how do you fundamentally put a footprint in the sand around who you are how are people going to know you you should be asking yourself is my positioning in this world about my business and my leadership you can develop that in what we’re going to be talking about today the title and the cover oh my God yeah so important some guy had gone in the back of the room and just taken an ugly orange color and wrote Never Eat Alone on it and so that ended up being the cover for Never Eat Alone don’t think of a book as this crazy Mount Everest thing that only special people do think of a book as your heartfelt ability to sit and be contemplative about what really matters to you who you are what do you want to project to the world it’s a forcing mechanism an accountability mechanism to focus on your brand and what you have to say to the world Keith welcome to moonshots it’s great to have you here pal any conversation with you is a blessing thank you uh let’s jump into this
[00:01:02] conversation which is for entrepreneurs for CEOs For Thought leaders who’ve never written a book but want to write a book uh our goal here is in service to them teach them how do you write a New York Times bestseller maybe how do you write a number one New York Times bestseller each of us have written one of those and the question of does it really actually matter um so let’s actually start with that do you think it matters that your book is in New York Times bestseller let me wind this back a second I think it’s a little different positioning one is that I think it’s important that everybody write their book I don’t care if you publish it because what I’m about to suggest is that you writing your book is you putting a a footprint in the sand around your brand what matters to you what are you trying to tell the world you you talk about an MTP yeah right I think everybody should manifest and again the way in which one quote writes a book is the same way as in which you develop
[00:02:00] your positioning your thought leadership your brand right so if any CEO out there you should be asking yourself is my positioning in this world about my business is my positioning around my leadership is my positioning around whatever you can develop that in what we’re going to be talking about today so whether or not you’re shooting for the New York Times list or whether or not you want to see your book at uh on the on Amazon it’s kind of irrelevant because what we’re really talking about is how do you fundamentally put a footprint in the sand around who you are all right so let’s dive into all these parts which is how do you decide what book you’re going to write and then how do you write and then how do you get it published and then how do you promote it and how do you get on the on the list and does that list really matter and I think your point is right um it doesn’t matter if you’re a number one New York Times it might matter for you as an ego to be able to claim that I mean let’s not take it away from me that I’ve gotten one so I don’t want to you know I got that it doesn’t matter at all you
[00:03:01] have one too you just have it in Partnership yeah I got to number two twice and then I had Tony Robbins as like you know the master promotional engine of the world what we’re about to tell these folks is you use any leverage you can right so it doesn’t matter you’ve got a number one I’ve got a number one and has it changed our lives ABS lutely not yeah at the end of at the end of the day uh you write a book for a number of reasons and let’s let’s talk about that because I think it’s important folks to realize I mean you said the first one right uh developing and promoting your brand how are people going to know you right so for me when I wrote abundance with stepen Cotler back in 2012 and got in the Ted stage and gave that that opening keynote it really was a pivot moment for me right and I became Mr abundance and all of a sudden good news was cool and and we’ll talk about a second reason not in this podcast but later but you don’t make money on the the book or the book
[00:04:00] Advance is you make money on you make money on speaking speaking Yeah right and and and the Tipping Point for you you know abundance was a big success yeah but the Ted talk like we should talk about that when we get to our the second half of our work together today which is going to be speaking but the Ted Talk is instrumental too it was it was and and the value of that and does it matter if you’re on a tedx talk or in the Ted main stage and we’ll talk about that in our our second podcast we’re going to do which is on how to build a speaking business but I agree go back to why you why do you write a book so if I’m talking to any of my clients I coach executive teams right and a number of my clients you know I Al ask them I said do you have a book in you and I’d say half of them say yes and the other half say not interested at all um the ones that say yes I put them through a simple exercise because I’m curious why they have a book in them it’s interesting because some people have a book in them and it has nothing to do with their workplace it’s because they’re a
[00:05:00] Christian and they believe in financial um success for for the underprivileged and they want to write a book about being a Christian and having financial success right I get surprised sometimes by whatever somebody comes at me what really matters to them just like when you’re trying to design somebody’s MTP sure right but then there are others who are like I have no interest at all and when the ones who say I have no interest at all I push them a little bit and I said well how do you represent yourself to your employees how do you represent yourself to the world how do you represent yourself to your shareholders who are you what matters yeah and I said let’s let’s think about writing a book now a book to me starts with the simplest thing in the world because most people see this Herculean effort of you know Mount Everest that they someday have to climb no you don’t you don’t even have to get the base camp all you got to do is and what I always say is go on a piece of paper and write 10 sentences that def Define for you what
[00:06:01] you have to teach the world or what you want the world to do differently just 10 things M right and try to make them in some order of flow and what would those be and then what you do is you write those 10 things and then show them to a few friends and talk about them have a dinner about them sure and then once you Muse on that with somebody else then go from 10 sentences to 10 10 sections with three sentences so sort of Flesh it out it out a littleit more three sentences and then show that to a few friends and get a buch of musings back and then maybe you get to the stage where you write 10 paragraphs by the time you’ve done that you’ve started to structure both what you think you have to share with the world and what the world resonates with or at least the people who have a sense of who you really are what they resonate with once you get to that I think you’ve got the bones of what is most important which is starting to structure your your what you have to share in the world I mean at the end of
[00:07:00] the day a book is moving someone through a sequence of thoughts and feelings so they come out the other end understanding the point you wanted to make right and and you and I one of the things I think books fail to do and this is something that I live my life on I think if there’s a if there’s a core element of my brand that I’m starting to realize about myself it’s not whether whether I was the relationship guy with never alone or the future of teams you know with competing in the the new world of work and other things I think at the core of my brand is something very different it’s high return practices I’ll explain what I mean by that I I had a remember pocket coach yeah I remember I was an investor and lovely failure of $6 million it was a great idea it was a great idea and it still remains a great idea and the idea was that there was extraordinary things we all needed to not just learn but to do differently yes so if you different habits different habits rituals practices and by the way like Atomic habits
[00:08:00] Prov but my idea was okay if you read good to great yeah you would know what a great leader is like but would you really know what to do so my idea was I was going to go and take all the great books originally the book it was called uh pocket coach um and the idea was that I was going to take all the great books turn them into practices so that along with a book you would get dosed practices on an ongoing basis and what I found interestingly enough was that there were basically no practices in most books yeah there were a lot of Concepts there were a lot of learning there were a lot of inspiration lot of ideas a lot of Storytelling but the what you do daytoday differently what are the practices and how do I they weren’t there all of my books are practice based yeah and that’s just my brand right my brand I think if anything else it’s a highly practical practice-based well for those who don’t know you fully I mean you began as a Fortune 500 executive Vier CMO at at
[00:09:01] starw hotels Dee and then deoe and I today you know I view you as what Tony Robbins does for individuals coaching individuals you do for executive teams right you come in coach teams for high performance and there’s a lot of practices a lot of this is how you get to that end point yeah and and I agree I mean a book where I can learn something and it changes my behavior right um is is really and I wouldn’t say that be yes that’s my brand but there are others where you read a book and you’re inspired or entertained entertained right so all of those are good um I just want to suggest that the key to your success as you start to think about this is these are the questions you should be asking yourself you should be asking yourself is my brand what and how does a person when I have in when I have communicated on paper or on stage with an audience what does that audience look like so let’s go into the basics who am I speaking to that’s different yeah you
[00:10:01] speak to entrepreneurs now the overlap of that is that you also Inspire and speak to Fortune 500 CEOs but that’s not your core audience yeah I my mission my MTP Inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful compelling and abundant future I want to go back to why write a book and and you said something a little bit ago I mean first of all we talked about what you said about creating defining your brand yeah right because if you have a book that really defines your brand and you’re if you’re employees and again speaking entrepreneurs a great book can launch a company right a great book can launch you as an entrepreneur as a CEO can align your organization Tony Shay delivering happiness and then exponential organizations that I recently wrote with Saleem or exo2 um it also can allow you to Pivot right and this is something that you’ve used in your life yeah so you and I were talking about this yesterday when we were having lunch I like to use books to
[00:11:00] learn not to read and learn but to write and learn so force you to learn it’s a forcing mechanism so uh you know when when I wrote my first book never e alone it was an accident you know it was I always had a book in me I you want to hear the funny little story I want to hear it I want why did you write that book yeah so um I always had a book in me and remember I had been the chief marketing officer of two companies and I thought my book pretty significant company big companies and I thought my book was going to be about marketing sure and I came out to Los Angeles and I was an entrepreneur I had left marketing because I wanted to be a CEO I was working for Michael milin and I was running one of the companies in his portfolio and um somebody came to me and said uh we would um like to write an article about you on your success you had such crazy success you were a Fortune 500 executive by the time you were 30 mhm and and then you’re now
[00:12:00] you’re a CEO blah blah blah and so we wrote they wrote an article about me and it was about my perspective and this is very important for anybody thinking about um writing your book again when when this when this journalist came to me and said I want to write an article about your success I stopped and I didn’t want the narrative to be run by him huh I stopped and I said give me 24 hours and I’m going to write for you the 10 things that I think defined My Success okay and I delivered those to him 24 hours later after be thinking about them and he called me back and he said you’ve just written My article My article is going to be those 10 things and we’re just going to go in more detail now right so the structure I commanded my own narrative and it was about really it was about things like deepening relationships with individuals being authentic being generous all those things um and then when I that when that article got published somebody reached
[00:13:01] out to me and said you should write a book on that now remember my head I want to be a CEO of a major company I’m a marketer that’s where I am and somebody comes along and says you should write a book about this this world of networking and and career development Etc and I said no I said I don’t want to do that that’s not my brand I’m a corporate guy I’m going to be a CEO and they said we’ll give you a quarter of a million and I’m like I’ll do it so it was and we’ll talk about advances and how much is real and so forth you know I had a not too dissimilar story on my first book um uh it was just after the xprize uh no the X prise had had reached some level of popularity but had not been one yet and I got uh I read an article that a guy Steven Cotler uh wrote about me he wrote One in GQ and one in um uh I think it was wire at the time and when I read this article I was
[00:14:02] so enthralled by his writing not what he said but the way he wrote was so incredible I did something unusual I called him up and I said Stephen would you give me writing lessons I want to learn how to write like you and cuz I the book I had in me was I wanted to write a book about space right I’d been a space cadet for 20 years and it was like I’m going to write about the future of humanity in space and this and that and um so I took writing lessons I wrote a book proposal on Space didn’t go any place and I put it aside and then Here Comes 2009 and I am at singular University in the first year and I’m having a conversation I’ll never forget with Neil jacobstein and with Ray KW about the idea that technology was turning things that were scarce into abundance and the that word abundance just grabbed me and I started thinking about that and it it became so powerful inside me I called up
[00:15:02] Stephen and I said Stephen you and I writing a book together and it’s going to be called abundance right it was like that committed and uh lo and behold I got a quar million dollars advance that I split with Steven and very difficult to do coming out of the shoot on a first book for anybody so just to manage expectation Sten who had been a writer a successful writer was getting like 60k advances and um and but it was our partnership and sometimes someone who’s got a wider reach and someone with writing skills and we’ll we’ll talk about do you write with somebody on your own I know that that’s probably in the sequence later but let’s use this as a moment um neither of us would have had the success we had in our first books if it wasn’t for an extraordinary writing partner yes I just want to note that so there’s two ways to think about this one is if what you’re writing your book for is is to is to document your positioning and to put
[00:16:01] a footprint in your brand and further explore it fine but if you’re going to put things out to the world there is a skill set called extraordinary writing which is rare yeah and I would never have had Never Eat Alone as a success if it wasn’t for T Ross who was your who was my co-writer right um and and similarly with abundance you wouldn’t have had the same if it wasn’t for stud I was an incredible Storyteller and you know as good as chat GPT is today it just doesn’t come close maybe maybe GPT 5 or six will will come close but and we’ll talk about that a bit later I just think it’s important to note that none neither of us believes that you do everything alone yeah building the right team and we’ll get to that later but I just wanted to note how important it was you don’t have to think I would imagine it would be daunting for most people to think of writing a book you don’t have to write the book you have to be the quarterback you have to be the leader of the book and there’s a
[00:17:01] whole set of assets that you’ll be leveraging to make that happen which we can talk about in a moment but I want to get over that hurdle yeah and and you can write with a co-author where you’re both named as the authors you can have a ghost writer who comes in and interviews you and uh writes the book in your voice and and just on that I’m often I’m intrigued by your thought so T and I had an extraordinary writing partnership for never alone and um by the time these days I always make a habit of making sure that the person who’s writing with me is on the cover yes 100% And the reason I do that is because I want them on Saturday night when they’re trying to decide they have an extra glass of wine or do they turn to the book yeah they if their their their their name is going to be on it just with mine I think it’s important and I don’t think I don’t think an author loses anything I lost by sharing the cover yeah and and so abundance was written in my voice um I
[00:18:01] you know first person voice and so forth and then Steph and I had continued our partnership in our second book bold and our third book um the future a Future’s faster than you think and those were jointly voiced books right and uh and at the end of the day it’s been incredible you will if you have a co-author it’s a very intimate relationship we used to joke that we were each other’s lovers you know in terms because we’d be up at 5: in the morning writing for 2 hours yeah and and it’s you know you go deep in that regard we’ll talk about you know writing styles so why write a book brand build a speaking career learning and curiosity learning and curiosity um uh I think launching your business you talked about speaking as a business but you’re right um right now I ironically of all I’ve written four books none of them are on the subject that I actually make my money from I make my money coaching executive teams and so I now cultivating
[00:19:01] the 20 years of work in a new book around High performing executive teams and that book will be out next year and it I it’s going to be important for the business that I have which I have had for years um to take that business to scale so is there any other reasons you write a book um you know like like I said there are there are people who have a book in them about something meaningful yeah in the world I came to mind it’s like it was bursting from me yeah it was like I had no I had no other choice I had to write that book it was like something that was new and true and you know and sort of using Peter Teal’s you know what’s your thesis that uh uh that you think is absolutely true and no one else agrees with when you feel that sort of U that feeling getting it out in a book uh can be a very powerful means so you know for me I love your process and I agree
[00:20:02] with it you know when I start sitting down to write a book it is outlining the argument flow in terms of the chapters in one of the things I think is very important in books is storytelling yeah um I think that books that are really engaging we as humans you know we receive and we communicate information in terms of stories yeah and so when you open a chapter and it is a compelling story about an individual in for you know it’s very different than just a bunch of data yeah yeah I I have um asked I have helped my many of my friends write their books uh Peter goober is a dear friend of mine and when I remember one time sitting out on my balcony for a dinner party and Peter goober who mostly known these days as one of the owners of the Warriors who really helped turn that franchise around uh the Dodgers helped turn that that franchise around but also a a an Oscar
[00:21:01] winning um movie producer um Peter and I were sitting and I asked him I said what is your great dream what’s next and he said you know I have made a legacy in my product that people will always remember some of the movies that got Oscars he said but there’s something underneath it that I want to leave as a real Legacy which is helping the world tell better stories mhm and so I helped coach him through the process of her writing his book on storytelling um and you know what’s from his perspective it was Legacy he was writing a book for legacy sure and and he did you know we helped get that to be a number one New York Times bestselling book Peter doesn’t lose in anything whether it’s a pennant you know an Oscar or a number one New York Times bestelling another reason to write a book is to tell your side of the story oo right so Paul Allen writes the idea man which is his side of the Bill Gates Paul Allen Microsoft founding
[00:22:02] right and so that’s interesting I I think uh writing a wrong or telling your side because you know a lot of times the person who is the most vocal stories out there and a book is a way to provide a Consolidated approach to that datab backed approach so so now that we have some hopefully what we’ve done at this stage is we’ve helped our listeners awaken to the idea that maybe they should have a book in them yeah I think everybody can have a book right what is it take and how do you how do you do what kind of commitment so I you know I was never a good writer in high school uh or in college my love of writing actually developed later in life and I actually love writing I get up I I I like am excited when I get my wake up before my alarm because I have extra time to write in the morning and I write almost every single morning first thing in the morning where I’m super super clear still today and it’s either writing a Blog um or writing and I’m you
[00:23:02] know I’m always working on multiple books so right now uh we just published uh exo2 uh Peter’s longevity practices is coming out next and then with Cho uh Rose Washington uh who my head of research were going to be putting out a book uh which is the follow on to abundance and then there’s a book on mindsets after that and so it’s just it’s a I’ve turned it into a day-to-day activity and I’ll write for an hour uh Stephen Cotler once taught me that if you can write a single finished page per day that would put you at the most productive you know book writers out there a b a year so that’s not my process what do you do yeah um I need designated sitting time to write my books to write anything so I have a writing day so my Friday it took me a long time to block off my Fridays and
[00:24:01] today is a Friday and I’m doing this for you thank you um and also for our listeners right and for our I’m doing this for actually I’m doing this for you um but the the Fridays are my writing days yeah so my team knows that they’re not allowed to block my Fridays for anything other than my writing yeah and it’s it’s the if I can’t I got to get into a writing Groove I can’t just go grab an hour to write yeah my head’s not there and I got maybe maybe I’ve got more monkey mind than you do but I’ve got to get quiet in the groove focused and ready to really think and iterate um that’s just me I totally love the idea of you know doing it uh for an hour every day and if that works for you that’s great yeah um but I I block the time the other thing that I think is really important but can I ask you when you were an undergrad at Harvard you were writing then yeah so uh I was a
[00:25:00] undergrad at Yale how dare you right I’m thinking I’m thinking of Eric was at Harvard I was Harvard Business School Harvard okay but no when I was yeah I’ve it’s interesting um maybe a little bit vulnerable revealing so I grew up kind of thinking I was smart until I went to Yale and then everybody there because I had not gone to the kind of schools that all these kids had because I wasn’t late and I hadn’t been you know steeped in the literature I didn’t feel smart and as a result it really styed me a bit I didn’t think I was smart enough um and it took me a while to realize regain again my confidence in my intellect um because I was I was smart in it a different way that’s shocking to me since I’ve never seen any aspect other than the brilli well you know you see it and I guess it was always there but I but when you’ve got a bunch of people the these audite
[00:26:00] philosophers who have read all of Kant and n and I didn’t I hadn’t done that yeah you know I felt I felt minuscule um so it it set me back but when I graduated from Yale I got into business and I started writing about the things I cared about I started writing manuals in manufacturing for continuous process Improvement down at the pr plant front line so I wrote my first book right out of Yale uh working at a manufacturing company about worker uh empowerment so soon as I started getting practical my writing started to show up and you enjoyed it I loved it I loved it I and that’s when I knew I had a book in me and I knew that my intellect wasn’t this audite stuff it was very practical in nature and I wanted to crack the code of continuous process engineering of changing the way the world works that’s always been my core so here’s the question of the times of course is the use of GPT in writing right so uh it’s
[00:27:01] not cheating I think it’s ridiculous to no I’m not no but I think a lot of people have been saying that I don’t get it well I think listen if you say to chat GPT write me a book on this topic and it spits out you know uh a you you probably can get it to write you an outline and then say please flesh out chapter one for me and then flesh it out again and you can probably get a book written um and what’s wrong with that well a question is is it your thoughts versus uh the consumed thoughts of the internet but what’s but what’s wrong with that if if the intention is to be a service to a community you know you and I had played the other day with some really interesting prompting theories MH prompting is a clever thing to do sure and if you get really clever at sequentially asking better and better prompts which get chat gbt to write a a better and better book or a better and
[00:28:00] better whatever um and look maybe your point is and you should say co-authored by chat gbt I think at a at a minimum you should you should disclose that information no problem with that I mean for me right now and I’ve seen I’ve seen long form content generated by chat GPT and it was missing but that’s another thing which is if you create a book with chat gbt yeah and it gets out there you have to suffer the consequences of a mediocre piece that hasn’t been fully fleshed out with your own ideas right but at the same time one of the challenges people have is staring at a blank page which is a great way to start and I find chat GPT as a mechanism to say okay uh you know give me ideas you know what you’re going to write about in this chapter conceptually and you know if you can outline like you did here’s the key points I want to make can you provide some content on top of this it can break a lot and give you an ability to get started I
[00:29:00] want to take you and the and the and the viewers into a very terrified moment I had uh less than a few months ago where I hadn’t been fully immersed in the prompting uh within chat jbt I knew it was there I hadn’t time to really play with it and here I was right in the middle of my my major book my tone my legacy of high performing teams this is going to be the most important book that I’ve written perhaps aside from never e alone thus far thus far um I’ll get it many many and we’ll talk about the pivots but I got scared shitless because I sat there and I thought wait a second I didn’t ask chat gbt what it has to think about this book that I have now structured and formalized and ready to ship what if chat gbt could make it fundamentally better yeah I’m I’m feeling castrated by the fact that I didn’t co-author it with chat GPT and it scared the out of
[00:30:00] me because I thought damn I’ve done an just I I’ve done an injustice to the world publishing my tone without the universe of all writing in it as with my partner of Chad gbt fascinating and and so I actually I I put a pause in the book yeah I said we’re not publishing the book we’re going through a rewriting process that will think about you know remember I was and here’s something I did the other day I just said I’ve always again I’m I’m All About High performing teams I always thought well what would it be if I had actually read all the great works of philosop not philosophy but of psychology Freud’s great works Etc so I started asking chat gbt what does Freud have to say about high performing executive teams and and it gave me some very interesting stuff and I said what does Young have to think about high performing executive teams and I asked more questions and more questions and it made me realize there is a body of knowledge that I can give to my readers yeah that
[00:31:00] was not there before the way I think about it is as a writer as an entrepreneur as an executive you only know how to think the way you know how to think yeah and having chat GPT in the conversation uh can give you massively different perspectives and especially if you prompted properly in saying you know take on the mantle of Freud uh I’m an author trying to write about this How would Freud look at it and then the ability to prompt it and say make it more compelling make it more data driven make it more whatever I had played with this idea by talking to a bunch of shrinks Over The Last 5 Years about their perspective on Executive teams barely barely and in three hours yeah I got this Deluge I and then I started doing the same thing like I chased after the the woman who was the coach for the women’s soccer team that won the Nationals I got to sit with Coach K asking him questions so so now then I did a whole separate thing about you know successful uh sports teams coaches
[00:32:02] right so all of this again is is powerful now the the question you were asking is um chat gbt and bookwriting I I think they’re they’re going to be massively integrated so the question be so listen at the end of the day if there are you know 10x or 100x more books going out into the market because it’s easier right because an individual can now use a to write their book the question becomes what distinguishes your book um and is is the future of is the future of books going to be this you know hard cover or soft digital um aren’t those aren’t those two different questions right they they are they are because I think at the core how you differentiate your book from other books obviously the quality is going to be important both abundance and never read alone were extraordinary books and they had viral appeals such that when somebody read them they wanted to pass
[00:33:00] them along yeah I the number of times I’ve heard I’m sure you have I bought 100 copies and gave it out to all my that’s all I’ve been doing is getting your book out and I’ve been doing it for 20 years so there’s that you got to write a great book and we know that chat gbt will write a mediocre book you’ve got to write a a great book but then the next question is the the the brand Peter diamandis has how many followers Keith has how many followers as a result our books get seated into the world in a different way yeah so if you really want your book to differentiate then you need to build a media company and you and I were talking about this the other day you know you need to build a media company around who you are now your media if you want your book to inspire your employees which is perfectly fine and a great purpose for a book and a great purpose for a book then you probably don’t need a media company yeah if you want your book to have Ripple effects around the world and change a state of the universe then you probably need a media company associated with it yeah you know I’m super passionate about
[00:34:00] longevity and health span and how do you add 10 20 Health years onto your life one of the most underappreciated elements is the quality of your sleep and there’s something that changed the quality of my sleep and this episode is brought to you by that product it’s called Eight sleep if you’re like me you probably didn’t know that temperature plays a crucial role in the quality of your sleep those mornings when you wake up feeling like you barely slept yeah temperature is off in the culprit traditional mattresses trap heat but your body needs to cool down during sleep and stay cool through the evening and then heat up in the morning enter the Pod cover by8 sleep it’s the perfect solution to the problem it fits on any bed adjust the temperature on each side of the bed based upon your individual needs you know I’ve been using pod cover and it’s a GameChanger I’m a big believer in using technology to improve life and at sleep has done that for me and it’s not just about temperature
[00:35:00] control with the pods sleep and health tracking I get personalized sleep reports every morning it’s like having a personal sleep coach so you know when you eat or drink or go to sleep too late how it impacts your sleep so why not experience sleep like never before visit www.sleep.com that’s EIG ght SLE p.com moonshots and you’ll save 150 bucks on the Pod cover by eight sleep I hope you do it it’s transformed my sleep and will for you as well now back to the episode let’s dive into a few of the other uh fun subjects we talk about writing process I’m every day you’re on Fridays um I used to one of the things I loved in writing with stepen Cotler is the back and forth right I would write a chapter and he would write a chapter we’d exchange them and edit them and then the thing I found really uh powerful ful was we’d get on back then it was uh Skype we would get on with
[00:36:01] every morning and we’d read the chapter out loud and reading the chapter out loud really is for me the way to take a Chapter to finish cuz it’s got to sound compelling and not boring to you and when you read it it’s very different when you when you speak it so so so I think we have again we have a very different way yeah you seem to write from the beginning with an expectation that what you’re writing is somewhere in the direction of final I do not you explore I write in a radically agile process so I expect my chapters to be WR Rewritten 20 times significantly Rewritten 20 times so first thing as I said I did is remember so think about how I’m writing books I’m writing 10 sentences to 10 paragraphs right and I’m iterative iterative and every one of the those is a is a turn once you get to a chapter and you’ve got the first paragraph now
[00:37:02] it’s th for me it’s throw up on the page anything you would want free form free form writing anything you’d want to think about in this then what I do because I’m not expected to be the expert in writing where you it’s the difference between you and me you went out and said teach me how to write I went out and I said tall write this MH right so I did I abdicated the the need to be the writer I have a writing partner so my job was to throw the stuff on the page that I think were was important and then recognize that my writing partner knew how to read that and restructure it so that’s what the way I do it I I and I think that’s what Tony Robbins does too you were saying he speaks to it he’s write it yeah when Tony and I wrote uh life forse um he was in an usual process to say the least uh and uh we had like five or six authors on the book right and it was um I I wrote my own chapters in rewriting but
[00:38:01] Tony works with a team of writers that will uh shape what he says and put into content let’s talk about um how you go from your idea uh to getting a publisher and a and a and a publishing deal so did you have a literary agent when you went out with your books I have I’ve had um three literary agents um over my four book trajectory okay and my first one was exceptional one of the things that I look for in an agent is somebody who cares about the content M and my agent my agent number one and my agent number three have all been richly interested in the content and hands in the content in fact my first agent sat with tall and I uh for many days in his office in New York and helped combat and structure up I don’t
[00:39:01] remember my first agent I don’t think he’s in the business any longer but I do remember the other ones yeah I had uh John Brockman uh as my agent great John’s amazing um his son Max Brockman is taken over Brockman in at this point yeah and I met him at Ted and he approached me one day he says when you’re ready for your book contact me yeah and then I did on abundance it’s interesting right so uh an agent will typically take a fixed percentage of the deal and so they’re motivated and that percentage can be like 10 15% oh higher I think 20% 20 25 okay um and they’re motivated to get the maximum advance from a a publisher now interestingly for a fiction book if you’re can I yeah please let me debate that so my agent now so my three agents the first agent was a small single shingle guy yeah and um and he really got in and and every loan would wouldn’t be successful without him got it um we ended up not needing an agent because we went with
[00:40:01] the first person who helped us bird the book somebody who just read the article and said you should write a book then we went and got an agent we shopped it around but we came back to the person who discovered me so to speak sure then what I decided to do is I wanted a named agent after that I thought I’m a big shot now so I went to William Morris agency which is now William Morris Endeavor yeah and I got one of these big named agents and I remember um Ari Emanuel calling me when we hit number one New York Times bestseller i’ never I didn’t know who he was I didn’t know his I’m not an entertainment guy he’s like who’s got your back baby I’m like who is this he’s like Google me what do you mean who is this he literally said that I I know Arie and it’s like my experience with ar is being in his office having a conversation and him having a conversation on two different phones at the same time I’ll call you right back and I just like for those who don’t know where I am and he’s the guy who was the arri in the series Entourage yes yeah anyway but but what I found out about that whole thing interestingly enough was that person
[00:41:02] that person didn’t care about my book yeah that person was all about maximizing maximizing the income for the book and and and frankly because I was a business book and business hadn’t gotten cool on there was no Netflix Etc there was no tale there was no movie for never e alone you know that that sort of thing so I think today by the way there could be I think there’s a there’s a genre now emerging like you see bernee brown has her TV series and all that kind of stuff but anyway but today Esmond harmsworth he is a gem he works in the detail of the content with us he and and what I was going to say is he in my last book he agreed we went with Harvard Business School as a publisher and this is important most Publishers don’t matter Harvard Business School does MH Harvard Business School has a category around the world that if your book is published on Harvard Business Review Harvard Business School people know that
[00:42:00] it has had peer review it’s had some degree of academic pressure to it and as a result there are there are business people in China and Vietnam who will go to their catalog and use their book and as a result speaking engagements go up on an international basis because you’ve got a Harvard Business School book so I just wanted to put that out there um esmin took uh probably a quar of a million dollars less interesting on that book because he knew long term it was better for me to have a Harvard Business School book as compared to if uh sister right so a few a few data points here so a literate agent is not necessary but if a if you got a a great literate agent they will maximize your income potential by and so what what John Brockman would do is he would have an auction so their proposal I was amazed so if you’re writing a fiction book you typically have to write the entire book and turn in a complete
[00:43:01] manuscript on a fiction book on a non-fiction book you write a book proposal um you write a book proposal a book proposal is typically an outline of you know each of the chapters what it’s going to mean and and how you’re going to Market it and it may or may not include a chapter it should include two chapters well these days you don’t but abundance did yeah with no abundance did not did not did notman did not want a chapter interes he and and so he went out to bid uh and Simon sister won the bid for $240,000 which was like wow it was like an amazing amount of money for me back then and um and by the way when people hear about your Advance just to be clear that number 240,000 is split over three payments right so you get a third upfront before you start writing a third when you deliver the manuscript and a third when the soft cover comes out so it’s not all upfront that was my deal I don’t yeah they’re all different I mean it most of the time it’s a third a third
[00:44:00] a third and a third third has something to do with the success of the book um or some delivery of some aspect of the book but let me go back I think what’s important for our um listeners is number one if you if you want your book to be a big success out in the world having an agent is One path and we’ll talk about another path which is self-publishing yeah but having an agent is One path what and but please make sure you find an agent that you love and they love you and they love your ideas want get involved and they want they get their hands dirty that’s my big recommendation the next piece then is what is a book proposal you should write a book proposal which is you write the introduction which is telling somebody what the book’s all about and again in a sense that’s the first chapter um you write about the book and then you write a structured outline of the book with if you know half a page per um now that’s one version of it and and I’ve often been told that you need one or two full chapters because they don’t know if you’re a good writer they don’t know if
[00:45:01] yeah maybe in my case you had Steve C St Cotler was a a known writer right and I was a known marketer promoter entrepreneur they see that you can structure a chapter that’s pretty good right so they want to see that on paper and that’s what you’re selling what a lot of people think they have to do is they have to go out and and write a book and then sell a book only in fiction do you do that yeah in this case uh fiction or a biography I suspect a biography write the book yeah but in the case of a a book proposal so that’s your next step is write your book proposal and your edit your agent will bust their ass to make sure it’s a good proposal my agent has Rewritten my book proposals so me and my co-writer how they earn their money that’s how they earn their money that’s and then what they have that you don’t is they have the network of the 10 people that they’re going to go pitch your book to yeah you do not know the 10 Publishers that would buy your book tomorrow they do and so so that’s the idea that they’re out pitching your book to people that they know who they are so
[00:46:02] you’re going to sell a book with certain rights and uh one of the things to think about is there’s audible rights there’s the uh you know the spoken book and there’s International rights and when you s when you sell your book to a publisher they may say we want us rights only we want Global rights they usually try to get it all they do um and I’ve in both ways sold just us rights and then had bids for rights around the world uh in translations right so like abundance this is where your agent coaches you yeah and the Agents incentivize to maximize your your income uh and it was always fun to get like oh here’s another language like you know abundance like exactly all these languages um so you write the proposal you submit it um again you know whether you’re going with a known publisher or or a press or Amazon entered the business and disrupted the business in some
[00:47:00] interesting ways they’re now buying let’s talk about that so the publisher piece is first you I’m sorry agent and going direct to a normal publisher that’s there yeah why do you want to do that well you want to do that if you think you can get an advance which allows you to pay for your writing partner which allows you to pay for your marketing right and you also want to do it similar to why you some I some entrepreneurs want to bring investors you want accountability you want to have a third party giving you some pressure you know they’ve invested in your book so they’re going to be expecting back from you and you also might want to do it because there’s a group of people coaching you just like an in like if you bring in an investor your investors are now your coaches because they put money in you they’re going to tell you you know what they expect from you so there’s a lot of reasons to do still traditional publishing but every author knows that it’s a very challenging and vacuous process in many ways the
[00:48:00] publisher does not do much for you can we put a giant exclamation point on this yeah and you think the publisher is going to promote the book and you know create press and really Drive sales and in the final result they don’t they they do their best they they do but they have a thousand in books Etc so you you are going to drive your the reason people love farazi is because when I came out with never e with who’s got your back reason it was number one New York Times bestseller was I had a successful book they gave you know 240,000 I think they G they gave me close to a million for my second book because off the back of the first one they’re expecting this you know this go go to the next level um and they give you a year to do it yeah right the first book How long did it take well my first book took me 35 years to write because okay it was it was the book about my life it it took a bunch took about 18 months to write uh the future is bold took about a year and future is
[00:49:02] faster about a year but it’s interesting Once you turn in your book then it’s a year that’s the other problem with going with a traditional publisher so I mean don’t think you’re going to get it publish the next month that’s the big problem if you like I’m worried about my teams book because for the sake of my business and where I’m going right now with scaling my business I want my teams book in the market now yeah and I know that the teams book is going to take once I’m done with it it’s going to take another year if you go with a publisher versus self-publish right which is the next let’s talk about self-publishing would you know more about than I do yeah so just to be clear uh I went with Simon and sister for the first four books the the fourth one was life forse with Tony we got a multi-million dollar advance was huge and uh I didn’t pocket a dime of it either to Tony that money was spent on writers it was spent on promoting the book uh significantly and we donated
[00:50:00] millions of dollars to Health and Longevity research so it was great I loved it um the book we I just published was with Saleem exponential organizations 2.0 we decided to self-publish um and how was the process the technology is a lot better so there’s a gentleman by name of uh of Carrie uh Ober Bruner who runs a company called igniting soul and he is a complete TurnKey self-publication uh so he has writers promoter translators everything on staff and it’s just a lot faster and so uh does he does he get distribution in Independence and bookstores as well as on Amazon uh he does to some degree not as much as a publisher would and also he does have international uh Outreach and so forth probably not as much as a not
[00:51:01] much but at the end of the day it is a fixed price with him and all revenues from the book come to the author yeah right so that’s and by the way when you get in advance when you get in advance a quar million dollars or a million dollars you got to earn that up you have to sell a million dollars of profits which almost no books do yeah very few books earn their advant earn their Advance did uh did uh abundance abundance all the books have so far yeah and so did so did mine the but that’s a big deal and you don’t have to give the advance back that’s important to know it’s like you get a quarter of a million you’re pocketing that and that’s the bet that the publisher has made on you and if you don’t sell a quarter of a m when when you say you don’t to sell a quarter of a million dollars wor the books you’re getting 15 20% of a book at most I forget the math at right the book sells for $20s whatever $20 right you get a nickel
[00:52:01] 2 amount money right and that’s what gets credited to your Advance the piece the piece that you got not not the 20 not the 25 bucks but the piece that you got yes gets credited your evance you have to sell exponentially that many books quar million books to earn back the quar million dollars of events right it’s crazy and so um the the the challenge I think you know it’s so the math on that is a little bit weird and then you get you get spiffs for international publication but you don’t get advances on you don’t get royalties like if you if every time your book gets published in Vietnam you get 5,000 bucks okay it’s a one time thing a a they buy the rights they buy the rights and they buy them outright and that goes to you um as cash in your account somehow that’s all you see that’s all you see you don’t get the tail now and and most books don’t have tail yeah you know most books in have t um the the self-publishing is very interesting because to your point you’re paying a
[00:53:01] one-time fee of X tens of thousands of dollars to this person yes and every bit of the book that you sell you set the price 20K 20 20 bucks 25 bucks that’s all coming to you yeah I’ll tell you the thing I love most isn’t that yeah it’s the speed yeah I get this and and when I’m writing about exponential Technologies and entrepreneurs I can’t publish this thing it’s a year out of date is like ridiculous that’s look you and I both take our full advance and we pour it back into marketing and then some yes right you and I pour it back into writing Partners research and then some but there are some people that watching this that could think of this as an income stream it can and and and and if you do self-publishing you could probably do a better business that way particularly if you’ve built your media company and that’s the point which is if you go self-publishing you’re getting nothing from the publisher so we we we we don’t give the Publishers too much credit for doing a ton but they do some now it’s
[00:54:00] all on you right it’s all on you if you self-publish yeah you have an extraordinary book list you have an extraordinary presence you snap your fingers and your team lines up 20 of the most important podcasts that you’re going to go hawk your book on and as a result it sells I just want to make sure that we’re balancing for folks who are watching who don’t have a media business yeah the books don’t sell themselves you have to sell you have to sell every book it becomes it’s packaged now which I want to talk about putting your marketing plan together for your book I I have a a good old school from back in the you know in the in the time when I publishing a book a binder with tabs and here’s a tab on podcasting here’s a tab on um yes you know Etc yeah write doing your book we could probably do an entire podcast just on the book marketing absolutely that’s an entire thing and and it’s critically important I’m going to hit a couple of other things here uh the title and the cover oh my God yeah
[00:55:03] so important it is and battles and battles and battles oh yeah I I literally the only time I lost my cool in Never Eat Alone was um was over the cover of Never Eat Alone MH um a funny story so Never Eat Alone comes out the book’s done so here’s the thing make sure that you write in your um in your contract yes you have control you have control yeah because most of the time you do not there’s a lot of times in the book contract the publisher owns the control I didn’t realize International covers are different are different and they’re controlled by the local they’re not there there are publishing there are title there are book covers out there that look like crap and I have nothing I can do about it the English book title for Never Eat Alone I hate um so the book cover was a guy’s hand with a business card on on top of a white plate as if
[00:56:01] like I’m handing you a business card at lunch now you laugh because you know that that couldn’t be further from who I am and what I wanted like I looked at that and I should have been a credit card I flipped the out I was like are you kidding me that is transactional networking smarmy I’m all about authentic generous relationships that are life-changing for both parties and I said and so I I puffed and puffed and said no and said no and said no and the publisher got so pissed at me that they said well you this is supposed to be out tomorrow I’m like I said I’m not going to promote it because I I didn’t have any rights yeah I didn’t have any rights they could do if I and I said fine then I’m not going to promote it I said you want to have rights over my book cover I’m not promoting it you and and so they said well you here’s your book cover some guy had gone in the back of the room and just just taken an ugly orange color and wrote Never Eat Alone on it and they said you here and
[00:57:00] I’m like good it’s done it’s better than that other thing and so that ended up being the cover for never alone that’s hilarious yeah so I I I basically um I fight over or spend countless hours on the book title and then on the imagery on it because it’s like it’s like if when it’s you know the movie poster is the same example right you’ve got like one image and like one statement to capture people’s attention yeah um and it’s important one of the things I would do is do AB testing by Google ads uh of different book names and covers see what people would would click on but to your point the reason we both care goes back to the very beginning of our talk it’s your brand yes it’s who you are it’s how you represent in the world yeah if it if it really is a book that is meant to represent you every aspect has to represent you um you know let’s talk
[00:58:00] about a little about the marketing so the uh to get to a New York Times bestseller list I’m going to give some numbers here that my team researched so right now uh to get onto the New York Times bestseller list not to get to number one uh is you have to sell between 5,000 and 10,000 books in your first week that’s the current rough number I would be surprised that’s enough you okay but it’s on just on the list right and so there’s many lists there’s uh uh fiction lists uh there is uh non-fiction list there’s children list there’s monthly lists and by the way when people say I’ve got a best-selling book there’s a thousand lists out there were you in the Wall Street Journal USA Today all of that stuff it’s funny I I was looking at uh somebody’s bio the other day I I had set up a call with somebody um and I was looking at their bio and it said besteller you know and and when I finally got underneath it it literally was nothing it was they one day on
[00:59:03] Amazon they had hit the top 10 of the their category yeah which like L way you could be in a subcategory of atomic physics part of physics number three on Atomic physics within and that that so I think what’s important is we spend a lot of time and have both of us have spent a lot of time sweating yeah this idea of our bestseller lists yeah and I would argue it’s very ego driven yeah and the question is does it matter I mean at the end of the day one of the realizations I had a while ago was I’m never going to put on the book Number Two New York Times bestseller right you’re either on the bestseller list or you’re number one but you even just said it right now you didn’t even say New York Times you just said bestseller list yeah so for the I really think the answer is if you don’t hit number one none of it matters right because you will always be able to say bestseller
[01:00:00] with some moderate degree of Integrity because you’re not putting a PR predecessor you’re not saying Wall Street Journal bestseller or Jo’s blog bestseller right you you could probably say that you’re a bestselling author no matter what in some subcategory some sub subcategory with some degree of Integrity uh and if you’re not number one then you probably doesn’t matter and then just look at the amount of look at the net present value of the energy oh that you and I put into being number one crazy and the favors you call money and the favors Etc I just don’t know for those and the likelihood is nothing but for those who want to go for the gold ring let me hit a let me hit a few data points and please add to them so um if you want to hit number one the number of pre-sales are probably in the 50 to 100,000 uh in the first week to get somewhere on the list the number is 5 to 10,000 you might be number 10 on the list you might be on a secondary New York this is the New York Times which is
[01:01:01] for some reason the list everyone cares about well let me also suggest that I have seen people get those numbers that you’re talking about and not make the list and the reason they don’t is because the New York Times finally has an arbitrary ability to say I don’t trust your numbers I think that you don’t have the pedigree I mean there there is no open algorithm there repeat that it’s editorial it’s not it’s subjective it’s not objective you can hit those numbers and not get in the list and one of the things they also do it’s there’s if you look at the list and you see a double dagger next to a book it is uh if you look at what that means it means that this book reached the number of sales but it was in a fashion that doesn’t represent public interest it was some individual got tens of thousands pre-sold to their friends which is what you do to get on the list yeah no I think I think where by the way
[01:02:01] i’ I want to hear more about this double dagger yeah um where I think it is unethical and I’ve seen I’ve heard of people doing it I’ve never I don’t know anybody directly who’s done it but people who are rich and buy 50,000 books and they send them to their warehouse yep and now they recognize that the way there’s a very intricate process which it’s probably inside baseball but if you go on the Amazon and you buy five books yes it counts as one so Amazon reports a transaction of a book purchase yes and so what was happening for a period of time is there were agencies that were created yeah I remember them I hired one yeah and it would be um you’re like I had friends of mine who had companies that wanted to supp and they would buy 100 books or 500 books and the agency would take the money right would buy the books individually and Sh and ship them to the
[01:03:02] employees of the company right which you know from that actually I actually don’t mind that yeah because that feels a degree of Integrity there are a hundred people getting your book right now they didn’t individually buy it their boss bought it but they’re getting your book I’m talking about people would buy 50,000 books go to that agency and have it shipped 50,000 times to people who never got the book right so that’s I consider low integrity and there were some people that got caught doing that and some articles written about them the challenge is that the only way you get to tens of thousands of sales in the first week is if you’re you know President Clinton or if you are a famous actor and it’s on the shelf and people know you and they want that inside story I what I was about to share yeah what I was about to sh again this was back in an era yeah when what I cared about was
[01:04:00] the list right so when I was trying to make the list I went out and found a partner uh back in the day you remember University of Phoenix I do um I was doing some Consulting yeah sure I was doing some some work with University of Phoenix and um they really believed in the book who’s got your back because I was helping them design peer-to-peer coaching groups young kids that at the University would be in small peer-to-peer coaching groups as a part of the learning experience and alumni that would be in peer-to-peer coaching groups and some part of their Career Development and so when who’s got your back came out they’re like that’s an amazing book we should get it for all of our students and let’s go on a book tour around the country yeah and so I ended up raising $2 million with University of Phoenix to just support my book launch amazing right and it and it got number one New York Times bestseller it’s it’s you know non-traditional marketing and thinking yeah um that’s that’s
[01:05:00] fascinating so you so that that’s the point which is book marketing isn’t just your Advance it’s not just your own money it’s Partnerships working with Partnerships with I’ll tell you what I did what I did on Bold um to drive it again to number two and both for abundance and bold it was some uh sequel to a fiction book you know sort of like a i it was 50 Shades of Gray was like hitting number one Oh I thought you were like bold was like 50 Shades of Gray I’m like I’m going to go back and reread that remember that in it was like the follow on to 50 Shades of Gray that was number one it was like no way I was going to beat it I mean un care how many I I sold um but what I did with bold was I did something unique um and interesting uh I went out to my community and I built a community Through Singularity University and through xprize and I said I’m going to create a program uh uh it was a it was called the Vanguard program and I said I’m looking for 200 members of my community uh who
[01:06:02] are going to uh go out and and sell a 100 copies of the book yeah that’s great and if you do that I think Gary ventu did something that like that recently it was a big deal if you do that I will give you an invitation to come and join me and Ray KW for a day to talk about exponential Technologies at Singularity University either by you know by remote viewing or in person and uh it worked great and so I had a small army yeah of people who cared deeply about exponential tech and and Entrepreneurship who went into so that was interesting thing to do yeah I want to pause on that because I feel like philosophy which is I think if you are really going to go big on a book you need to think of yourself as a movement leader yes and and if you think of yourself um as again this is the difference between you doing it all
[01:07:00] yourself and a movement leader movement leaders realize there they go I must follow them for I am their leader that was the Gandhi phrase right you need to Marshall volunteers yeah and as a movement leader I start to Marshall Volunteers in the writing process MH I go out to people who care about what I care about because they’ve been following me and I ask for case studies examples I ask for volunte for people who are curious about a topic that they would go spend a month doing research on the side for and deliver it to me yeah so I I get people involved that’s what happened in EXO 2.0 uh Saleem had built open EXO as a large community of thousands of entrepreneurs and they contributed ideas they reviewed chapters and then they were there to promote the book and we did when we the day we launched the book we did a 5H hour uh free Global webinar right teaching everything that was in the book and then offered the book at 99 on Amazon for the
[01:08:02] digital copy for two weeks really for for those individuals um you know it really is about getting creative these days and you have to care about the book content because you’re going to spend a lot of energy it’s it’s not a financial transaction it’s something that represents your heart and your soul um let’s talk a little bit about a lifetime of book writing you and I have done that now you know we both started and we keep going um I have a I have a you seem to have these short agile Sprints of writing book A book might take you a year or two to to be done I have a longtail perspective I’ve been writing one book now for 10 years and need some help I have had help I’ve had lots of help but it’s a very it’s a pivotal uh book for me and I’m not worried about publishing it right away because to me it’s about the learning and I keep rewriting it and I keep reworking it and
[01:09:02] I’m not ready to let it go into the world yet but it’s it’s a it’s a beautiful ongoing learning path that I’ve had with two writing Partners yeah and so I just want people to think a little differently about it and the other thing I want you to think about is the pivots so when I was when I wrote n alone it was serendipitous you here’s an there was an article about how you had your career be so successful would you write a book about how other people can be successful sure never read alone about networking relationships great but that’s not what I wanted my brand to be right all of a sudden I had this amazing success of a brand around networking that I was um I was actually pushing away from because in my head you know my friends were Peter diamandis who was a thoughtful scientist changing the world my friends were my CEO friends who were changing major corporations I didn’t want to be the networking guy yeah and
[01:10:02] and so I never captured the momentum of Never Eat Alone I feel I feel that you you had a trajectory that if you held on to that could have been gamechanging yeah it’s well in different ways I mean I would have it would have been different I mean this was back in the day pre Tim Ferris this was a day you could have you could have been the ultimate podcaster from from day one all of those I had to let go of space which I had spent 20 25 years developing all the relationships building companies there when I switched over to exponential tech and and and sort of abundance thinking and it’s really about constantly Reinventing yourself right all right which is a fun thing to do yeah and that’s what I’ve done with my books yeah so if you look at my books they and it’s interesting because I may now come back around to that self-help space mhm it’s a space that I abandoned at a time when my sense of self and ego and other things didn’t want to be all
[01:11:00] in I didn’t want that to be my brand I wanted to be respected by presidents and and CEOs and thought leaders and you are and ironically I am and they still respect me for the networking thing I mean I’ve helped presidents build their networks during campaigns and it’s ironic that people want to keep pulling me back into that core and and and I had fought it for a while hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you know I’m a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are
[01:12:01] Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur do if this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com back/ blog and learn more now back to the episode so you’re going to get to a point your book is published you get the gals you get um you’re going to go out there and look for book blurbs right so what’s a book blurb a book blurb is uh getting someone on the back of the cover who has some notoriety to say this is a great book buy it right which probably the author has written and handed to the
[01:13:14] blurberry of the book because I’m not going to have a time to really just slot it in and read it and you just want to make sure it’s not weirdly and what’s its purpose Pur and then how does it connect to me right and then I will say then write me three or four draft blurbs and I’ll and I’ll modify one right you know um are you abundant with your blurbing of other people’s books because I know some people I I say their names am but they are very stingy with it there others who are in the middle someplace I have been careful not to just accept everybody but there are those people who I know through Singularity or xprize who I respect ECT um but I’m not I’m not that stingy with it but uh I get I probably get a 100
[01:14:01] requests a year and I’ll probably accommodate 20 my my view is I don’t get the stinginess because it’s not like any human will have seen the 10 things that you’ve blur blurbed yeah I just want to make sure it’s it’s authentic for me right authenticity in that regard so you get the book blurs um you get your book jacket you get your final hard copy and you’re going to have a launch event of some type which used to be in person my first abundance launch event was uh Steve Forbes threw me a party and Ariana Huffington threw me a party and that was Ari has the best book launches she threw me mine too right and uh and then you’re on a press tour now which by the way first of all I think a book launch party is is useless it it doesn’t doesn’t do anything other than makes you feel makes you feel it’s a birthday yeah it’s like a birthday like do I have a party or do we not have a party this year Well I’ll have a party okay that’s that’s as important don’t spend any money it’s not going to drive anything if you want to celebrate like a decade of work and your
[01:15:02] friends are there have a party for that purpose great right um and then you start your media then you start your book marketing yes and at that point it’s it is eyeballs it’s getting on NPR is probably the best thing you can get on you know and that changes so when never delone came out I had a relationship that got me on the New York time on on The Today Show and at that time Not Today Show yeah today show the morning TV show right Today Show made Number One MH that was it and today Oprah will make you a number one does it anymore well maybe these two I mean like I mean does she even have a book club anymore I don’t don’t we don’t know we got to be careful we don’t say that I’m not sure well she I don’t think she has a show anymore Peter oh come on she’s happy she oh well we’ll find out anyway anyway regardless but you’re the pr you know but but the I I think the look what are the categories this is any media person there’s um there’s the
[01:16:02] newspapers which do do reviews and I don’t think they matter as much anymore except for New York Times doing a review is a big deal still I think um you’ve got the morning shows you’ve got radio which still has impact um uh Bob Pitman keeps reminding me who owns high heart media how important radio is and I really think it is but I think the biggest issue of pod casters yeah you know so it is today it’s going on a podcast tour it’s really speaking about your book and you know people are like I don’t want to give it away I mean you want to talk about it as much as as give everything away and then a lot of people will buy the book just to have it on their shelf so they can refer back to it well you know what portion of books that are bought or read oh God what less 10% what less than 10% wow I mean the reality is is you’re anyway I’m not even going to go there I was about to be we’re about to take this whole reason for watching this podcast and flush it on the toilet cuz no one
[01:17:01] reads it anymore well that’s the big question it’s like what’s next for books well I’ll tell you what’s next and we did this with EXO 2.0 we basically trained a gp4 model on the book and all the research and it’s you’re talking to the query is that the thing I was talking to Peter bot that’s a different version um and Peter bot is is trained on all of my books yeah and you can ask it concrete questions like you know how do I develop an abundance mindset or an exponential mindset whatever it might be or how do I I’m in a cement business in in uh sou Paulo uh how do I turn myself into an exponential organization and the book will give you context and a and a reason your books I hope my books um deserve to be read beginning to end from people who really believe in what we’re writing about if somebody wants to I about to write the most important consummate book today of high performing
[01:18:00] teams the last teams book was 20 years ago wow things have Chang which was which was uh Pat lon’s five dysfunctions of a team which everybody still refers to yes but think about what’s changed in 20 years so my book that we’re about to publish is going to be very meaningful and important in the world um most books don’t have that gravitas about them and you know you need to ask yourself again do you you what are you writing for sure I’ll tell you one thing that I’ve done recently is as I’m writing a book I will release chapters or portions of chapters as blogs right and I as and I ask for feedback yeah and I developed an audience on that way right uh Andy wear who wrote The Martian and wrote like my favorite book of the decade uh Hal Mary uh both fiction books would had came out of no place and he wrote his book The Martian and released it as chapters on the internet for for
[01:19:01] feedback and and people get afraid that if they do that they’re giving it away and no one’s going to buy the book it just doesn’t work that way no abundance it works in this regard so give the information away get the feedback develop people who want the next chapter in that regards and I think that’s really uh you know important so what do we have to say in summary we’re feels like we’re getting yeah let’s wrap this up um you know uh I’ll one last thing do you read your own books on Audible oh great question yeah and so when abundance came out and they chose the uh the reader and I listened to it like I was horrified I was like oh my God I could not listen to this person for a chapter you’d rather Peter bot read it oh my God so I ended up reading uh with Stephen read bold and future is faster do you like the process um I I do I enjoy reading it um because I can put the inflection into it it takes
[01:20:01] you know a day and a half two days to read a book yeah I hate it I know well the thing that’s interesting is you don’t have to actually read it perfectly you can like have to read it three times you read a sentence and then you fed it you read it again I mean I’m getting my skin is crawling thinking about it so the answer is I’ve not read out of your mind okay well I’ll tell you uh we just trained up my voice model on 11 labs and it feels really good and I’m sure not without with not with the inflections but not with the meaning right of the personal story that goes like Oh my God you know when you really when you convey it in that regard but it will get there yeah but in the meantime here’s what I say to reading your book um I think it’s a beautifully generous gift to give your readers that I’ve never given them because when I’ve tried it drove me crazy I sat I said okay you know what this next book I’m going to do it yeah and I sat there and I started practicing
[01:21:01] and I realized I have three days of this ahead of me and I said no what I did do is I interviewed the the readers yeah so I got my publisher to give me three potential readers yeah and I listened to all of them and I found one that I thought was good and then I had a meeting with them interesting I said listen let me explain to you I’m going with you instead of myself I’d like you to understand why this book’s important to me I love that I want you to understand and I want to talk to you about some of the stories I want to tell you I’m going to tell you with the inflection point that matters to me I coached them yes nice and you know I I think it got better as a result of that but I agree I should be a more generous better human and let and read him myself well I’ll tell you something that is interesting that David Sinclair when he wrote lifespan and he had a he had a a CO a co-author author on that in between the chapters not all chapters but in the between the chapters when on the audible there was a conversation
[01:22:01] between David and the author about the chapter about the content of the chapter like has how that’s that was amazing and how fast it’s changed and that gave a level of intimacy so at a minimum if someone else is reading your book yeah um getting into an audio and recording having a conversation with that person about the chapter thought about that so we of course when I’m working with my co-writers um I had a co-writer that I did two books with his name is n wrick amazing co-writer he was he was great um he and I would get into some really like knockdown drag out fights like he’d be like you know that doesn’t make any sense I’m a book writer I know what this I was like but that but you’ve turned it into mush and like we’re yelling at each other and I would sometimes just laugh and I said we’ve got to publish this as a part of the book right know all the soup that you know the ingredients that go into the soup that makes it I think we will by the way see books that are
[01:23:02] written in this multimedia fashion where the making of the book is all recorded the the filmed even perhaps when when they when they’re together on Zoom talking about it imagine the richness of that sure you’ve got the book and then you got all the stuff that went into it I mean it would be powerful so ladies and gentlemen our book writers here um Keith farazi author of Never Eat Alone who’s got your back leading without Authority competing in the new world of work Keith um Which social media platform are you mostly active on these days I’d say LinkedIn LinkedIn LinkedIn is the right place and you’re and you’re it’s at Keith farazi Lincoln at Keith farzi wait before we we can’t just close we can’t why we got to say something poignant at the end okay I thought we I thought we did I don’t know we were just just no not we had an hour worth of poignance bring bring it in then so like both of us should give a reflective comment about the rapper of the book all
[01:24:02] right so you no no you go first okay that’s fair um don’t think of a book as this crazy Mount Everest thing that only special people Doh think of a book as your heartfelt ability to sit and be contemplative about what really matters to you who you are what do you want to project to the world and it doesn’t have to be something that you’re on Deadline it can be something that you you evolve but it it it’s a forcing mechanism an accountability mechanism to focus on your brand and what you have to say to the world and then I would also recommend that you get a coach yeah and that coach could be a co-writer or something yeah so that you keep on and you work it through and you get to the end and you get to the end and you’ve got something for your legacy and at a minimum your grand kids will love to see
[01:25:01] yeah you know um that was beautiful that was beautiful that was beautiful I felt the need to do something your birth to that uh understanding why you’re writing the book is really important right I think the why is is key and I I remember the difference between I’m going to write a book about space cuz I’m the space guy to oh my God there’s this incredible truth in the universe about technology making everything more abundant in where Humanity was going and I want everyone to know about it and the level of emotional energy that drove that was night and day so uh hopefully uh folks listening can find that that book inside them that really has this em we’re emotional we’re emotional entities right you need that emotional Drive um I found the book writing process incredibly um meaningful and creative and it’s
[01:26:03] Artistry uh and uh you know it can it changed my life abundance as a book launched launched me in a brand new Direction uh as did every read alone uh for you uh and at the end of the day it’s going to become easier to write a book right use the tools I think we had an interesting debate and discussion about using chat GPT uh use the tools but make sure that if you’re using chat GPT um that it isn’t plain vanilla that you’re adding your own stories that it is um what is on the page there is Meaningful to you um but at the end of the day uh we’re going to see a lot of books and uh people say I’m going to write a book to make money well guess what uh that’s not where you make your money you make your money in the speaking business if that’s what you want to do and that’s going to be the subject of our next podcast we talked about you’re on
[01:27:01] LinkedIn at Keith farazi uh 2 RS 2 Z’s and uh uh what if they want to reach you for to for have you speak or coach their executive team where do they go for that the company is called farazi Greenlight so go to frazzi Greenlight and you can get in contact with us there awesome thank you brother this was fun [Music] always