like pretty obvious reasons that like the people who book speakers want them to have books because that's a status signal. It's a signal of credibility and authority. And then also it gives speakers something to sell uh at their speeches. You know, it's pretty clear. A big one, a big, big, big one is sort of entrepreneurs and business owners. Books are incredible for generating leads. So for example, we do a huge number of books for wealth managers and estate lawyers. Because, yeah, no, seriously, both of those occupations, they have weird laws about how they're allowed to promote themselves.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Right? Like, like estate lawyers can't give referrals fees to anybody, right? And so like, they basically have to like get wealth managers to recommend, they develop relationships. Well, instead of giving them business cards to give to their clients, they give, we have, we have a bunch of estate lawyers who wrote books. And then now the wealth managers give the book to their client and say, this is who I recommend. The guy who wrote the book on estate planner, instead of just an estate planner, right? And so same with wealth managers, like if you're, we have a couple that have some pretty novel, cool strategies. So they write a book about their strategy, which gives it away sort of, except if you have a lot of money, you don't want to read this book and learn how to implement their strategies.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  You want, you read it, you're like, this is genius. And then you're like, here, take my money. Just go deal with it.

• 18:34Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  You know, so like, those are a couple of examples, business owners, entrepreneurs, and then also C-level executives. We see a lot of, not just CEOs, but like CMOs or CTOs or CIOs, who like want to raise their status and credibility and maybe like be sort of positioned for a higher C-level job. Like, that's a great way to do it.

• 18:58Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. I love this. Yeah. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of potential. I mean, most of my audience is, is entrepreneurs or people that are interested in building businesses and taking their life to the next level, people that have an expertise. So, you know, anyone in that, this is, you're talking about nonfiction. You're not talking about people.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Of course. Yeah, we only do nonfiction. If you want to write fiction, that's awesome, but good luck. You can't use us.

• 19:20Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Now, now what's the normal? You know, what route do you think is the best route for people today to take in writing a book? Should they self-publish? Should they find a big publisher and try to get a big advance? Should they?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 19:33Lewis Howes?

  E-book?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  There's two reasons to use a big publisher, right? Uh, if you have a big platform, like someone like you, uh, Lewis, actually, like we talked about this. You, you called me and we talked about this when you were thinking about doing your book. I actually recommended that you not self-publish. I recommended, I told you, you should go try and get an advance because you're the type of person who can get a 500,000 or a million dollar or more advance because you have a massive audience. So every traditional publisher, essentially to sign someone, you have to have an audience, right? Uh, so if you have a big audience, uh, or if you, uh, you want to use your book, uh, to get a lot of mainstream media attention, like you want to be in the New York Times and you want to be in the New Yorker

• 20:17Speaker 01

  and you want to be in like Newsweek or whatever, then no one in America cares who publishes your book. They care what's in the book anymore, except the people in media. So like the New York Times, if you're self-published, you've got to have to do a ton of stuff for them to cover your book. But if the same exact book, if Simon and Schuster publishes it, then they'll take it seriously and potentially do a story about it.

• 20:41Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  So those are the two rea- if, if you have a big platform, uh, you can get them to write you a big check, which for some people is worth it, for other people it's not. Or i- if you have the ability, uh, and the sort of, um, need to generate a lot of mainstream media attention, those are the two reasons to go traditional publishing. Everyone else probably should do some form of self-publishing.

• 21:03Lewis Howes?

  So whether it be ebook format or just self-publish it, uh, into a paperback and, and it's probably not going to be in Barnes and Noble or anything, but you're going to have a book that you can sell online.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 21:14Lewis Howes?

  Buy your own copies and sell them at events.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Or people can find you, man. It's like, I'm telling you, it's crazy how much our authors will sell so few copies, but they get what they actually want for their book to get for them, you know?

• 21:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, they get the consulting gigs, they get the five to 10 clients that brings in way more money, they get the speaking, they get whatever.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  They get new leads for their business, they get joint ventures, they get invited to speak at things. People look at them and treat them differently because they wrote a book. It doesn't matter if it's self-published. What actually matters, though, is does it look professionally published?

• 21:48Lewis Howes?

  Ah.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  That's the difference. So if you write a book that looks self-published, like it's got some janky clip art cover, you know, and it's like, yeah, four pages long and the first sentence is misspelled, then it's like, people are like, ugh, this is ghetto. But if your book looks amazing and feels amazing and is laid out beautifully and has a cool cover, no one looks at who the publisher is. They're like, oh, man. They think because your book looks good, automatically your credibility and status is raised. And then, if the book actually is good, if you have good ideas in it, then it's like you're off to the races.

• 22:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's powerful. The challenge is, you know, going with a big publisher, you know, I'm with a big publisher with Dale, and to be honest, they've been incredible. Like, I went into the expectation of thinking they're not going to do anything for me because every author friend of mine says that their publishers sucked. And so I went into it thinking, I'm gonna do everything myself, I'm gonna design the cover, I'm gonna be doing the tour, the book launch, like, everything's gonna be on me, the publicist. But they've been going above and beyond. And because I went in with that expectation they weren't gonna give me anything, it's, they've blown my mind.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. You've been super happy with them.

• 23:00Lewis Howes?

  I'm so pleased with them. I mean, there's been some little things back and forth that, you know, we disagreed on, but at the end of the day, it's been unbelievable their support, and I'm so grateful.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  You know why they're throwing a lot of weight behind you, though, don't you?

• 23:14Lewis Howes?

  Because I'm throwing a lot of weight behind it too, and they think it's a big home run.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Exactly, because you have a big platform and because they see you putting so much effort into not just the creation of the book, but the marketing of the book. And so they're doubling down on their winners. So they probably signed, whatever, seven or 10 authors this quarter and three of them they've already given up on. And then another four they're doing like, like or five, they're doing minimal work for. And then there's two they're devoting all their resources to and it's you and whoever else the other person is.

• 23:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly. They said I'm the big one for the fall. So, um, you know, we'll see how it goes.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  I'm telling you, your next book is a Lewis Howes effect, man. It's coming, dude.

• 23:55Lewis Howes?

  The, the challenge is, you know, I put together, it took up, you know, going traditional, here's the challenges. It's been great. Because I've got a big vision and a long-term vision with it, but the challenge is it was a year of writing a proposal and putting together a marketing plan and writing the first chapter and outlining the whole thing. And I worked with my agent with that and I worked with a writer to help me really craft my ideas better. So that took, you know, 10 grand in 10 months to put together this proposal that I went back and forth on and did all these interviews and things. It took time. It took 10 months.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  It was effort. I remember, man. I remember going through it. Yeah.

• 24:32Lewis Howes?

  Then, uh, you know, I, I get the deal. I sign the advance, uh, and I gotta write the book now. And that took another, essentially eight to 10 months as well of, of time and money and hiring editors and hiring people to help craft certain things and flesh it out. So all in all, it's been 50 grand just to write the book. And with all the people involved, and all that different thing happened and all that happening. It's been a lot of work, a lot of time and energy. I'm excited about it. I'm, I'm thrilled with the journey and the process. It's what I wanted. But for most people, they don't want to spend two years and 50 grand to get a book written.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  And for most people, it doesn't make sense either.

• 25:12Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Because here's the thing, you're like the perfect person to go traditional because you have a big platform. And because this book is going to be sort of like your coming out party for the mainstream media. You know, like dude, I've known. You're awesome for like six, seven years, right? And your audience is known for, you know, whatever. How long has your podcast been around now? Two and a half, three?

• 25:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, three years in January.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Right, three years. So, so for three years, you've had an audience and people get it, right? But like, the mainstream media doesn't know who you are yet. And, and they need something that they understand to like, sort of justify to them the reason that they're covering you. And it's gonna be your book, even though, like, you're gonna, you're gonna be one of those overnight successes that took 10 years, just like all of us. Like, they're, they're gonna discover you and you'll become the hot sort of interview in the fall when your book comes out. And it'll be like, oh, Lewis Howes and this and that, and, and all that sort of stuff. And your phone will be blowing up and everyone's gonna want their piece of Lewis Howes in the mainstream. But like, all your fans will be like, I knew about this fucking dude for three years. What's wrong with you?

• 26:13Lewis Howes?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  You better keep returning my texts, dude.

• 26:18Lewis Howes?

  Of course.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  When I was big, I returned your texts. Now you're about to get big, you better return mine.

• 26:23Lewis Howes?

  Of course, of course. Okay, so that's the traditional route. And again, that's only for a certain amount of people. That's for people that have a bigger audience, bigger brand, that really wanna make a big splash.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Right, for most, if you're a, if you own a small business or you're a consultant or whatever, like, you wouldn't be able to even utilize all that attention. You probably couldn't get it, and even if you got it, you wouldn't, there's no way for you to utilize all that.

• 26:50Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  It'd be a waste.

• 26:51Lewis Howes?

  Exactly, and if you didn't have like a long-term vision of, you know, other products and courses, or how it was going to enter in your backend funnel and things like that, it probably wouldn't make sense.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:01Lewis Howes?

  And so on the other side of the spectrum, we've got the big advanced, big publisher spectrum, which, you know, takes a couple of years and however much money it takes and time and energy. Then you got, and you, you may not get a good, great publisher. You know, Rodale's been great for me, but you may be. Uh, you know, entering a war zone with a publisher who's just gonna kill your ideas and put a horrible cover on and not do any marketing. So you may get that. That's the challenge and that's the risk you take. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, I've, you know, written a couple eBooks and I know a lot of marketers online who write eBooks and sometimes you can make a lot of money with that, but really there's not much credibility when it's this like 30, 40 page eBook. You're not getting the credibility for the clients and the higher end consulting that you want as an entrepreneur.

• 27:46Lewis Howes?

  And you've seen that as well. I mean, you've probably written eBooks, right?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, so like eBooks are great if you want to be in the direct sales internet marketing business and you want to sell $40, $50, $60 eBooks and you create like a scarcity fear model and you do that, then that's fine. Or you're selling something very specific that's very valuable, like, like, what's a great example? How to invest in gold or I don't know, whatever, whatever nonsense those people sell, right? Right?

• 28:16Lewis Howes?

  But you can make a lot of money doing eBooks like that if you really want to do that model.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But eBooks are considered downmarket and low status for a reason because most people who dabble in that space are, that's who they are, you know? If you're a serious professional and if you have real knowledge and wisdom in your head that you think other people will find valuable, then doing a professionally published book, whether it's self or traditional, is the way to go.

• 28:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and, you know, obviously I'm going to have the Kindle eBook version of my book available on Kindle and all those other places and iBooks and stuff. We're not talking about that. We're talking about if it's just an eBook and it's not traditional as well.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Right. If you're not selling it on Amazon or it's not through a publisher, it's just this PDF that you're selling through a landing page. That's what you're talking about.

• 29:06Lewis Howes?

  Right, exactly.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:07Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. So then the third option, which is kind of the sweet spot, you've helped solve this problem that your first client said you needed to do, Melissa Gonzalez, that you needed to create is really how can you serve the people in the middle who Do have great information, who do have gifts to offer the world, that have great businesses, but just are trying to get to that next level. Again, on the School of Greatness, I'm trying to teach people always how to get to the next level in their life.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, speaking of, hold on, do you have diplomas for your School of Greatness? Because I feel like I should get an honorary degree.

• 29:38Lewis Howes?

  You should. Well, you're a professor, man.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Well, dude, I built a seven-figure business because of my time in the School of Greatness on the podcast.

• 29:47Lewis Howes?

  That's it. You're a professor and your student.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  I will be a professor and a student at the School of Greatness.

• 29:52Lewis Howes?

  I love it.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  I'll teach classes and then I'll sit in on other classes.

• 29:55Lewis Howes?

  There you go. I mean, you're making multiple million dollars a business. So, I mean, I'll take it, man. I'll take it as a great case study. So, but that's really, you know, the sweet spot. A lot of people here who are listening are in that kind of sweet spot. They've got a great expertise. You know, some people who are listening have huge platforms, but a lot of people have great expertise. They've got six, seven-figure business running, and they're trying to get to that next level. But they don't want to do a crappy little ebook. They don't have the time or the platform to do the traditional book, which takes years and a lot of money. But they want to write a book. And whether they use you, you know, you're not the only service. There's other services out there. But whether they use you or not, what's the process for them doing it themselves?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Right. So, there's no one that does what we do, I don't think, or at least not the level we do. But there are definitely other services that can help you along the process. So, the basic steps are very simple. We actually released a book about our method, but there's a lot of books out there that are about sort of what to do. But it's very simple. You have to understand. So, I'll tell you exactly how we do it. First, you need to understand what kind of book you're writing, right? So, to do that, you need to understand why you're writing a book. So, you need to sit down and think, okay. And if you say, oh, I want to be a bestseller and sell a bunch of copies, that's nonsense. That's not a realistic goal for someone who, unless there's someone like you who has a big platform and that kind of stuff, right? You're looking at a book as a means to another

• 31:22Speaker 01

  end, right? And so, you need to know specifically what it is. If you want to be able to speak at conferences, okay, that's a goal. If you want to, you know, increase the number And quality of clients, that's a goal, things like that. So you know, what is your goal? Why am I writing this book? Sharing your wisdom with the world is is part of it, right? But that's not actually the goal. That's the result of what you do. You need to know why, what you're hoping and expecting to get from this book, right? So once you understand that, what's your goal, what what's the expected result? The next thing you have to understand is what audience do I have to reach to achieve that goal? So if you want to be booked to speak at conferences,

• 32:02Speaker 01

  then the audience you need to reach are the people who book speakers at conferences and the people who go to those conferences, right? Or if if you want to book consulting clients in the fashion industry, then it's the decision makers at fashion companies. That's your audience. And like, people always want to say, oh, my audience is everybody or all women. That's not an audience. Not even the Bible's audience is everybody, okay? Right, seriously, like, there's a lot of Hindus don't read the Bible. Like, there's plenty of people who don't care about the Bible. So it's like, the bestselling book of all time doesn't fit that, neither does yours. So you need to be very specific. So you got your goal, you got your audience. Now you need to ask yourself, what do I know that that audience will find valuable?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Because that's what your book needs to be about, right? The book needs to be about other people, not about you, for it to be successful for you. You've gotta, you've gotta write, we talked about this at the very beginning, right? Like, what makes a book successful? And I said, I said, you write a book that other people find valuable. Like, I wrote, my original books were entertainment books, right? People bought them to laugh. And they made people laugh. And so I sold millions. If you want to to become, you know, to be established as a as a high level financial consultant, then you need to write a book that has information that people who are looking for financial consultants will find valuable.

• 33:26Lewis Howes?

  That really serves them in a high way, in a big way, that gives them results, yes.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  What what you, the problem you see with so many authors, and even high profile authors, is that they write books that they want to write that are about them. Ultimately, they just write like bragging. Nonsense, right? Or look at how smart I am. Look at how fancy I am. And you'll see these really famous, uh, noteworthy intellectuals or whatever come out with these books that flop and go nowhere. And that's why is because the book wasn't about their audience. They didn't, they weren't creating value for other people. They were just celebrating themselves. Those books go nowhere. But I, I, I know for a fact your audience is, is, um, covered in these people because we, we served them as clients. They were our first set of clients.

• 34:09Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  You have a bunch of people in your audience who are really smart, who are really accomplished, who know things that are valuable to other people. And that want to share those things with the world. Well, uh, like that's the way you do it right there. That's the process. Whether you pay us and then you just can do it over the phone, or you do it yourself. That's where you need to start is what's my goal? Who's, uh, my audience to reach that goal? And then what do, what do I know? That need that that audience will find valuable because that's the book.

• 34:35Lewis Howes?

  So let's, let's talk about, you know, I, I kind of heard about the planning process right there and kind of figuring out your ideas and the goals and who you're reaching and that audience. What's the actual, if someone's going to do it on their own, if they want to write a book on their own. What is the next step for them in doing it in, again, not the traditional way and not the ebook way, but self-publishing, having a nice paperback book?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  So then you've got to sit down. That's a, that's called the book positioning. So once you go through that exercise, you, you're going to have a really good idea of you know who your audience is. You know what you're going to write about. So now, uh, traditionally, listen, you can just sit down and start banging out on a keyboard. That's, it sucks though. It's really hard.

• 35:13Lewis Howes?

  Is there a good format or an outline that you give to people that you would?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so it's actually.

• 35:17Lewis Howes?

  On their own?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yes. So, uh, my, our book is for the company, we, we created a book, uh, called the book in a box method. Um, and it's literally our exact process with all the templates. And, and, and docs exactly that we give to our freelancers and that we use. So, uh, there's a lot of books about outlining that you can look at. That's just one of them, but we have very clear templates for outlining. And I would recommend doing an outline first, and here's why. If you don't do an outline first, then you better hope that you have an incredibly organized mind naturally, which like five people on earth have. Because if you don't do an outline first, you're gonna end up all over the place. And it's gonna be really, really difficult for you to get back on track. And it's just gonna take you a long time.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean you can't do it. It just means it's gonna take a long time.

• 36:06Lewis Howes?

  What does outline look like? Is that, you know, 10 bullet points and then, you know, headlines? Or what does that look like?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  So, so the most basic form of an outline is essentially the table of contents. Like, that, that's an outline. Like, you start with the title. You understand, uh, like, okay, what's the title of my book? So you can kind of conceptualize it. What, you know, what does the book say, um, you know, in a sentence or a paragraph? And then what are the sections of the book? So if the book is sort of like, um, you know, how to, how to run your surgical career, then it's like, okay, here's the five things you have to do, right? And then, so, so there's five, and those are like maybe the five chapters or the five sections of the book. And then under each one, you just keep subdividing like each section. So it's, we write a lot of books, a lot, most of your audience are basically how to books. Like, they know something and they, they can teach it to other people.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  So all a how to book is, once you've got the positioning, is explaining it to someone who's interested, but doesn't understand, uh, any of the process. So what, what are the literal steps you would walk them through? If you use that as your basic framework for an outline, you could do a, a decent skeleton outline in like an hour.

• 37:14Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. And then from there, it's essentially, do you have people, if you were gonna teach people to do this on their own, but you have them write one chapter at a time, or, um?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  It, it depends on the person. So, so what, what we do at Book in a Box is, this is what's cool about our process, is that we get people, we don't ask people to do any work. Uh, all we do, we do all the work in the background, so it feels like magic. All they do is talk on the phone to us, right? And then we have, we're very structured. We have a very structured set of questions, and we know exactly what to ask them, how much to get out of them, et cetera, right? So, people can do- Do that on their own. I mean, the reason you pay us is so it only takes you about twelve to fifteen hours. You can do it on your own in far, far, it's far more time, but it's far less time than if you were writing on a keyboard, right? So that's the first thing, honestly, I would recommend for most of, most people, unless you are a professional writer or you are good at writing or you really like writing, I would argue that you should, once you have your structure,

• 38:10Speaker 01

  you should essentially talk out your book first. Think of it as, eh eh, think of it as like recording a rough draft of your audiobook first. And then I, I, we use Rev, uh, it's like an app on your phone or rev.com. And Rev, it's like a dollar a minute, they transcribe it. So what you get back is all your ideas. It's spoken and so it's in very rough form. It's not easy to read. But now you have a rough draft of your ideas and it's real, it's much, much easier for most people to edit than it is to write from scratch.

• 38:44Lewis Howes?

  And what, you know, what's the average length of a book that someone should have to how to book, you know, what's too long, too short? What's the sweet spot?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Uh, we found that the sweet spot is somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand words. So it's about half the size of a book you're gonna see on a shelf at Barnes and Noble.

• 38:59Lewis Howes?

  So it's like a hundred and thirty, a hundred and sixty pages?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Yes, mm-hmm, right. And so we've actually looked at the data on the Amazon accounts. And what we, and there's actually other people who've done sort of research on this. What people find is that shorter books are actually way better because, uh, people aren't intimidated by them. They'll start them, they'll finish them because they know it's short. And if it's short, usually all the bullshit's stripped out. So people are like far more engaged instead of like, do you understand why most, uh, books? Like there's this idea that books need to be like two hundred and fifty pages or more. That's because physical retailers like Barnes and Noble wanted big books so that, uh, they could put them, uh, on the shelf and people could read the spines.

• 39:43Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  So they could sell books. It's a, it's a requirement of physical retailers, which makes zero sense in an online world. Cause you have people who are busy and they, they want to learn something, but they don't want to have to read three hundred pages. They want to read a hundred pages and they want to get it and get out, right? So what we've found is shorter books not just get read more, but they get engaged more. Which is what you're looking for, right? You're looking for a result. So you want people to not just know the book exists, but to buy it and then actually read it. So shorter is better.

• 40:14Lewis Howes?

  So once they've, once they've recorded it, and how long do you think it takes to record? Eight to 10 chapters or 30,000 to 60,000 word book?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Our, right, our, our sort of frame of reference is about 8,000 words an hour.

• 40:26Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Uh, right, so that's why like with our process, it's about maybe 10 whatever hours of, of interviewing. So we get about 80,000 words and then we'll cut that down to maybe, you know, 35 to 50. Because you know, when you talk, you're redundant and you, uh, you stutter and all that kind of stuff. And so you cut all that down. And then, um, so I would say to a good 40,000 word book, yeah, you're looking at eight to 10 hours. Uh, for most people.

• 40:53Lewis Howes?

  You know, for a day of recording your voice as opposed to a year.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  I would do it all in a day. I would, I would break it up to hours to two hour segments because you get exhausted if you talk.

• 41:02Lewis Howes?

  Sure you do, yeah, of course. Well, just say a day of time total. Um, you know, as opposed to, you know, uh, 10 months to write a proposal and 10 months to, to write the book, you know, whatever it takes. Is there something different about speaking than there is? Having writer's block, you know, writer's block is a real thing. Even, even for the greatest writers, it's a real thing, let alone if you're not a writer, you know what I mean? So.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  But there's no such thing as speaker's block.

• 41:28Lewis Howes?

  No, you could speak all day and you've got the information in your head, so just speak it out.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:32Lewis Howes?

  So if someone, again, if someone was doing it on their own and they were recording this out and it took them, you know, 10 hours to record everything. They got their outline, they've done the voice audio, they translated on, uh, transcribed on rev.com. What's next for someone if they're doing it on their own?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  So, right, so what's gonna happen is this is a kind, it can be overwhelming for a lot of people, but you can get through it if you break it up into steps. So, once you get the transcription back, then it's gonna be, let's say, 80,000 words. And it's like, oh, oh my God. So you can hire editors, uh, to do this. I, I, be careful because if you're hiring freelance, it's really tough to know quality, right? Some people are great, some people are not. If you're doing it yourself, here's how, what we recommend is you go, like, literally just don't think of it like, oh my God, I've gotta edit 80,000 words. Think of it like I need to turn this paragraph into something readable. So don't think of it like you're writing, don't even actually think of it like you're editing. Think of it like you're translating, because you're gonna look at the audio transcription.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Uh, the, you know, the transcription you get back from Rev or whoever. And it's gonna, seriously, you're gonna be embarrassed and it's gonna read really weird. Because every, you could get this, this podcast transcribed and I would look like on the page like a total retard.

• 42:46Lewis Howes?

  Like a moron.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. It, it, it, transcriptions read really unusual. So what you need to think in your head is I'm translating my, uh, my transcription into book prose. So all, the best thing you can do is read the paragraph, think, what am I saying in this paragraph? What's my point? And then how can I say it in the smoothest, simplest way possible? Don't try and be fancy, don't try and use big words, don't try and use jargon. Just understand I'm trying to say X, so I'm gonna write X in the simplest way possible. Be direct and clear and concise with people and people will love your book. You don't have to be Malcolm Gladwell to write a great nonfiction book.

• 43:27Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm. Okay. So once you do all the editing and you've got the book complete, the manuscript complete, then what do people need to do if they're?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  So this is right, this is very, this is the difference between self-publishing and professional publishing is what you do next. So there are companies who will, uh, you know, obviously we do it as part of our whole package, of course. But like there are companies who just do this, who do just publishing. Uh, like you have a finished manuscript and you send it to them. Um, we, we do it for some people, we don't advertise it on our site, but like we'll do it for some people if they have a, a good finished manuscript. But there's another company called Mill City Press, I know, um, there's a company called Blurb also. And they, they both do solid work, both of them are good. But basically what you, here's the components that matter. You need a really nice cover design. Do not skimp on the cover.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Because remember the first, when someone's looking online, the first thing they see, the first piece of information about your book is either your title or your cover. So get your title right and spend money on the cover. If you're spending less than $500, it's probably gonna be terrible. You know, and I I would recommend spending at least five hundred. And then I would really, if you can, go the extra mile, go to places like Dribbble or uh Beehance or um places like that. Or even, I'll tell you, Nine9designs is actually pretty good. You need to use their five hundred dollar and up package, but um you'll get good designs on Nine9designs if you pay. Not the lower tier packages don't do very good, but the higher tier ones actually do really well.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Pay uh because if you're a professional, you need to signal to the world that you're a professional. And that means you gotta spend a little bit of money. Book cover is super important, title is super important. So and those services usually uh will help you with that. Um but I would really recommend making sure you manage that process if you're doing this yourself.

• 45:19Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, okay. So once you get the professional design, then what?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Cover's big, uh interior layout is another big one. So have you ever like downloaded a book? Oh, actually, hold on, let me go one step back. Proofreading, I forgot about this because like I assume it, but you can't assume this.

• 45:33Lewis Howes?

  Dude.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  You must get your book copy edited and proofread.

• 45:36Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh, that was a headache for me. That was like weeks and weeks of stress.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  I know, it is.

• 45:40Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Cause you gotta go through all these tedious changes. But dude, that's the difference because e- every one of your listeners, I'm gonna say this and they'll all shake their heads in agreement. As soon as you see a misspelling in a book, you immediately think at least twenty percent less of the author or the publisher.

• 45:56Lewis Howes?

  Hopefully, they don't think that of me, because I'm sure there's a couple of them. But every book has a misspelling or two or some mistake, you know, even the greatest books, right?

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, here's the thing. Uh you you there's you're actually right, they've done studies on this. Uh I know, I think Harper Collins did a big one. And they uh had something like ten professional copy editors recopy edit like a hundred of their bestselling books of the last like twenty years. And every single book had an at least one error in it.

• 46:25Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  But but here's the thing. Most, uh, none of the books did all ten copy editors find an error, right? So if you're, if the errors in your book are so minute that copy editors are missing them, you're fine. The problem is, like, people like, they'll, they'll proof it a couple of times, which is like, almost worthless, because you, you've missed, you get, you get script blindness, right? And so then they'll hand it to their wife, and then their best friend who wrote good essays in college, and they'll be like, "Oh yeah, that's more than enough." No way. You're gonna have like, ten or fifteen misspellings, you're gonna have basic grammar mistakes, you're gonna have things in there that signal that you are not, you did not take this seriously.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  No one expects you to be a grammar expert, but they expect you to pay $200 to go get it proofread and copy edited.

• 47:14Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  That's hugely important, right? Okay, so, you need to do that, then, obviously, cover design, those can go at the same time. Then you must, uh, this is a little bit less important, but it is a big signal of professionalism as interior design, interior layout. Like, have you ever, uh, downloaded a book on Kindle, and like, you upload, you know, like, you start to read it, and it's laid out all weird, and there's weird indents, and, right, that's because those people didn't actually professionally format it, they just uploaded it from Microsoft Word into Amazon, and then all these weird characters and all this stuff jumps in there, and then everyone knows immediately that you're an amateur.

• 47:50Lewis Howes?

  And it's almost like a, you wasted your time, whatever how long it took you to write this book, you wasted it because you didn't take that extra step to make it look good inside.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So you lose credibility, like, it, a lot of times, what you're earning with your book is not, it's not, people don't judge you just by the knowledge and wisdom in your book, they judge you by all the signals around your book, like, your cover, your interior design, the spelling, it's the same as, like, think about if someone meets you out, they don't, everyone's like, "Oh, you should only judge someone by the content of their character," but who does that? Nobody, monks do that. You judge people by, uh, like, are they, uh, dressed well, or what are they like?

• 48:29Lewis Howes?

  And their first impression, too. It's kind of like going to a new website, if you see a website that's horrible design and misspelled, it doesn't matter if they have great information or not, you're here to judge them.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. You judge them, but they're all pieces of information. What you're wearing, are you like shaven or not? Are you clean? Uh, what's your handshake like? What do you smell like? Uh, how do you act in conversation? Can you make small talk? These, all these things are pieces of information about you. The same thing is true for books. Cover, interior, spelling, all those things. So a couple more things, book description. People like, they go, it's just marketing copy, who cares? But like, think about when you go to an Amazon page. What do you look at? First you look at the title and cover. Then the thing right next to that on the Amazon page is the description of the book. You get to write that. So take your time and do something awesome there.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  You know, like really, like look at some really good, uh, Ti- Tim Ferriss's For Our Work Week's really good. Um, uh, what's another, there's a couple of Tyler Cowen, uh, Average, uh, Average is Over. Um, is another good one. Like look at books that have really good book description and just imitate them. Basically, the, the best ones make you really, uh, excited to read the book, but don't give quite everything in the book away. They tell you what's in the book, they make it excited, they make you understand why the book, it's, it's same thing as any co- copy. Here's the problem, we solve it, here's kind of how we do it, but we're not telling you everything, so you gotta read the book.

• 49:55Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  That's book description. Uh, another one is author photo and author bio. Like what you look like in your author photo is, is a huge piece of information. Like Louis, you probably had all kinds of professional headshots and all that stuff, didn't you?

• 50:10Lewis Howes?

  So many.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Of course, of course, because you understand how important that is.

• 50:13Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  So many people will take like an iPhone selfie. And it's just like, oh my god, like, and people will judge you based on that.

• 50:21Lewis Howes?

  We did a full day, a full day of, uh, photo shoot inside and outside, trying to get with a stylist with everything, clothes options, to get the right photo for the cover and the, uh, the bio, the author bio.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  I'm even looking, we're on Skype right now, I'm looking at your Skype, uh, thing, like every picture of you online is like, perfect, like you time. No, and I'm not even making fun of you, that's really smart. You're a public figure and you're like, you know, like, i- i- if your job is to be in the public eye, then you need to spend five or 10 times as much time as a normal person.

• 50:53Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  But if you're a normal person, you need to spend time on this, not as much as you, but like time. You know, it's gotta be, it's gotta be, you gotta look. Think of it almost like a dating profile, like not the exact same, you know, you don't want to look seductive, but you want to look good in, in sort of like your profile pic on, you know, whatever, match.com or something or eHarmony. Same thing in your author photo and then your author bio also is a piece of information, especially, especially for people in your audience who are actual authorities in their business, but they don't have a lot of name recognition.

• 51:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Then your bio needs to tell the world why we should care about this person.

• 51:29Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Why do you matter? Right? But, but you can't be too braggy. You can't be like, oh, you know, I won the science fair in 10th grade and blah, blah, blah. Like no one cares. My SAT score. No, no, no, no, no. It just needs to very clearly and succinctly explain why you're an expert and why you have credibility.

• 51:46Lewis Howes?

  Sure. Yeah. Okay. So we've, we've designed it inside and out. Everything's looks perfect. It's edited, it's proofread. Thing is complete.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:55Lewis Howes?

  Now, if you're self-publishing it, what are the options to, to get it out there?

• 52:00Speaker 01

  To market it?

• 52:00Lewis Howes?

  And actually, well, actually publish it and actually physically have it and get it in bookstores if you're doing it on your own.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's, the big thing honestly is to get it on Amazon. I, I would almost say that for 80% of authors, if you have it on Amazon, you don't need to worry about anything else.

• 52:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Seriously, like I, I books is okay. I, Amazon is, I think 85% of the ebook market. And then Nook, Ibooks and Kobo are like 12% and then there's like a whole bunch of other ones that are like the other 3%. So like, uh, that's like, that's kind of it. You, you know what you can use? If you're doing this yourself, there's a service called Book Baby that's really good. And you basically submit the manuscript once and they handle sort of everything, royalties, whatever, all this sort of stuff. They kind of do it all for you and they're a pretty solid service. But the, the, the frequently asked questions on Amazon walks you through their process like step by step.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  It's super, super, super easy. Um, and anyone, and you can pay services like Mail City or Blurb or, or Book Baby. They can do those for you as well.

• 53:08Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. And what about if you wanted to get into the Barnes and Noble, if that's some, some?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Not really, not really possible. There's only one kind of way to do that and you want to get listed in a database called Ingram. So that's another thing. I didn't go super deep into the details, but if you want to be crazy legit, you need to get an ISBN, which is International Standard Book Number. It's like the number that's on the back with the barcode, right? And so if you have that, that means that you actually had to pay whatever, like 50 bucks or something for an ISBN. And, uh, and people like it's a signal of legitimacy, but only to people who like media look at that. And some other people look at it, but most people don't really look at that that much. So that's not a huge deal. But, um, you can get those a couple of different places. Uh, and then what you do is you get in a database called Ingram.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  And, uh, books in print and then Ingram. Ingram is sort of like the big, big book distributor. And if you're in Ingram, then any Barnes and Noble, any bookstore in the world can order your book and can have it there in like a day or two. So like, right. So we obviously for a book in a box, all of our authors are in Ingram. Uh, we put them on Amazon. So like, what we tell authors is your books will be available to be ordered in bookstores, but they are not going to be sitting on the shelves.

• 54:22Lewis Howes?

  Got you. So how does someone get them sitting on the shelf? Is that really a big publisher needs to do that or retail?

• 54:27Speaker 01

  So, so.

• 54:28Lewis Howes?

  Constantly.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, no, no, they, they won't do it request constantly. Like they just won't. That's just not, it sounds crazy. I know. But you have to understand the book business is, uh, just old and antiquated and just a crazy ridiculous business. There's only traditional mainstream publishers, for the most part, can get books into bookstores. Now, uh, there are other ways, sort of, but you still kind of have to go through the big publishers. You have to go through what are called distributors. And so like some of the big publishers are distributors as well, uh, like Simon and Schuster. So for example, I have a publishing deal with Simon and Schuster. My, my publishing company, Lioncrest. If, if we go to them with a book that is big and they, and they think will sell a lot of copies,

• 55:12Speaker 01

  then they'll go to BNN and try to convince BNN to stock it. And, uh, we've gotten a couple of books into BNN. I, I, we don't advertise this at Book in a Box because I don't want authors thinking that we can do this as a service. Because honestly, it doesn't matter how much money you pay us. It's up to BNN whether they stock your book. So, so we don't even bring this up, uh, to get like expectations, uh, eschew. We've gotten actually one author. I've gotten a couple others in before Book in a Box just as a consulting gig. Like I helped some big authors. Like I helped Hugh Howey figure this out and a couple other people. And then I got one, we got one of our authors in who, she sold a lot of eBooks. And then we went to Simon and then Simon went to BNN and BNN

• 55:55Speaker 01

  was like, yeah, we'll stock this. And so we got her in. But you kind of have to have those sorts of connections.

• 56:01Lewis Howes?

  Sure. Okay.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  But honestly, man, being a bookstore doesn't really mean shit. Seriously. No, it doesn't. Like it means something to you because like your book is gonna be, Rodale's like paying for like a co-op, which means like for the book to be on the front counter. So like, not a lot of people browse bookstores anymore and not a lot of people go to bookstores anymore. But someone like you, it's a big thing for someone like, like who's gonna sell a hundred thousand books in their first month or something. It can make a difference for someone at that scale. But like if you have one copy in like each, even if you have one copy in every BNN, it's gonna be tucked away in the corner. No one's gonna find it. It doesn't matter. You know?

• 56:43Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. Gotcha. In the next process, you know, after that, there's a, we could do a whole nother episode on marketing, which we did previously. We talked about marketing before in the previous episode, number 78. So I will, I will spare people for that. You know, there's a whole process to this and maybe we can do another episode again about after my book launch. Maybe we'll do a recap of all the marketing stuff that I'm

• 57:06Speaker 01

  That would be cool.

• 57:06Lewis Howes?

  building up to and we can kind of join forces.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  No, I know. You're doing some cool stuff, man. We talked about some real cool stuff. I'm excited to see.

• 57:12Lewis Howes?

  We got some even more stuff that's happening that I haven't shared with you that I'm super pumped about that I'm gonna reveal here soon. So I'm excited. But the thing is, what I want to recap this is, is there's a lot of process, there's a lot of steps to this process of planning the book, to creating and writing the book and editing the book, to publishing and marketing it. And if you're gonna do this as yourself, how many hours would you think if you did it on your own and you hired your own people, you're the proofreaders, the editors, the designers, how many months would it take or hours or weeks? And how much money would it take to really get a solid book? Did it all on your own?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Um, it it totally depends on the person.

• 57:53Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  But generally speaking, it takes about a thousand to fifteen hundred hours to, if you do, if you do everything on your own, right? It's gonna take you a thousand to fifteen hundred hours to write and publish a a nonfiction book. Now, you can shorten that drastically by buying expertise in various areas. You know, like buying the book cover. Like, when I say do everything, I mean everything, right? Uh, but like, you know, spending five hundred thousand bucks on a book cover takes, you know, a hundred hours off of that or something.

• 58:24Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  And then like, uh, getting someone to help you with editing or proofreading and copy editing, right? That takes another hundred hours off. And then, so that you can, I I think a reasonable person, like someone, your your standard audience, someone who's fairly successful, has done some stuff, has some money, um, you can expect to spend five, I think five grand is a good budget, and spent wisely can take, uh, let's say twelve hundred hours down to like a hundred to a hundred and fifty hours.

• 58:54Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  So you you can reduce it quite a bit. Maybe two hun- two hundred hours or something, something like that. So like, you're in the hundreds of hours where it's like, you're spending, let's say, two hours a week for a year, uh, and you're spending five grand, I think that's a doable thing. And then, so and then we're like the next tier up. We we charge eighteen thousand and you're spending twelve to fifteen hours on the phone and we're done in four months. And it's amazing.

• 59:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So and so twelve to fifteen hours total time on the phone, there's probably some emails back and forth and some other things.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Emails and then you edit the manuscript if you want, so you can spend a lot of time on that, uh, or none. We have authors that go both ways.

• 59:30Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. So essentially, four months from the first phone call to publish book.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, i- i- if you, if you go quickly, we say four months, five at the outset. Some authors like to take a long, longer time. So, uh, you know, we've, we've got books that are gonna take a year, but we only take four to five months.

• 59:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow, it's amazing. So if you want a book that's done quick, effective, done well, that looks professional, and you guys do the design, you do the ins, you do everything? You do like the proofreading, the editing, the layout?

• 59:59Speaker 01

  We even actually, we actually do some marketing now. We we changed. Package and add that. That's why we increased. We used to be fifteen. We increased the price to eighteen. Cause we've added on some basic marketing. Like we do some, some cool Amazon promotions. So you're gonna probably be number one in a, you know, a small, small subcategory. Uh, not like, you're not gonna be number one in business, but you might be number one in like fashion business or something like that, you know? And so, uh, we, we do that sort of stuff. We do, uh, a press release and we do, we have a, a deal with, who is it? Book, um, not Bookshop or Bookbub. It's Buckbooks. Yeah, no, Buck, Buckbooks. And they have like a massive list. I was, I'd never heard of them and they have a list of like

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  a million people or something crazy like that. And so we do, we have a set promotion with them. So, um, we do some basic marketing. If you want advanced marketing, we can either, you know, we can use it. We connect you to PR people or to people like Ryan or someone like that. Um, yeah. So, so we do kinda all of that.

• 1:00:56Lewis Howes?

  Okay. Awesome. So for people that are interested, they wanna get signed up now. Do you guys take new clients now? Or what's, what do they do to get signed up? Is it a, what do they have to fill out a form or something?

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Just go to bookinabox.com and there's a little, uh, sort of, uh, like a form thing at the bottom. Fill that out and one of our author consultants will email you within 24 hours and get on the phone and we talk through everything. We see, we don't actually, uh, like, uh, this is the truth. I'm not trying to like be salesy with this. We don't actually take every single person who applies.

• 1:01:25Lewis Howes?

  I was gonna ask you that. I was gonna say, do you take everyone?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Well, because here's the thing. First off, some people are dicks and terrible to work with. And so like, we, we have a great team and cool employees and I'm not gonna like, subject them to some horrible person who treats, uh, my people like dirt. Uh, eighteen grand is not enough. Like life is too short, but that's very few, very, very few people. So, uh, but, uh, the only type of person we systematically don't take is people who think that like we're ghostwriters or that we'll just do the content for them. We don't do that. We're a service to turn your knowledge and wisdom into a professionally published book. So if you have great ideas, we're gonna give you a great book. If you have decent ideas, we'll give you a great looking professional book full of decent ideas. Uh, but if you have no ideas, we can't, we can't do anything.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  So those, those people we reject too. We've had a couple of them who's like, what do you mean? Like I have to actually tell you stuff? And it's like, yeah, yeah. It's not, we're not, like, that's what ghostwriting is, is you pay someone fifty or a hundred grand and they write a book and you're paying them to put your name on it.

• 1:02:24Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. Yep. So there you go, guys. Hopefully, this was helpful to have you kind of understand the process of writing the book. And again, hopefully, I'll do another episode where we talk about the marketing after my book launch. I'm going to give a whole little breakdown of what we did.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  You know what you should have is you should have a bunch of marketing people and have it like a round table like me, Ryan Holiday, like all kinds of cool people. And we can talk about all the things that went right, that went wrong, that you could have done different, that you did that were genius. That would be fun, man.

• 1:02:54Lewis Howes?

  I'm down for that. If you guys want to hear that, maybe a round table of a bunch of us, then leave a comment below this blog or this post and let me know wherever you're listening to this ad. Just leave a comment below if you do. And again, this has been extremely helpful. Tucker, we could go on for this for hours. I know you've got so much wisdom in your years of writing and creating books.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a professor at the School of Greatness.

• 1:03:18Lewis Howes?

  You are a professor, man. You'll come back. You'll be back to do more lectures. But hopefully, you know, this made sense for a lot of people. And I'm looking at I'm at bookinabox.com right now. And I see the process. There's a whole like mapping out. So even if you do this on your own, go check out the site because there's kind of like a little map there. You can see on how you want to do this yourself.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what, Lewis, I'll do this. I'll do this for your audience. I have the, you know, we have a book called The Book in a Box Method that details our process in detail. If someone's listened all the way through, don't put this on your page because I'll get too many people emailing me. Email me at [email protected] and I'll send you a PDF of the book for free. I have no problem giving the information away for free. We just charge for the service. That's it.

• 1:04:02Lewis Howes?

  There you go. There you go. Yeah. So if you want to do it on your own, he's got the process. You can go follow it and do it on your own. It's just going to take you a year.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  I'll just send you the book for free. No problem.

• 1:04:10Lewis Howes?

  There you go. And if you want to learn more about doing it, then fill out the information and do a free call and see if it's a right for you. But hopefully, that's been helpful. And here's the thing, guys. It's all about getting to the next level. And if you're here listening right now, and you've been thinking for a while that it's time to do a book, I want to do one, but it's a struggle. Follow the process. Either get a book from Tucker. Again, it's Tucker at bookinabox.com. Get the book and do it yourself. If you don't have the money to invest in it, then do it yourself. And if you want to accelerate the process, then do a phone call and see if this is the right fit for you. Because it's powerful to have a book. When I wrote a LinkedIn book that sold like less than a thousand copies,

• 1:04:51Lewis Howes?

  it made me seven figures over the next year and a half because I became known as the LinkedIn expert with the book. And now there's like 50,000 books on LinkedIn, but I was one of the first people to do it. So it doesn't matter if you make this a number one New York Times bestseller. It's about having the credibility and the authority that a book gives you. And it opened the doors for me to be in all these events and conferences. People ask me to speak constantly, do a lot more webinars, and it just opened up incredible opportunities for me. So I highly recommend doing one on your own or just investing in this because it's going to take, you know, four to six months and then you're done and it's professional and you don't have to worry about the stress. So are there any final thoughts, Tucker, about?

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Dude, that's like the greatest commercial for writing a book I've ever heard.

• 1:05:38Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  You should be in media, man. You're good at this.

• 1:05:43Lewis Howes?

  Well, the thing is, you know, listen, you know, doing it myself, I understand the process. And my first one, it took a lot of time and energy and I did it on my own and had made a lot of mistakes. But it still brought me a lot of business. So whether you're going to do it on your own or use Tucker or hire someone for a hundred thousand dollars to write it for you, I just recommend doing one if you want to get to the next level. So that's where I'm at. But Tucker, you are the man. We've gone over an hour now and I feel like it was 20 minutes. So thank you for sharing your wisdom. I'm going to ask you a final couple of questions that I always ask people.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Shoot.

• 1:06:18Lewis Howes?

  I don't know if I asked you this the last time, so I just started doing this probably six months ago. So if there was a, if it's the last day for you in however many years from now, the last day, and all your books have been erased, everything you've ever created has been gone, and you've got a piece of paper and three truths to write down that you know to be true about life, and this is going to be the legacy that you leave behind to the world, to your family, to everyone else, signed by you, three lines with three truths, what would you say that would be?

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Man, that's hard. That's hard on the moment. All right. So three truths.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Number one is, life is hard, so don't expect something else. So many people think it's not supposed to be hard. It's supposed to be hard, and then you kind of live for the easy parts, and try and make your life easier, but the default is hard. So, life is hard, don't expect something else is number one. Uh, but, number two, I would put, um, most of your problems are in your head. Figure out which ones are and aren't, you know? Like, most people, like, they're anguished and sad, and like, all these problems they think they have, most of them are sort of made up, not real problems. Or the things that like, they're kind of, the misery's in their head, you know? Not everybody, not all, uh, of course not, but like, so much of it is. And then the third, I would say, um,

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  it all boils down to the relationships you have with the people you love. Um, and so like, uh, almost nothing else matters. Or, no, no, actually, I would say, it all boils down to the relationships you have with the people you love, and the things you do that make the world better. So that's kind of four, I'm kind of sneaking, what, a fourth one in the third, but, yeah.

• 1:08:01Lewis Howes?

  All good. I like it, I like those three truths. Uh, two final questions. One is, what are you most grateful for recently?

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Uh, man, uh, I married an amazing woman, dude. Like, uh, uh, I met an amazing woman, and I married her, and I, I feel like, I feel like my life sort of has two, uh, it's gonna have two segments. It's like, before I met my wife and after. And I got a lot done before I met her, but I feel like she's an amazing woman who's both helped me become better and forced me to become better in a lot of ways. And so, uh, I'm grateful not just for her, but like, everything surrounding that, the family, and like, all that kind of stuff. Um, definitely, and honestly, man, I'm, I'm kind of grateful for like, uh, I don't want to say the company, it's more what the, what we're doing at Booker Box, like, uh, yeah. I hate to sound like a salesman, but this is true, I really feel like,

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  I feel like we are creating a process that's gonna unlock a lot of the world's wisdom. And, and, and to me, that's like, it's relief and exciting, man, I'm seeing the books that we're doing. And all we're doing, we're just doing the process, but like, I see the wisdom. Wisdom that's coming out of some people's heads and it's like shocking and amazing and I'm like wow That didn't exist, the wisdom existed but it was locked up in one person's head and now the world can access it. And it's like, that's really cool. And some of these things are relatively small, but you do like, you know, The Great Wall of China is built by a lot of small bricks put together, you know, and um, It's really exciting to see all this wisdom being unlocked and to start to see the impacts of it is, We're only at the very beginning, it's very cool.

• 1:09:37Lewis Howes?

  Love it. Uh, one final question before I ask it, I wanna acknowledge you for a moment Tucker for, For your friendship and you know, a lot of people have different opinions about you, but Knowing you for the, the five plus years I've known you, I wanna acknowledge you for Just being a great friend, man. You've been consistently there, you've consistently shown up and uh, given me tough love, Helpful love, um, and you're always open to share your wisdom to the world. You've done it for me and you, you, you do it with everyone else through your books, through your businesses, through when you speak, And I wanna acknowledge you and, and just say thanks for all that you do, man.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Dude, thank you, man. Uh, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm just glad I can help, dude. It's, it's, it's cool when you reach the point in your life when you realize that most of the nonsense of your, at least me, I had a lot of nonsense in my youth. You kinda get past that and you start to realize, it's sort of like I said, like your question, like, The only thing that matters is what you, the relationships you have with the people you love and the things you do that make the world better. And if you focus on those two things, you're gonna have a pretty good life.

• 1:10:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  I, I, I just said it. No, seriously, someone great is someone who has great relationships Uh, with the people they love and, and, and vice versa. And someone who produces something meaningful for the world. And it doesn't have to be like, You don't have to be like Einstein or whatever, man. If you make something in the world a little bit better, That's fantastic. I mean, there's seven billion people on earth. If we all make the world a little bit better, that's a crazy level up, you know?

• 1:11:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, there you go. Tucker Max, thanks so much for coming on, man. Appreciate you.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Thank you, man. Thank you for having me.

• 1:11:23Lewis Howes?

  And there you have it guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode and hopefully you got a lot out of it. If you're interested in doing a book, I feel like Tucker has got some great wisdom. Again, having three books on the New York Times Bestseller List at once, it's pretty impressive what he's done as an author. But some of us don't have that luxury to really go out there and spend a year or two of writing a book. So make sure to check out LewisHowes.com/227 and you can see all of the links back to Tucker's information on how to get the system that he does and also how to get his free resources so you can do it on your own. Again, LewisHowes.com/227 to get all the show notes from this episode. Share this with a friend. If you have a friend who's interested in writing a book, share this with them, tell them to

• 1:12:05Lewis Howes?

  listen to it, and download the free resource that Tucker provides as well if they want to do it on their own. I'm so grateful that you guys decided to show up today and listen and tune in. Thank you for sharing it with your friends. Again, LewisHowes.com/227. Send it to a friend right now. And you guys know what time it is, it's time to go out there and do something great.