SPI 895: What’s Working in Publishing Books Right Now

SPI 895: What’s Working in Publishing Books Right Now

Pat Flynn: Hey, let’s talk about books. Books have been on my mind this entire year. Only just recently have I been able to, in a way, come up for water or no, not come up for water. I’ve been in water. Coming up for air. That’s how out of it I’ve been. To discuss the book publishing industry now that I have some more experience to share.

Now many of you know that I published my book Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less, and that came out in June and that was a big deal.

That was a lot of fun and a lot of you have picked it up and I still continue to get really nice things said about it. We are now very close to 100 reviews on Amazon. So if you’ve read it and you enjoyed it, and even if you didn’t, I’d love your feedback and a review on Amazon. That always helps more people decide whether or not to pick it up or not.

But I do wanna discuss for the next few minutes here today during this episode about just book writing in general, and ultimately answer the question for you, is it worth it to write a book? Books have been the primary way that a lot of people have separated themselves from their industry to become more authoritative, to become more of a thought leader. Right?

If you had two people who had the exact same experience and one had a book and the other didn’t, you would kind of gravitate toward the person who did have a book because somebody else, or just even them because they self-published or or a publisher came in and said, you know, we believe in this. We we’re gonna work on it, and you have this book, this work of authority, and that is something that is still important today. So I will say that there is a level of authority that still exists with books, however, it’s not as authoritative as it once was. When you had to be special when you had to know the right people in order to just even have the chance of having your book written.

You know, that’s what it meant more. But anybody could create a book today. And I had heard about somebody, I don’t wanna mention this person’s name. It’s not somebody we’ve ever had on the show here either, but it is somebody who I came across who is publishing a book a day. They’ve built a system to publish a book a day on Amazon, and no offense to this person, I know they might be listening, but I’m just, I’ve told him this before, that they’re not the best books.

But he’s playing a different game. He’s playing the game of not building authority but just arbitrage on Amazon with keywords and that sort of thing. And it’s just kind of in a way, a little bit disgusts me. No offense or a lot of offense. I don’t believe in that kind of content creation. I think you should ultimately think about value.

And if I were to ask you the listener, how do you think this person is pumping out 365 books a year? Guess what tools they’re using to do that? They’re using AI. And when you go that quickly, there’s definitely not an opportunity to put more personality into it, to connect, to tell better stories. Stories that haven’t been told before or told in that specific way.

Yes, AI is great. I use AI, I use Poppy all the time to help me sift through ideas, to help me research faster, to help me automate some stuff. But I mean, 365 books a year, a book a day. You know, he’s hired this whole team, and again, I don’t want this episode to be a rant about this person ’cause I do want to answer that question, is it worth it to publish a book. To him? I guess it is right now because he’s generating revenue. But I mean, how could you just sleep at night knowing that you’re just putting more crap out there? But I mean, he’s making sales and there are positive reviews on this book. I mean, there’s something to be said for that, but there’s also something to be said for putting your life’s experiences, your wisdom, the things you’ve learned that can truly help somebody that ultimately come from your soul. And that’s something that AI is never going to have, and that’s where a person can connect with you. That’s where a book could be used for more than just telling great stories or teaching, which of course can happen anywhere.

But a book has this interesting way of connecting somebody because it’s relatable, because it’s an experience to sit down and read or listen to a book and absorb something and think about it and have time to think about it and imagine it, and all those sorts of things that can come as a reader. And there’s so much good that can come as an author with regards to making that connection.

So I think for the connective tissue between you and your audience, if you know who your audience is. And you know, the kinds of things that they resonated with because maybe you’ve tested that on social media before. Maybe you’ve experimented on other platforms and other mediums like video and even podcasting and have told stories that seem to resonate.

Maybe you’ve been on stage before and have told stories and have seen the guttural real reaction to people when you tell them that story and you get to the punchline and the words that they say after when they come up to you after the event. That’s how Superfans was made into a book in 2019. It was Jay Baer, in fact, who really convinced me that my presentation Superfans, how to convert a casual viewer into a raving fan, that that should be a book. And so thank you J Baer, and that has been a tremendous work. One that actually is resurfacing because of just where we are at in the world now. Lean learning came at the perfect time with where we’re at as well with AI and learning and that sort of thing. But that was more of a passion project and one that so happened to relate to everything that we teach and do here.

So it kind of worked out. Superfans was more of an answer to where I thought things were going, and we are there. Which is about community. It’s about creating more than just a list or customers or having followers and subscribers. It’s about creating experiences for people, and I feel like people have seen me recently with the Pokemon Channel, which is very close to hitting 2 million subscribers.

By the way, the short form channel is way past 2 million. That just surpassed around the 1.5 million mark, but the long form channel and the audience I’m building there and the incredible loyal fans who watch that channel every time we drop a video, they’re coming out to events. In fact, this coming weekend, you know, I’m recording this on, when am I recording this?

Tuesday, September 30th. This weekend in Seattle, there’s gonna be 6,000 people, attendees, Pokemon nerds like myself, who wanna get together and make memories and create experiences and buy, sell, trade, and have fun. It’s just great and it’s everything that I’ve taught in Superfans, lived out. So we’re actually working on a second version of Superfans.

We’re gonna lean into Superfans a lot more here because I truly believe, and I think a lot of what we’ve talked about in the recent past have sort of hinted at this, but you need to build your loyal set of superfans and find them and kind of nurture them and can’t wait to tell you more about Superfans and how it’s going to apply to you.

It doesn’t even matter what industry you’re in. What I love about that is you don’t need very many to do something incredible for your life and the business that you’re creating. Going back to Kevin Kelly’s Thousand True fans, right? If you had a thousand true fans paying you a hundred dollars a year for something, your art, your craft, your time, your coaching, your consultation, whatever it might be, that’s a six figure business right there. And that can be a great start to launch other things, right? When you have that loyal audience, you’re able to launch other things. Anyway, we’re getting a little off the mark here, but it’s all relevant because what a book can do for you is help you create a deeper relationship with those who have already voted yes.

I want to learn from you. I’m going to spend time and sit down and read or listen. And if you position it well, if you set them up for success, you can ultimately get them to come back and want more. This is what happened with my original book, Will It Fly in 2015? I had written that book specifically to answer the most common questions about starting business.

How do I know which niche to select? How do I know I’m not wasting my time? How do I know I’m not wasting my money? That’s why I wrote that book, and when I wrote it, I wrote it so that I didn’t have to answer that question anymore. I would just go, Hey, go check out the book. That’s where you get started.

And yet, even though people read that book and became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Those readers who finished and closed the book said, Pat, teach me how to do exactly everything you’ve taught in the book. Show me more. Go deeper with me. And that’s where one of our very first courses, Smart From Scratch was created.

So a book can be an incredible way to not just answer questions like that book did, but to be a launching pad for other things. With the readers who come across that book and read through it, whether they get all the way through or not, hopefully halfway through or even in the beginning, you can start teasing things and sharing offers and lead magnets and other things to get them out of that book and into more of your, your ecosystem.

That means your email list, so you can nurture them and introduce yourself a little bit more personally than a book. The book is also an amazing tool for not just generating some revenue. Not directly, typically, right? Unless you get in advance. But a book is not meant to make money. It’s meant to be a tool that you can launch things off of.

It could be something that can build a deeper relationship. And it’s not just a relationship with the audience that’s reading or listening. It’s a relationship with other creators in your space. The other influencers, the other authorities, the other podcast hosts the other YouTubers in the space, the other decision makers at events that you can speak at.

When you have a book, you are more able to command those opportunities and build those kinds of relationships, those partnerships, those collaborations. That is an amazing tool that the book has helped me with even Lean Learning, even though I’m pretty fresh off of it, it has already helped me build new relationships.

It has already been a conversation piece at events that has helped create connections and create collaborations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. And that is great. Now I wanna dive into a little bit of a discussion about self-publishing versus traditional publishing. And I wanna start off by saying, I’m very grateful for my publisher and all the things that they’ve done for me. Stephanie, over at Simon Schuster has been great. They’ve helped me navigate this world. They’ve ultimately helped me write a New York Times bestseller. If it wasn’t for her especially, and the pressure that was created, this voluntary force function, as I talk about in Lean Learning, I wouldn’t have sat and written this book as quickly and intensely as I did, and, and a lot of new stories, a lot of new things were shared in this book that I had never thought about. And in order to put them into words that were worth reading, I had to really think deeply about the way that I learn.

And it was so, so freeing and really experiential to have to do that. And so I credit my publisher for just having this book exist. I also credit my publisher for taking a lot off my plate when it came to the creation of this book, the creation of the cover, and the kind of paper that it was gonna be printed on, the fonts, the design of it, all these things that I remember in my first three books.

Let go, Will It Fly, in Superfans that were intense decisions that I had to make. They were sometimes things that stopped me. They were blockers because I was so worried about choosing the right layout for the book or the, the right cover design and all these things. And although I’m not completely a hundred percent hell yes on the Lean Learning cover, I I, I am ultimately happy with it.

I wasn’t at first, but they have their systems, they have their data, they know what sells, and of course, it did very well. So thank you to Simon and Schuster. Now, there were a number of other things that I wasn’t super satisfied with. Again, I wouldn’t change the experience, but there were a lot of creative things that I wasn’t able to do with the book because of just differences in opinion.

I, again, wanted the cover to be a little bit better, but we ran out of time and it again, it landed okay. There were some stories that were removed from the book that I, I wish were in there. There were other ones that were kind of forced in there, but I understand why that was the case and it just took a long time.

It took a long time and there was some miscommunication as well with regards to the editing process and when other drafts were due. That left me scrambling and there was a point at which the book was probably not even gonna get published because I didn’t have enough time. But thanks to my family and thanks to people in my mastermind group and my friends, they lifted me up and they told me I could do it.

And I wrote this thing in about 11 or 12 days. I had a collaborator help me, Jeff Goins, need to shout out him as well because he really helped me. And I think that if you’re gonna be writing a book, it’s really hard to write it alone. Now, I’m not saying you need a co-author. I’m not saying you need a ghost writer.

I’m not even saying you need a collaborator, but it is important to share your work as you’re writing it so that you can get some outside perspective. It’s hard to read the label or in fact your book when you are inside the bottle or inside the cover. In other words, getting outside perspective as you are writing and as you’re coming up with ideas in the outlining process.

All of it, just having somebody to bounce things off of. It is amazing, and if you wanna reach out to Jeff Goins, you can find him. I’ve worked with other people before, Azul Terronez and his partner Steve Vannoy over at Authors Who Lead. And just again, shout out to my mastermind group and Chris Ducker and other authors, Amy Porterfield, the authors group in Nashville. Chris Gibo. I mean, I could keep going on and on, but you could read my thank yous and appreciation inside of Lean Learning at the end of it, if you’d like.

Would I do traditional publishing again? It’s not a hell yes, and it’s not even a yes, it’s a probably not. And the reasons are as follows. Number one, speed. Although I got a really great advance for Lean Learning, the speed at which it was able to come out. Was not as fast as I wanted it to be. It took a while, and this is probably why a lot of it was hard because there were a lot of kind of laggy moments that kind of took my mind out of it, and then I had to kind of come back into it.

So there was some cost transitionally going into the book and then coming out of it and kind of waiting and then going back into it again. When I get into things, I like to just dive headfirst and go into it full on and, and that was hard for me to do. The revenue opportunities on the book are far less favorable, although, again, I did get a great advance.

I, I’ve learned that a lot of these publishers, once they pay your advance, they, they kind of like don’t support the book as much anymore. You’re kind of left to your own devices to kind of figure it out on how to get it out there. This is where I found the most was lacking in this relationship and it was.

Helping to get the word out there. It was 99% all me. If I didn’t have smart passive income, and if I didn’t have Deep Pocket Monster, the Pokemon Channel, the book wouldn’t have even been known. It would be in the ether. The algorithms hopefully would’ve found it and people would’ve hopefully found it to talk about it.

But man, I got no help. No real podcast interviews, no media. No real plan other than kind of generic things like press releases and things like that. So I’m hearing that that’s a usual circumstance when it comes to authors working with publishers. And if I could do it all over again, I would either bake into the contract certain things that I would hope to be done and be very specific about those things, or just not go down that route at all.

And with the, with the advance, you know, some of that is shared with my agent. They take a lot of ti. It’s until I reach to the point at which the advance is paid off, then I, I am not gonna see any more money from the book at all. So when I do, that’s gonna be a very small percentage. So there’s a lot of potential other options out there.

There’s hybrid authors that help you retain the rights. That’s the other thing there, there were certain things I wanted to do with the book that I just can’t because I don’t own it. Right. I sold the rights. For a certain amount of time. I wanted to launch the Kindle and the Audible version later. I wanted to feed all sales and all attention to the hardcover book.

’cause I, I wanted to try and give it the best shot to become a New York Times bestseller. And I’m grateful that it, it did, despite not having my plan that I wanted come to fruition. I wanted the audio book released later as sort of a wave two. That way all attention was driven and sales were driven to the hardcover book.

And I just, I did, I had zero opportunity. Like, that wasn’t even a discussion. I, I brought it up, but it was just, nope, we can’t do that. Okay. So that was tough. But again, not getting him a lot of help was hard. I had to do all the legwork myself for marketing. I got some help. However, from Rory Vaden from Brand Builders Group, so big shout out to BBG.

He taught me a lot about the sort of bi opportunity BILF, which is books in lieu of fee. So I was able to, I did speak a little bit more this year because of the book, but instead of my speaking fee, I sold books. In exchange for me to show up and that did work. That, that’s something that worked really well.

And it, it got me on stage. It, it helped me sell more books and it got me to give to those audiences, which was really nice. But again, just the options were very short because the book wasn’t my own. So would I do it again? Probably not. Probably not, I’m not gonna say never there could be a good opportunity, maybe a, a much bigger advance that might sway me.

Probably not. That’s not important to me. I think it depends on the capabilities of of, of the project and what it could do, and kind of how I would want it out there. You know, if I write a children’s book for example, I think I’d want that more traditionally published and to get into places that I don’t have access to.

The book was in Barnes and Noble and that’s great. I saw it at the Barnes and Noble here in San Diego and it had a nice little feature, which was really cool that I think the store decided to do. That wasn’t anything that I think the publishers did, but that was neat. And that comes with a level of authority.

You can grab the videos, you could share it on social and that’s kind of cool. But book sales and bookstores are, are, are next to nothing. Unless you are a romance novel author with the most popular book out there. It’s very difficult, right? What’s that? Thrones Roses One, like that series. I don’t know about fairies and doing naughty things.

I don’t know. I’m not in that world thankfully. But writing a book is. Meditative writing a book forces you to extrapolate and discover and understand more about kind of how your brain works and how you’re trying to portray what it is that you’re teaching out there. And the fact that you have to go through a number of edits about those stories gives you some incredible opportunity to master those stories and internalize them and then tell them on podcasts, show up on stage and, and do that. I’ve gotten a whole new world, a whole new bank of stories and insights and things to share, punchlines jokes even that have come across from just simply the exercise of writing this book.

The other interesting thing is that the book does lead itself to more leads. So we have a quiz. If you haven’t checked out the quiz, you can go to LeanLearningQuiz.com. This is thanks to SCORE App. By the way, shout out to Daniel Priestley. That tool has been amazing. We’ve heard a lot of feedback from a lot of you, in fact, who’ve set up little quizzes and customized results pages for people using that tool against SmartPassiveIncome.com/scoreapp. If you wanna set that up. That’s kind of the new way to generate leads. So we do that from the book. We have a way to take a quiz, LeanLearningQuiz.com, and you can take that, check it out, you’ll be able to discover, and the whole point of it is to help you discover just how much time you’re wasting learning.

Non-essential stuff, and then we go into here, get the book if you haven’t gotten it yet, and some other things that can lead into other courses in our community, all that great stuff. So books are an incredible way to generate leads and potentially generate sales. That for many authors, is the plan. With Lean Learning, it was less so. Superfans, less so. Will it fly?

Absolutely. It led to. Really our course era in 2017 with Power Up Podcasting with A to Z Webinars, Email Marketing Magic, all of our pillar courses came as a result of writing that book and getting connected to those audiences and discovering what else they needed. Now, what’s really working is getting people to do something while they are reading the book, not reading the book, and put it down.

I think, thankfully, this is something that more authors are thinking about now because of just how short the attention spans are. We wanna get people results while they’re reading the book, and if through that, you allow them to either subscribe to a quiz or your newsletter to get something, a tool to help them do the thing that you’re teaching them in the book, this is working really well because they get results even before the book is finished. And you get an email, which you could use to nurture and build loyalty and to introduce yourself and to offer other things, recommendations of other tools as an affiliate. Recommendations for your own stuff. I was pretty early on in doing this in 2015. The book, Will It Fly, again, how to test your next business idea so you don’t waste your time and money.

That was largely one of the first books to include lead magnets that were directed toward what’s called a companion course. There were a lot of people creating lead magnets inside of books, PDF files of additional videos, that sort of thing. But I was one of the first to create companion course for a digital business book, and I was largely inspired by the Walking Dead because when I was into the Walking Dead, I’m not anymore.

I can’t believe it’s still going on by the way, I lost interest. When was it? Negan? Came in with the bat. Yeah. I’m not even gonna get there, but where was I going? I got distracted. Oh, Walking Dead. So the WalkingDeadStorySync.com. I remember that link because for a while I was really into it. And while an episode was playing, right, the new episodes on Sunday, I would fire up my computer, go to WalkingDeadStorySync.com and it would give me more insights, more information, more cool things about the scenes I was watching. More fun facts about the actors and funny things that happened on set while they were filming that pretty gruesome scene. Like all those kinds of things.

And it was just so interesting. It was cool because it. As I was watching, I had this companion guide, this story sync. So I wanted to create something similar for Will It Fly, so With Will It Fly? There was a companion course that essentially had a few things. Number one, it had all the links that were mentioned in the book, and there were quite a few.

So I found this to be hugely valuable as a organization tool, and it’s sort of a library and a directory. But it was also valuable because I took those lessons that were talked about on with words, and I put them into video format and I showed up on video. Because it was me showing up on video person who read the book essentially got instant access to me, relevant to the things that they were reading, and it was such a cool experience.

It helped me generate, I think it was over 50,000 or 60,000 new email subscribers, which ultimately led to core sales and we’re talking half a million dollars in sales. The book itself generated revenue. In fact, the audio book generated more revenue. That’s another thing that’s working today in books, is the audio book.

The audio book. I mean, the, the publisher did not wanna sell the rights. Did, did not wanna give up the rights to that. And, and I understood it. That’s why I wanted it so much because there’s a lot of money to be made with the audio. That’s, that’s also why they didn’t let me wait for a phase two because you wanna make money on day one when you have your book launch.

So although it’s spread some of the customers, then a lot of you did download it and listen to it on Audible and not get the physical copy. I thankfully was still able to make it happen and get the New York Times bestseller thing. And so what has happened since becoming a New York Times bestseller? you might think, I’ve gone on these amazing tours, I’ve been on television. You might think that I’ve been interviewed by so many other magazines, now, as a result of this. Let me tell you exactly what happened. There’s only one thing. Two, in fact. Number one, when I get introduced now often they mention the New York Times bestseller. It’s New York Times bestseller, Pat Flynn, which still sounds crazy to me. But the second thing. Is I’ve finally realized that it’s not that important. ’cause really nothing else has happened, nothing else has changed. I could have created what I’ve created since then with or without that mark. The YouTube channels still continue to grow. We continue to fine tune the community here and see new members come in and help the members that are here.

That has nothing to do with the New York Times bestseller list. And as much as authors wanna hit that list. I am, I mean, it’s, I’m on this side of it now, so I could say like, you might be like, well, you’re already that, so you could say this, but honestly, I can truly and honestly say it’s not worth the time and effort.

Focus on writing a great book. Focus on understanding who your target audience is and telling great stories. You’ve heard me say it, and I mean, continue to say it time and time again. The better your storytelling, the better your results will be. Learn how to tell great stories. A book can be a great way to discover what those stories might be to help you take those things out of the archive of your life and display them and write them out for a person to be affected in some way, shape, or form by them.

But this is really important in the day and age we live now where AI is here, we, we don’t even know it’s real anymore. And there is something to be said about. The fact that a paperback book is old school, that there’s something in your hands. Gary Vee has been very loud with Gen Alpha wanting to just not be on the computer as much anymore, wanting to get outdoors again, that there’s gonna be this movement that the young kids who are sort of tweens and teenagers now are gonna live in a world where they don’t want to be around the technology all the time.

They’re gonna put their phones down. I feel like there could be a resurgence of reading paperback books again, and I don’t think reading’s ever gonna go away, but I think people are gonna put the tablets down and start reading real things again. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the newspaper, but books at least something that takes you away from the stuff that’s going on around you and transforms you.

Stuff that can teach you but not just teach you the same information you can find elsewhere, but teach you with relevance. With relatability from somebody that you trust, from somebody who has a story similar to yours, there’s just a few steps ahead and you wanna follow their path. So no books aren’t dead, books are changing.

The publishing industry is something that is definitely struggling, the traditional publishing industry. But man, when I get those emails, when I get, I’ve gotten a few handwritten letters now since writing Lean Learning of people who just say it has changed their life already. And for that and that reason alone, it’s definitely worth doing.

So I appreciate you for listening in a little bit of rant here, some strategy as well. So maybe big ideas too that you can take forward with you as well. Again, I just wanna thank you so much for an incredible year. This has been, we are approaching episode 900, which is insane. We are almost at four figures, 1000 episodes of podcast here since 2010, 15 plus years into this, and I still love it.

Thank you so much for being a part of it. Hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss out on the upcoming episodes. Next time I’m gonna start talking about what I would do if I would start over, like literally, if I had to start everything over, I lost everything. What would I do? We’ll talk about that next time.

Cheers!