Build Your Business with a Book: Recent Episodes
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Through solo question-and-answer episodes as well as interviews with best-selling authors, entrepreneurs and publishing insiders, New York Times bestselling author and TEDx speaker Anna David breaks down the best ways to write, publish and promote a book that will build your business.
Subscribe now so you don't miss an episode, view show notes at www.buildyourbizwithabook.com and learn more about publishing with Anna David at www.launchpadpub.com.
While Mark Gottlieb has agenting in his blood—he’s a second generation lit agent—he’s not your typical agent. He doesn’t specialize in any particular genre but bounces between fiction and nonfiction, with some children’s books and graphic novels in between. And though he works with the Big Five publishers, he’s open-minded when it comes to self-publishing...
Here’s a special release for you: the keynote I recently gave at a mastermind that encompasses so much of what I know to be true about coming up with your book idea. It’s short but sweet. Enjoy! FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO http://WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.
You know that kindergarten teacher we all wish we’d had? That’s Erin Lee. But part of what makes us all wish she’d been our teacher is the fact that in addition to being a teacher, she’s an award-winning children’s book author. Still, as we discuss quite a bit around here, being an amazing author doesn’t...
Kevin Anderson never meant to get into the publishing business after growing up in a small town in Canada before getting his PhD and graduating summa cum laude from Harvard and starting a tutoring company. Nevertheless, that tutoring company transitioned into what is now a massive publishing company that employs 30 writers and editors that...
Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress, activist, and the author of the New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort. Her other books include: Wherever You Go, There They Are, and You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up (coauthored with Jeff Kahn). She was the co-host of Dinner & a...
Ashlea Hearn is not only a 1st Lieutenant in the Army Reserves but also the author of Genesis Mortalis, Book 1 of the Take It Trilogy. We met when she reached out to me about the upcoming release of that book. But here’s what’s relevant: by that point, I had noticed this lovely person named...
Scott Duffy is an entrepreneur and business strategist who’s listed as a “Top 10 Speaker” by Entrepreneur and has been named one of the “Top Influential People To Follow” by Yahoo! Finance. ‘But that’s not why I brought him on the pod. I brought him on because he’s also the author of three different business...
Greg Behrendt is the #1 New York Times best-selling co-author of He’s Just Not That Into You and It’s Called A Breakup Because It’s Broken. He’s appeared on every TV show known to man, including Oprah, The Tonight Show and The Today Show, is a life long standup comedian and co-hosts the relationship podcast Don’t...
Katie DePaola is an author, speaker, entrepreneur and the founder of Inner Glow Circle, a company dedicated to helping women entrepreneurs find their glow and live purpose-driven lives. But most relevantly for our show, she is the author of At Least You Look Good: How to Glow Through What You Go Through, the latest release...
Alex Sanfilippo is the host of the top-rated podcast Podcasting Made Simple, the founder of PodPros.com, a software company focused specifically on the podcasting industry and the co-creator of PodMatch, a service that matches podcast guests and hosts together for interviews. That’s not all! He also co-founded PodcastSOP, a project management tool that helps podcasters...
Boy, does Craig Stanland have a story to tell. It starts with the FBI knocking on his door, followed by two years in prison. But that’s not really what we delve into here. Instead we talk about the book he wrote on his experience—and the one major mistake he made. Now that he’s at work...
Peter Shankman is many things, among them a five-time best selling author, entrepreneur and corporate in-person and virtual keynote speaker who focuses on customer service. But in this episode I got him speaking about something so many of you ask me about: HARO, or Help a Reporter Out…the website he started (and sold to Cision...
Rich Goldstein is a patent attorney, speaker, host of the Innovations and Breakthroughs podcast and, most relevantly for this show, the author of the bestselling book The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent, which was published by the American Bar Association. He’s someone who understands through and through what a book can do for...
Tawny Lara is a self-proclaimed natural born promoter.
She's also a delightful person known as The Sober Sexpert, co-host of the Recovery Rocks podcast and author of the book, Dry Humping: a Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without Booze.
This was recorded months before the book's release because I wanted to get a sense of what she was doing at this stage of her launch...turns out, a lot. In this episode, we talk about the ways she's incentivizing pre-orders, why she got a shirt made of her Publishers Marketplace book announcement and how outsourcing can help with a book launch.
Tips galore in here...as well as some good motivation to start the launch work early!
FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER COOL THINGS, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM
Joel Stein wrote a weekly column for Time magazine for 20 years, was a columnist for Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times and is the author of the books Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinityand In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book.
He's also such a funny person that he manages to come across as incredibly likable both while penning a book defending elitism and while dis-inviting me to his book launch party (true story; listen to his defense in this episode and let me know if you think it means you think I should forgive him).
In this episode, we talk about how to ask friends to recommend you to a show as a guest, why to never rely on a publicist and ways to make an audiobook much better, among many other topics.
FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.
Jess Lahey can talk about so many things so brilliantly that interviewing her felt a bit like walking through an outlet mall: so many choices and they all look so good!
But really, here's what you need to know: She's a former New York Times columnist and current Atlantic contributor, podcaster and New York Times bestselling author of The Gift of Failure whose new book, The Addiction Inoculation, is the one that the world has been clamoring for. It addresses the question on pretty much every parent's mind at one time or another: how do I prevent my kid from becoming an addict?
Lahey addresses this issue from her own perspective (as a sober woman from an alcoholic family who's taught high schoolers in recovery) but with a reporter's brilliance (coupled with scientific and medical knowledge, with some help, she acknowledges, from her in-house researcher, her husband Dr. Tim Lahey). In short, she's the perfect person to have penned this book and she couldn't have penned it at a more perfect time.
She's also, it turns out, the perfect person to talk to about building a business from a book—particularly if that business includes speaking, podcasting and newsletter writing. She's got tips aplenty for how to get speaking gigs, be booked on huge podcasts and have celebrities endorse your work. But—trigger warning—you'll never again think, "Oh, look how lucky that writer got, I bet it was easy for her." In other words, a shtload of work goes into these "lucky breaks," and Jess breaks down every single one. FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM*
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is the New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia: How the Show About Nothing Changed Everything; a history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted; and Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love. She spent a decade on staff at Entertainment Weekly and has since written for many publications, including BBC Culture, The New York Times Book Review, Vice, New York magazine, and Billboard.
She's also an old pal from my NYC days; in fact, we used to host Readings & Rubdowns events where people would listen to writers read from their latest books while getting massaged.
In the ensuing years, Jennifer has become a huge author and in this episode she breaks down, step-by-step, what makes for a successful launch.
FOR MORE INFO, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM
Jay Abraham is the world's highest-paid marketing consultant, a proven business leader and top executive coach in the United States.
As Founder and CEO of The Abraham Group, Inc., Jay has spent his entire career solving complex problems and fixing underperforming businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 1,000 industries and over 7,200 sub-industries worldwide.
This is a man who is paid $30,000 for a day of business consulting. And I was lucky enough to not only get him to agree to come on this podcast to talk about applying lessons from other industries to a book launch but I was also able to get invaluable advice from him a few years ago that radically transformed my business (we talk about that at the very end of the episode; you definitely want to hear it).
In this episode, he doles out some of his top gems—including what to write at the beginning of every business book, how to involve influencers in your writing process, why to read the Amazon reviews of every book on your topic that's come before and how to get readers to hire you.
FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.
Jane Friedman is an icon in the publishing space. With over two decades of experience in the business, she is truly considered the world's leading expert on traditional publishing, self publishing and where the twain shall meet. She's the curator of The Hot Sheet, a biweekly paid newsletter, oversees a wildly popular blog and is also the author of The Business of Being a Writer.
In this episode, we discussed how important it is to know what you want your book to do for you, how to get bookstores interested in hosting you, the biggest changes in the publishing industry over the past year and so much more. FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.
Do you really need me to tell you who Jeff Garlin is? Well, the simple way to handle that is to tell you that he stars on arguably the most adored show of all time (Curb Your Enthusiasm).
But he does so much more than just come to you via your SmartTV. He's also a standup (um, obv), photographer and author. In this episode, he explains what happens when you sell a book to a big publisher but then it doesn't sell the number of copies anyone had hoped (and also has an odd name change somewhere between the hardcover and paperback).
This episode also has LOTS of digressions into random topics both because Jeff Garlin could be renamed Digression Garlin and also because we're pals who digress a lot. Listen and digress with us...
WANT MORE INFO ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF? GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.
Ed Kressy is not your average human.
He's much sweeter than your average human and his sweetness emanates from him.
He also has a much crazier story than your average addict with a crazy story...and this is coming from someone who's heard every crazy addiction story over the past two decades.
The short version: he went into a meth-induced psychosis for 14 years that left him convinced he was involved in 9/11. The longer version is in his memoir, My Addiction & Recovery: Just Because You're Done With Drugs Doesn't Mean Drugs Are Done With You, which you can get here.
He is one of the most exquisitely talented writers I've come across in a long time—something I found, and tell him in this episode, surprising. I've read almost every book out there about addiction and recovery and few are as brilliantly crafted as this. Please get this book. Not only will you be exposed to some of the best writing around but all proceeds are being donated to prisons.
And that relationship with prisons, for those here for the marketing tidbits, is how Ed was able to get the great Seth Godin to blurb his book.
In this episode, we get into Ed's crazy story, how many drafts he wrote of this book (you don't want to know) and his mission to get the book into every prison he can (so far, it has been accepted by 108 facilities in nine states, serving an estimated 132,000 incarcerated people). Listen in to find out more about the guy whose recovery-related work has appeared in the Washington Post and who's delivered criminal justice-themed talks for groups at Amazon, Cisco, Google, LinkedIn and MIT.
FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM!
Derek Murphy is a USA Today bestselling author with a PhD in Literature, who’s been featured in CNN, writes fantasy and sometimes lives in castles. When not trolling obscure bookshops, he prefers to be sipping espresso, surrounded by kittens and pursuing research on what it means to be a successful creative.
Now the word unique is overused but this is one unique guy. Looking at the amazing array of material he puts out there is to enter into a tireless brain of myriad interests—including educating aspiring writers, designing covers, penning paranormal fiction and hosting writing retreats in castles.
In this episode, we talked about creative ways to get Amazon to recommend your book (write a blog post that recommends other books like yours and then include a link to that blog in your email auto-responder), the importance of obeying Amazon's ever-changing rules and how to actually make money from book sales.
WANT MORE INFO ABOUT THE POD AND OTHER STUFF? GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.
Originally from Dublin Ireland, David Nihill is the founder of FunnyBizz Conference, bestselling author of Do You Talk Funny?, winner of San Francisco International Comedy Competition, runner up in the Moth’s largest US Grandslam storytelling competition and the first-ever Irishman to have a special on Dry Bar Comedy. His work has been featured in Inc, The Huffington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, Lifehacker, The Irish Times, TED, The Irish Independent, Today FM, and on TV3.
He and I met through friends a few years ago and I was immediately impressed not only with his barely indecipherable accent but also with how much knowledge he possessed about marketing, books and how to make them successful. This impression was only solidified when, a few days later, he sent me an email packed with all the strategies he'd used to make his book so successful that he was able to then sell it to a major publisher.
In this episode, we go through all those ideas and more. If you listened to the episode, you know that I promised I would give you the email he sent out to his launch team, which you are welcome to copy and steal (he will never know, unless he's reading this, in which case I say hi David!)
FOR THE SHOW NOTES [INCLUDING THE EMAIL MENTIONED] AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM
Estelle Erasmus is an award-winning journalist, writing coach, teacher for Writer's Digest and adjunct instructor at New York University. The former editor-in-chief of five national consumer women's magazines, her work has appeared in dozens of media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, Huffington Post Personal, Marie Claire and more.
Now she's written a book that can show you how to do the same! Writing That Gets Noticed: How to Find Your Voice, Become a Better Storyteller, and Get Published will show you all the techniques for getting editors to pay attention to you so that you can spread your writing beyond your book.
In this episode, we dove into some of those techniques (including using your potential article name as the subject line of your pitch email and including your first paragraph of the article in your pitch) and also how to get an agent if you want to pursue the traditional publishing path.
WANT MORE INFO ABOUT THE POD AND OTHER THINGS? GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM
Dave Chesson is the creator of Kindlepreneur.com, a website devoted to teaching advanced book marketing which even Amazon KDP acknowledges as one of the best by telling users to “Gain insight from Kindlepreneur on how you can optimize marketing for your books.” Having worked with such authors as Orson Scott Card, Ted Dekker and more, his tactics help both fiction and nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers.
But that's the official bio stuff. The stuff that really matters, at least to me, is that he is the wisest person out there today when it comes to successful indie publishing. Basically, he does the work so that the rest of us can utilize his techniques and systems.
You can read the full transcript of our conversation below but the main takeaways are this: if you want to successfully launch a book, start your launch work the day you start writing; to cut down on haters, show readers you're human; and the right keywords and categories on Amazon can make the difference between bestsellerdom and obscurity.
Enjoy this episode and by all means, employ the techniques! FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.
This special episode is a solo chat about the implosion of Scribe Media. While it doesn't contain tips about how to launch a book that transforms your career, it's a deep dive into what NOT to do when building a business from your book. Everything in here is, like all episodes, just my opinion but I've been in a unique position where I've been receiving constant updates and information from people who have the inside scoop on the Scribe sh*tshow.
Regular listeners know that I'm obsessed with PickFu, a software that, in technical terms, provides actionable pre-launch feedback on creative options. (How obsessed? I never had ads on the podcast because I wanted to wait until there was something I loved so much that I could recommend it without reservations. And, well, PickFu is it!)
That's why I was delighted to welcome PickFu's co-creator John Li onto the show. And it's also why I'm delighted to use PickFu to get feedback on my covers, titles, book descriptions and Amazon book pages, among many other things. Yes, you can go onto PickFu set up a poll and ask between 50 and 500 people—hand-selected based on interests, income and thousands of other options—for feedback. This isn't "Yeah, that's good" feedback either; it's feedback that people who want to participate in polling are being compensated to do—millions and millions of people, as it turns out.
In this episode, John walks us through how PickFu started, the craziest things it's used for and why someone with no need for an income would want to participate in something like polls.
Listen in and my God, if you know what's good for you, please give PickFu a try. If you use the code Pickfu.com/anna, you'll get 50% off your first poll!
It was a meta on top of a meta on top of a meta experience to record this episode, which is all about what worked and didn't work for the launch of my most recent book (which happened to be based on podcast interviews I've done on this show).
This means that for the launch, I tried out a lot of the things experts have recommended on this very show...some were very effective, some not so much. While it's impossible to say what the end result of all my launch efforts will be because our books have long lives and what we do at launch could end up paying off 100-fold down the line, I give you here the bird's eye view from six weeks post-launch.
WANT TO SEE THE BOOK I'M TALKING ABOUT IN THIS EPISODE? GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYBOOK.COM
Cameron Herold is the Founder of the COO Alliance & Second In Command Podcast as well as the author of five books and an international public speaker. By the age of 35, he’d help build his first TWO $100 MILLION DOLLAR companies and by 42, he engineered 1-800-GOT-JUNK?’s spectacular growth from $2 million to $106 million in revenue.
So you get it. The guy's a machine. And he's a machine well worth talking to about what a book (let alone five) can do for a career, seeing as his have added millions of dollars to his bottom line. He also knows how to engineer a fantastic book launch, since he's an expert on generating PR (exhibit A: his 2019 book, Free PR). Exhibit B: his tactics have landed him everywhere from The New York Times to Oprah.
In this episode, we talked about how to get the media to care about you (hint: it involves picking up the phone), why to put an 800 number on your book cover and how paying for 1000 copies of your own book to give away may be the smartest business decision you can make.
FOR MORE INFO ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM
When someone says they're in a writing group, that can mean many things.
They may be doing a "write your book in a weekend" class or sitting down with fellow writers once a month.
For Tim Gager, it means showing up five days a week, online, for the past three years.
That's because Tim runs the writing group I started when the pandemic hit. In those three years, at least 10 of its members have launched books and numerous movie projects, in-person readings and lifelong friendships have come to be.
Yet, in all that time, I've somehow never talked about the writing group on the podcast. Well, that all changed with this episode, where we dove into how a writing group transformed Tim's life and career. I should mention that when he joined the group, he was already a critically acclaimed author of 16 books!
For more information about the writing group, click here. For more information about Tim Gager, click here.
Nicolas Cole is an author and the #1 personal development writer on the internet with more than 75,000,000 views on his work.
Cole rose to internet stardom in 2015 when he became the #1 most-read writer on Quora, accumulating tens of millions of views on his viral articles, and his work being republished in Time, Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, CNBC, The Chicago Tribune, and more. In 2016, Cole became one of Inc Magazine's Top 10 contributing writers, accumulating millions of views on his business & creativity column, and in 2017 he founded a ghostwriting and thought leadership agency called Digital Press, for Fortune 500 executives, Silicon Valley founders, venture capitalists, Grammy-winning musicians, Olympians, NYT best-selling authors, international public speakers, and more.
Cole has written two books, Confessions of a Teenage Gamer, a memoir about his high school years as one of the highest-ranked World of Warcraft players in North America (while simultaneously undiagnosed with Celiac Disease), and Slow Down, Wake Up: 150 Short Meditations For A More Present Life.
He is also someone who forever changed my business, with an offhand remark he made to me when we had coffee a year or so ago. I know of no one better at merging writing passion with entrepreneurial success and in this episode, we get into why caring about book sales is silly, what journalism professors get wrong and why having no launch strategy is the best strategy of all.
FOR MORE INFO ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM!
Carlyn Montes De Oca is a passionate animal advocate, international speaker and multi-award winning author of Dog as My Doctor, Cat as my Nurse who has also been featured on ABC and CBS and in Woman's Day magazine.
But it was what she did for her most recent book, Junkyard Girl: A Memoir of Ancestry, Family Secrets, and Second Chances, that we focused on. Rather than trying to tackle the whole wide world, she focused on her local area: Santa Fe, New Mexico. As a result, she got in with the local bookstores, pitched the local TV shows and set up local events. Now she's become a bit of a local celebrity.
Steal her techniques and dominate your hometown! From there, take on the world.
Want my authority-building secrets every week? Grab 'em at www.authoritysecrets.club.
Ian Altman is one of the world's top expert on sales, with his Same Side Academy rated as one of the top 5 Sales Development programs globally.
But instead of focusing on sales, we talked about how he has used the book he co-authored, Same Side Selling, to attract clients to his business.
We also touched on having a podcast and everything else with the same name as the book, producing an accompanying book workbook, updating a book five years after its release and so much more.
Only listen to this if you want to make money from your book!
Want my authority-building secrets every week? Grab 'em at www.authoritysecrets.club.
Joel Weldon is not just a Hall of Fame speaker who's been speaking for over four decades but he is also a true legend in the speaking industry—having been paid to speak at over 3,000 events and personally coached over 10,000 speakers.
In this episode, we talked about how to nail your pitch letter if you want to get into corporate speaking (he actually recites, off the top of his head, a letter that you'd be crazy not to type up and send). He also gave us the 22 words that will get you speaking gigs, why you need to replace every "I" in your speech with "you," how to make your audience want to read your book and so much more.
This one is gem after gem after gem! I highly recommend getting out the pen and taking some notes. And if you already know you want to work with Joel, you can go ahead and book a free slot here.
This week, I usher a new baby into the world...
My book, On Good Authority: 7 Steps to Prepare, Promote and Profit From a How-to Book That Makes You the Go-to Expert, is now out and this week's episode is an excerpt from the audiobook.
It's the book's introduction, which is all about how we're in the Golden Age of authority building from a book and how you can take advantage of that.
Only listen if you want to build authority with your book. GRAB THE BOOK BY GOING TO WWW.ONGOODAMAZON.COM!
Do the words "networking for your book launch" make you want to curl up in a small ball and rock back and forth?
This week's guest will assuage your anxieties...or at least get you to uncurl.
Ryan Paugh isn't just a thought leader, but also a community-building, relationship-forging, entrepreneur-enabling force to be reckoned with. And he's a self-proclaimed introvert!
The co-author of the book Superconnector: Stop Networking and Start Building Business Relationships That Matter, Ryan shares in this episode how any author, introvert or extrovert, can use basic skills for connection in order to have a successful book launch.
Want my authority-building secrets every week? Grab 'em at www.authoritysecrets.club.
Traditional publishers lie.
They tell you that you have to sell 10,000 copies of your book for it to be successful.
Or 5000.
Or 1000.
They're wrong. I'd rather sell 100 copies of my book to the right reader than 10,000 copies to readers who won't really care.
In this episode, I explain why.
This is another of the episodes based on the book I'm writing. Speaking of, if you want exclusive stories, resources and info about this book as I write it, you can sign up for that on annadbook.com.
Good news: going on podcasts is the best way to promote your book. Podcast listeners are eager to learn and read books.
Even more good news: Podcast hosts love to book authors.
So there has to be a catch, right?
Well, here it is: most of us are pitched daily, in the worst ways.
Listen to this episode to find out the absolute best way to pitch yourself to the podcasts you want to be on...and then how to slay once you're on there.
This is another of the episodes based on the book I'm writing. Speaking of, if you want exclusive stories, resources and info about this book as I write it, you can sign up for that on annadbook.com.
Anna here. Now you may have noticed I’ve never had a sponsor for this show before. And that’s because there’s never been a product that I believe in enough to recommend it to you guys. Well, all that changed when I discovered PickFu. It’s an online polling platform that allows you to get real responses from between 50 and 500 real people when you’re debating your title, chapter name, cover, descriptions, book trailers or anything else you need to decide on.
Now, why is this so important? Because going to social media and asking, “Hey which do you guys like best” is the absolutely worst way to get an opinions. PickFu is the only way I pick titles because it doesn’t just give you numbers, it actually gives you written feedback. And you know it’s real because sometimes you get harsh stuff like I did on a recent poll. It said: “C is the only one that makes me want to buy it. The others sound like snake oil and seem shifty and cheap.”
PickFu allows you to target respondents by age, income, hobbies, education level and so much more. Go to pickfu.com/anna and guess what? You’ll get 50% off your first poll. Thank me later.
Nicole Kalil is someone who practices what she preaches.
A fugitive of the C-suite at a Fortune 100 company, she has coached hundreds of women in business and speaks around the world.
When she was gearing up to her launch her book, Validation is for Parking, she heavily invested in social media (to the tune of $9,000 a month!) She also set out to write a book debunking some of the advice doled out by male entrepreneurs. But she realized two things: one, social media didn't make her feel good. And two: she didn't want to write the book she had already started working on.
In this conversation, she talked about how she switched courses for her book topic, why she left social media when she was "at the top," how she handles the "head trash" that creeps up when you're writing and launching a book and how her book has impacted her speaking career, among many other topics.
WANT TO ENHANCE YOUR AUTHORITY? GO TO WWW.OGAUTHORITYPOD.COM
Anna here. Now you may have noticed I’ve never had a sponsor for this show before. And that’s because there’s never been a product that I believe in enough to recommend it to you guys. Well, all that changed when I discovered PickFu. It’s an online polling platform that allows you to get real responses from between 50 and 500 real people when you’re debating your title, chapter name, cover, descriptions, book trailers or anything else you need to decide on.
Now, why is this so important? Because going to social media and asking, “Hey which do you guys like best” is the absolutely worst way to get an opinions. PickFu is the only way I pick titles because it doesn’t just give you numbers, it actually gives you written feedback. And you know it’s real because sometimes you get harsh stuff like I did on a recent poll. It said: “C is the only one that makes me want to buy it. The others sound like snake oil and seem shifty and cheap.”
PickFu allows you to target respondents by age, income, hobbies, education level and so much more. Go to pickfu.com/anna and guess what? You’ll get 50% off your first poll. Thank me later.
Scott Duffy is an entrepreneur and business strategist. He is listed as a “Top 10 Speaker” by Entrepreneur and has been named one of the “Top Influential People To Follow” by Yahoo! Finance.
He's also the author of three different business books on three different topics, from three different publishers and launched in three entirely different ways. When I was at his mastermind a few weeks ago, he articulated why entrepreneurs should launch books in a way that was clearer than I'd ever heard. That's why I wanted him on the show but what I actually got out of our talk was so much more.
In this episode, we got into the importance of subtitles, why authors should be featured on their book covers and how his most recent book launch was a disaster.
IF YOU'RE AN AUTHOR, YOU NEED AN ELEVATOR PITCH! GET YOUR ELEVATOR PITCH TEMPLATE AT WWW.BOOKELEVATORPITCH.COM
Jerry Stahl is the iconic author of Permanent Midnight (made into a movie starring Ben Stiller), among nine other books (among them, OG Dad, Pain Killers, I, Fatty, Perv, Plainclothes Naked, Happy Mutant Baby Pills, Bad Sex on Speed and his latest, Nien Nien: One Man's Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust).
A Pushcart Prize–winning author, Stahl’s work has appeared in Esquire, Vice, The Believer, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Times, among other places.
He also wrote the HBO movie Hemingway & Gellhorn (which earned a Writers Guild Award nomination), Bad Boys II and the cult classic Dr. Caligari and has written on the TV shows Maron, CSI and Escape at Dannemora (for which he received an Emmy nomination).
So you get it; he's done a lot. So why does he hate promoting his work so much? And how does he promote his work in spite of that? Find out in our spirited, sarcastic and deeply salacious (no, it's not salacious, I was just in the mood to be alliterative) interview.
IF YOU'RE AN AUTHOR, YOU NEED AN ELEVATOR PITCH! GET YOUR ELEVATOR PITCH TEMPLATE AT WWW.BOOKELEVATORPITCH.COM
Bridget Sampson is a Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies, the author of Communication Secrets for Success and the co-author of Communication Training and Development. She's also a TEDx speaker who helps other people write and deliver their TEDx talks.
All of this made her the perfect person to talk to about how to convert your book into a TEDx talk, whether or not you should outline or write the talk out completely, how to book a TEDx slot, how many times to practice, what to wear and what to do if you bomb, among many other topics.
She also shared that people never seem to care that she was a professor for decades but they all care that she has a book and a TEDx talk. So get on it! It's easier than you think.
IF YOU'RE AN AUTHOR, YOU NEED AN ELEVATOR PITCH! GET YOUR ELEVATOR PITCH TEMPLATE AT WWW.BOOKELEVATORPITCH.COM
Peter Shankman is many things, among them a five-time best selling author, entrepreneur and corporate in-person and virtual keynote speaker who focuses on customer service. But in this episode I got him speaking about something so many of you ask me about: HARO, or Help a Reporter Out...the website he started (and sold to Cision many years ago) that helps so many authors get featured in mainstream media.
In this conversation, which happened in rapid fire while he was in the throws of salmonella, Peter shared with me how he started HARO accidentally, the best way to get a journalist's attention and why someone stealing a Yoo Hoo truck ended up being the best PR Yoo Hoo could get, among many other topics.
IF YOU'RE AN AUTHOR, YOU NEED AN ELEVATOR PITCH! GET YOUR ELEVATOR PITCH TEMPLATE AT WWW.BOOKELEVATORPITCH.COM
Bonnie Habyan is a communications marketing professional with an MBA in banking and finance. She's been a news reporter, a wedding DJ and even a Miss Baltimore Oriole.
But now she's taken on a whole new role: as an author. Her book, The World According to Bess, is a true love letter to her 90-year-old mother—a woman who can definitely give the Sh*t My Dad guy's dad a run for his money.
What surprised Bonnie the most about the book process is that, despite her history in marketing, launching a book is a whole new animal—an animal that requires as much of a plan as any other business...complete with KPIs, plans for how the book plays into ultimate business goals and much more.
So what has she figured out about a book business plan and what are her KPI's and plans? It's all in this episode.
GET EXCLUSIVE ACCESS TO MY BESTSELLING BOOK BULLETIN (4 QUICK TIDBITS EVERY THURSDAY), BY GOING TO WWW.BESTSELLINGBOOKBULLETIN.COM
Elizabeth Lyons is the creator of the Book Writing Accelerator and a five-time author whose first book, which she wrote because she couldn't find another book on the topic and really needed it, sold over 20,000 copies.
As someone who helps aspiring authors write and publish books, she's become a bit of my comrade-in-arms the past few years, where we regularly text each other questions, concerns and the occasional (or not so occasional) gripe.
We have so many feelings and thoughts about publishing, in fact, that in this episode we delve into beginners luck, navigating self-publishing and much more before we get to the meat of it: what to include in your non-fiction book. She breaks down how to start (you write a letter to your reader [genius!]), how to approach your Table of Contents and how to see it through to the end.
Did I mention she's a mom of five and super funny?
You'll like this one, I promise. (Who are we kidding, you like love all of 'em!)
GET EXCLUSIVE ACCESS TO MY BESTSELLING BOOK BULLETIN (4 QUICK TIDBITS EVERY THURSDAY), BY GOING TO WWW.BESTSELLINGBOOKBULLETIN.COM
Ben Mezrich has sold over 10 million copies of his books.
And, by the way, that’s not even the impressive part. The impressive part is that he sells EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS BOOKS as a movie or TV show; in fact, if Hollywood isn’t interested in the treatment, he doesn’t even write the book.
Mezrich has gotten into this position because of a chance encounter with some MIT students, which led to his writing Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, which led to Kevin Spacey snapping up the film rights before the book was even out, which led to the book spending over 60 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Then there was his book, The Accidental Billionaires, which David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin jumped on as Mezrich was writing the book and which, of course turned into the multi award-nominated movie The Social Network. (Mezrich is the only non-fiction author to have two adaptations open at #1 at the box office.)
He’s written numerous other books, including Bitcoin Billionaires and The Antisocial Network and is also a consulting producer on Billions. Oh, and his most recent book, The Midnight Ride, has an NFT component that already has over 3500 owners.
So how does this happen? How does a former struggling novelist become Hollywood’s go to guy pursued by designers who want to dress him for his book tours? And what is the secret to finding the sort of story that makes Hollywood salivate? It’s all in this episode.
WANT 4 QUICK TIDBITS EVERY THURSDAY TO HELP YOU GET YOUR BOOK LAUNCHED? GO TO WWW.LAUNCHPADWEEKLY.COM.
Mike De Luca has, arguably, more experience than anyone else out there when it comes to turning books into movies: three of the four times he's done it (for The Social Network, Moneyball and Captain Phillips), he has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and the one time he wasn't nominated for one of his book-to-film adaptations, it was for a little movie called 50 Shades of Gray. He's done several other million things in his career, including discovering Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher and running New Line studio at the age of 27.
But in this episode, we focused on the process of turning a book into a movie—including how producers find out about the books they end up adapting, how much control the author has over the movie and how much money they can make, among many other topics.
WANT 4 QUICK TIDBITS EVERY THURSDAY TO HELP YOU GET YOUR BOOK LAUNCHED? GO TO WWW.LAUNCHPADWEEKLY.COM.
Paul Angone had an extremely unusual journey to success as an author.
First, he tried to sell a book. For eight years. Nary a bite.
Then a blog post he dashed off went viral. Very viral. From there, he was able to sell a book based on that blog post to a publisher. The problem was that he had to finish it in a month.
Well that book and the next have sold over 100,000 copies and launched a massive speaking career.
But that's not even why I wanted to have him on the podcast. I wanted him on the pod so I could Interview him about the process of turning his book into a course.
Listen in on this mega inspiring conversation about how courses and books work symbiotically—and how your reality may end up being even bigger than your dreams.
WANT 4 QUICK TIDBITS EVERY THURSDAY TO HELP YOU GET YOUR BOOK LAUNCHED? GO TO WWW.LAUNCHPADWEEKLY.COM.
While Jeff Kober is a terribly successful actor—having appeared on The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, Shameless, New Girl, NCIS: Los Angeles, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, ER, 24, The Closer and Criminal Minds, among many other shows—it is only one of the many things he does. In fact, although he's a good friend that I adore, I will admit right here and now that I've never seen any of his acting. Sorry, Jeff! But that's because I think of him primarily as a gifted meditation teacher and writer.
And I am selfishly so grateful that he recently turned his daily newsletter into a book, Embracing Bliss: 108 Daily Meditations. See, for many years, I read his newsletter religiously every morning before meditating and I pretty much curse Jeff every day for making me have to look at my phone to access it. I'm an addict, people! I can't help but get sucked into some stressful email or Instagram rabbit hole when I was just hoping to take in some spiritual truths, Damn it! Well, now that he's made these brilliant daily thoughts into a book, I have no one but myself to blame if I go down an internet rabbit hole before meditating.
You can grab your copy of his book of daily thoughts here. You will not regret it—I ordered multiple copies because I plan to give it out as gifts. But before you order it, do listen in on our conversation so you can learn about his process for turning pre-existing content into a book; it involved spreadsheets, consultations with a colleague and a whole lot of reflection on what people respond to (spoiler alert: musings on relationships and love).
WANT 4 QUICK TIDBITS EVERY THURSDAY TO HELP YOU GET YOUR BOOK LAUNCHED? GO TO WWW.LAUNCHPADWEEKLY.COM.
Jesse J. Anderson's journey to bookdom is unlike any other guest I've had on the show.
For one, he's not launching a book to help build his business.
Also, that book—Refocus: A Practical Guide to Adult ADHD—hasn't launched yet. In fact, he hasn't even finished writing it.
Why, then, you may ask, would I have him on the show?
Well, part of the reason is entirely selfish: he's writing a book in public and I want to write my next book in public so this is simply a shameless attempt to get some intel.
If you're wondering what "writing a book in public" even means, you may want to go back to the Rob Fitzpatrick episode, where he breaks down the process he documents in his book, Write Useful Books. If you don't have that kind of time, I'll tell you: it's essentially getting feedback from your readers while you're writing the book. Jesse is in fact doing it using software Rob designed for that very process and, as of this recording, he's about three-quarters of the way done with writing.
Jesse has also built up an impressive Twitter following by releasing Twitter threads of book chapters—a topic he dove into in detail.
When he's not writing books in public, Jesse is a designer and developer who has made it his mission to help others better understand what ADHD really is.
WANT 4 QUICK TIDBITS EVERY THURSDAY TO HELP YOU GET YOUR BOOK LAUNCHED? GO TO WWW.LAUNCHPADWEEKLY.COM.