#223 – How to Master Passive Growth with Rob Fitzpatrick of Write Useful Books
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What's up, everybody? This is courtland n from india hakka com. And you're listening to the ni hacker's podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these andy hackers to discuss the idea as the opportunities and the strategies they're taking advantage so the rest of us can do the same.

So it's funny thing thing about books a lot recently strike us like a publishing ARM called strike press and they've been how me to write a books like two years and everything when i'm approach like you know like IT would be cool to like have writing a book in the past that's the thing that I would like to have done but like I don't want to write a book now and part of its like i've got other things to do. I've never been fully convention like it's a worthwhile to do at least for me. Well, how much money can you really make by writing a book is a reward with the effort invested is a really good way to reach people like millions of you open, andy hackers, tens of thousands of people into the podcast for at a book I going to get anywhere near that amount of sales or touch people deeply is a lot of questions.

And yeah, around me. I see you, all these people like yourself, who are happy. We are writing books all the time.

You seem to know something I don't so sure. What's the reason why you write books? I write a book I enjoyed.

Activity itself is a big part of IT. A book is a too big of a project to go into. Cynically, if you're doing IT as a appear money game or numbers game, even if you look at IT as a reputation and if you don't actually like the writing and the beta reading and the refining and figuring out how to explain something abstract in a way that works for people, for me, that's fun is the same fun that I get from programing or any any other product design.

And I asked myself, years ago, what would I do if I was retired? And I was like, well, i'd wake up, i'd write something i'm interested in and i'd learned, and i'd ay video games and hang out the afternoon. I was like, okay, there's no reason I can just start living that life.

Now I just do.

But that is good, people think. And it's past of revenue. That truly is passive. If if you design IT right, IT grows rather than feds IT allow you to think deeply about something.

Talking to an entrepreneurship teacher from George town the other day, and instead of having his students is right, business models, business plans, anything like that, he's having them write a book about the topic of their future business. So kind of spending the year, the school year, this, we deeply diving and thinking about the problem that their business hopes to solve. And at the end of IT, they have this the book he helps them on to get IT published, and then they started. Roles are more successful because they haven't skip for the deep thinking part.

and they're also experts who have a publish book under the name like that's cool. It's pretty rare to hear about the course that actually gives you something so tangible.

He told me he he was planning to quit his name and and he was an entrepreneur. He got signal about the academic side of the of the academic version of entrepreneurship, and they asked him to stay for one more semester and is like, okay. And if I stay, i'm going to do with something be crazy because, you know, i've already tried to quit and you didn't let me, so i'm going to try this experiment.

And then, however, many years later, is still doing IT, because IT works to well and had so much going with that. And he said that they now published that was in books, they can set up an impression if the students can precede at the end of the year, two hundred books, so they work on IT in public, writ in public, and they can do please call campaigns enough to cover the editing in the publishing. And and then they have got a back full of books, and they can continue from there.

So most andy hackers, I would say I have zero interesting writing books, not all, but like most, but they are interested in all of this goal of financial freedom and that sort of y erd you mentioned as well, which is passive income. I'm looking at that right now like you've sort of published the monthly royals that you've earned from your first book, the mom test and it's it's a graft is just up into the right.

So i'm looking like, you know two thousand and thirteen you launched the book or publish the book you're making like five hundred dollars a month. Next year it's know thousand dollars a month and so on. And so by the time you get to like two thousand and sixteen and making three four thousand dollars a month by time, in the twenty nineteen, this book is making ten .

thousand dollars a month and revenue prety.

It's you wrote the book like like nine, eight, nine years ago and it's still it's making you more, more and more money, which is the exact opposite of how I think most people think about books. I think of a book is like you publish IT, it's like a huge flash in the pan. Everybody loves IT. IT sells a ton and then you know the sales decline and it's .

on that's how the industry traditionally thinks about IT, and that's the expected outcome for most books, nonfiction best sellers like york, traditionally published by others, they peak on average within twelve weeks, and then they lose ninety five percent of their peak sales within the year and they never recover.

If you've got that, you really need to hit the launch heart and you need to get this combination of preexisting platform in luck because those twelve weeks is where everything happens. And to me, that was scary. And as someone who doesn't love marketing, and when I went my first book, I had no platform. Now I have a small platform, still not a substantial one that wasn't a business model I could believe in.

And so I tried to rethink IT just using the stuff we learnt from customer development, from tech product design, from boot shopping and like, okay, how do you make this so that is long lasting instead of expiring? And how do you make IT so grows through word of mouth, rather than through the authors own platform. And I bet fully on that.

That's why I chose such a weird name from my first book, the on test, because I didn't think anyone would discover IT. I thought they would only ever be recommended IT. So I want to say that that was easy to say, yeah, I just double down hard on that this says, and I worked that I worked again for my second book.

And the third book seems to be going in the same way. And that's the topic of the third book, you know, write useful book. How do you actually do this? Because IT is different than Normal writing, and we're watching other people do IT as well. We set up this little paid community. We ve got one hundred and fifty non fiction authors in IT now and time, seeing all of them reading books.

They're trying to follow this process and it's so core to see the excitement in the results like because they get over the impostor sync me when you start doing beater reading and reader conversations and you actually figure out that people want what you're writing and and you know exactly who you're writing for and you have that picture in your head, you like, oh, these two chapters don't need to be here and oh, of course I should write this book. There's people who wanted and need that. All these problems with writing just disappear if you actually understand your readers yeah .

doesn't having the community cool? It's like one of the most fun things to do if you start a business is just to get a unch of other people who you like you're affecting positively and just like see them help each other and talk to each other and work with each other. I just restarted the some of the ni hackers meet ups. We just have a ton of him all over the world but encode a hit and we just ort of reserved like the seattle in the hackers meet up right now there's just like five or six of us and the telegram group, like a couple of them were like past in the hacks podcast gas like ella and that was hello.

So the guy is working on like games and so we just like got together sunday and just like SAT down and have like a workshop meet up where we all just governor laptops, worked on our stuff, gave each other feedback and you're like play testing this guys game and like I left like full of energy because it's like wild other people working on the same thing. So I am working on and it's like, I don't know what IT is, but like we're just social animals. If you have a community, you get to like work with other people. And i'm sure you're energize to probably write more books. Now you have the community, if other people who are write books, you're getting to see like what works for them and what does that.

I need to a year break, I think because the workshops, survival guy took eighteen months, this book took twenty four months, and they were based good back to back. And so it's kind of my last four years, i've had A A book project going and I took me a while. I was doing little kind of guff around projects.

I'd call them more projects than businesses pay the bills like to stuff who strapping stuff on things. Then recently was like, actually I want to build business with a bit more upset again, take you a bit more seriously. And so that draws from the same well of energy is writing. And so I feel like I can't jump straight back into writing. I need to give myself a little bit time to build the business, make sense.

think about money for a bit because I you're kind of in a position financially where you can do this without I got imagine you don't have a job over ten thousand a month of royal, the mom test alone plus you have two other books.

It's about twenty grand a month at the moment from the three books together and that's awesome.

It's purely passive. Mean what marketing you really we have a conversation with me. This even counters marriot.

You know it's just a confirm conver you know not doing anything you know like costly, you like crushing. And on twitter, you're not trying to like have some huge launch. It's just passive. It's stuff you did years ago. And I think people underestimate how much money you can make from this stuff like I think you've sold, you tell me you sold something like a hundred thousand copies for the mom test.

The protest is cleared, more than five hundred and fifty thousand, and royalties. So that slike profit in my pocket. And I take a little bit of IT, but most of IT, we even hunting in myself, my business partner.

We basically use the bulk of the book revenue as our seed funding for our other businesses. And so we were able to. Start the current business with zero stress because we had this.

We allocated whatever some portion of that because he's been my partner for a long time. We share book revenue and we like we kind of share all of our business interests is the way we've set IT up even when we don't have a legal entity. Rap round IT.

And yeah, just made this so stressful you to start. And i'm not saying this is the optimal path. Like if you are starting from scratch IT ouldn't necessarily make sense to write the book first.

But if you're interested in, you're strategic about what you write and how you build the book, it's incredible. And I could, I tried a mini retirement. You just tell me you, you're been driving around in your van.

I did that with a little sailboat and meter sailboat, and I spent three years kind of living in the boat and sAiling around england, france, spain, eventually bringing the both from london to barcelona. And like actually houses are pretty nice. It's it's nice to have money later and you know not not coming down from the sea link, but kind of doing .

where you want IT.

yeah, yeah. I tried them in retirement three years I did with basically just writing for finance and thinking and being A A principal lay about. And I had one.

I can't remember what exactly happened. I think the device needs some help on a project and we just didn't intense weekends, you know, almost like a little mini hackston. I just jumped in and we work together.

And I came out of that with so much energy and such excitement, I was like, wow, I actually don't want to retire early. And so that's when I got the apartment, settle down and start a building stuff again was quite a surprise for me, honestly. Like, because I worked so hard for the freedom and I finally got IT, I was like, way is not what I want. I'm still glad I have the option.

I think if you are the kite, a person who's got the energy in the motivation and the creativity a to actually, you know, write books and build websites and create apps that can earn you your financial freedom, you're also likely to do with the kind of person who is, like, unlikely to stay in that state for very long because you're eventually gone to do something that can energize you.

Be like, oh, this is actually like the process itself is super fun. Not just the reward, but the reward could be this kind of self, a feeling where the report will be in the ideally pass of income, which then fuel you to have more time. You can start more projects. And I guess if you use those to gender even more plastic and come and start more projects.

finding now that I don't even need to be one hundred percent involved in everything, so is kind of like five products are involved with now in summer, are very light touch, where I kind of found the person run the business and helped out to financially support moment. There's a mix. We've got a full services.

We've got products services. We've got pure attack. We've got you books. We're setting up a publishing in print where we're doing all this all for the same customer in theory, which makes IT nice because you get to share the understanding and the marketing, which I think is this is a total tangent. But that's what people keep getting wrong when they do these personal schunk works projects like twelve startups and twelve months or however ever people call IT these days, IT seems to work if you keep serving the same customer over and over in different ways because then you get to build up the inside and the customer list and otherwise it's just throwing a bunch of stuffer around and and hoping you get lucky.

That's exactly Peter levels did IT. I think he's just want to start in this trend. And he started off by doing completely ranking projects that had nothing to do with each other.

And then he started no madness for this to no mad and working. So it's like next project was like a chat community for digital mad. And then he did like a job board for distro mad and he is keep in the same target every month, like a different products and like that work super well.

And I think it's approaching like three million dollars in revenue. Was like a solo founder from is like conStellation, a project which is super cool. I want to talk about your latest book called right useful books.

We sort of bay the case of writing books is is a worthwhile and dever assuming like you want your finances freedom, assume you actually like the process. You're obviously crushing and financial with your books. I interview James clear and mark manson to .

other like sort of like he's orders a magneto .

above me like the unicorn founders of of non fixed book writing. And I think people would be surprised like you could make literally tens of millions of dollars from writing books like theyve sold at three million copies, and I think twice million copies of the push, respectively. I don't know you know more than me about how the royals work, but they are probably making at least three of four books.

super book. If they're traditionally published, they probably making closer to one and a half dollars per book. I mean, I D depends up, but you're looking at roald from eight percent to twelve hf percent depending on how we you negotiate.

And because of the cost structures are the publishing industry that can't really go far about ve that. And so what you tend to negotiate around if you're in a really good position is the advance. So if you're well, platforms, then you can get a nice advance, but that comes out of your future royalties.

So is not really extra money. And so you're really just trying to play the the scale game. If you are going with traditional publishers, whatever. If you're self published, I make between seven and fifteen dollars per book depending on the format, which is a pretty big difference compared to a dollar fifty.

So if you care about the royalties, you definite want to self publish, if you care more about the reach on the reputation than traditional publishing is still very, very valid. And something that marty cagan mentioned is that when you self publish, you've got more upside potential, but you've also you're taking more downside risk because you're paying all your own development costs for the book. The editor is the layout of this stuff.

And so if they completely flops, you're on a pocket for that. Where's when you traditionally publish? You kept the downside, but you you also slow down your website.

not you don't have an advance if you sell, publish. So you're probably turning to your savings to support yourself. You spend the time writing the book.

So it's it's like being at you only need in only an hour two per day, but you need to do IT most days. You know writing works much Better if you could make IT a small daily process instead of do these big, intense one day's rents to make up for last time. So, you know, like ten davi, he wrote parents in the navy and three award winning books about corporate innovation, full time job, family.

He just said he woke up to hours earlier every day and just did up for a year. And he was like, i've only got a year to spend on this book. Wake up. Let's use those two hours well. And he did at three times. He said toward the end of the process, he would have to book a hotel room just to get away from the daily obligations of life, and just we can doing the final push to get about the door. But I hear stories like that.

and I envy those people who are who are such a abot machines. Like, I have certain things that i'll do on a regular basis, but there you know, again, things that i'd love to do, like no one has to tell me the code, like i'll set side five, six hours day to code. Someone has to tell me to stop coding, but I don't know.

I get set down to right a book for two hours a day. I really have to develop a new habit. But let's say, you do put all this work in.

You put in a tone of work. You publish a book. You don't wanted to have that sort of like terrible graph for all the work and all the revenue comes up front. You want to be like one of your books from where essentially year after year, it's growing and generating more and more past of income.

So every single year out of you know, padding your pass self on the back for having been so thought ful to have written this book that's made your future life so much Better. And this is what your new book is about. Your book is about write useful books is all about how do you write a book that is essentially recommendable, that is basically going to market itself.

So it's going to do to increase the number the number of sales and the amount of royalties is generating for you without you having to do anything. And I think this is like every ni hacker's, which not just would like books, but would like products and apps and websites and stuff, and was cool to me about reading through your book. Is that a lot of the principles of the same, you know, a lot of the things you can do to make a book recommendable also make an upper website recommendable.

So I I thought we could walk through like a little bit your book. We did the same thing with your other broke the mom test earlier last year, I believe. And people really like that. Officials, so we should do the same thing here. What does that mean to write a book that markets itself?

This, this is, let me just Carry out this, but this is a particular type of non section. This would not apply to a novel, and IT would not apply that to a memory biography. But if you're writing a book that was useful, IT solves a problem for the reader.

They pick IT up for a reason. They are not looking for fun nor entertainment. They're looking to saw the technical chAllenge or to level up their career or to whatever understand some abstract concept clearly.

Then you're building a solution, right? Like they have a problem. You're building a solution. And there is different ways people screwed up. Books tend to get written like startups were built in the nineties where the author goes into the tank for a year or two, then comes out and hopes everything magically works and the people want IT. But I spent long enough in education like I should have done this.

Just because you understand IT, you do your best try to explain IT doesn't necessarily mean that the other parties going to receive what you're putting down, they're going to necessarily understand they're not necessary going to be able to act on IT are integrated into their life. And so like teaching education knowledge that needs to be tested in the same way that you would test the user experience of an APP. And so for tech, we have user testing and customer development.

And for books, you instead of user testing, you are beta reading and customer development looks pretty similar. And you can do stuff like use one on one coaching or teaching as a proxy as kind of a concious MVP for the book because you get to test the knowledge without having the right and rewrite a manuscript. And alongside that, you're iterating on your table of contents because that you're underlying kind of wires, frames, the education design.

And if you're smart about this, you can get a solution that really works. And you can also confirm that the people care about the problem. If you read a book about an an important problem, that's not going to get recommended. And if you write a book about an important problem, but it's not the best solution, then again, it's not onna, get recommended. So you need those two things to be in place.

And the way I think writing about the best book is one, you could either be a super genius, but that's hard and repeatable or you can scope down who you're serving until you've chosen a very narrow type of person, the same way we needs down any other products. And you can then write the best book for them. So the one test isn't the best book about sales or customer interviews, but IT is the best work about that for technical, introverted founders because that's what I was.

And I had to learn sales and IT turns out there's a lot of them. And so I could never write the best book about sales, but I can write the best book about sales for introvert or duckies. And that's what I try to do like write useful books is not the best book about all types of books.

But if you're writing this type of non fiction and you have these goals and you you understand the product process, then that really resonates with people like that. And then they're like, wow, no one has ever spoken me so directly. What this as you to do is cut out all the other chapters so that what's left is very dense with value. And all these things combined to form this recommendation. And also, you know, long lasting is slowly different, but IT overlaps.

You have an an act of your book, do you say, in order, write a recommendable book that needs to be deep.

So the d is desirable action.

The promising to solve a problem. People about e is effective so that your broke actually deliver results with the aberrant you're talking about. Are you teaching effectively or you just sort of, you know bear in your head in the sand for a year, you're right, and then hope crash your fingers that people actually learn .

like i've i've read so many books about chess and I am no Better at chess. So those are books where is a desirable promise. But it's not effective solution, at least for me as a reader.

The second em deep is engaging. So it's got to have a high value per page and feel rewarding to read ideas. A reader like, oh my god, I got to right this down. Oh my god, got to use this like you feel like you're getting utility every single time. Real page exactly.

And that's what James cleared did so well with atomic rabbits. The like when you're reading atomic rabbits every couple pages is just like, well, he did such a good job entertaining the actually will take away with the theory. See, you never feel like you're suffering through fifty pages of theory, every page, every two pages as you like.

Yeah, I can use this. I can use this. And it's just so easy to get through and it's something you can plan for like work counts matter word counts per section.

What's the learning outcome of the section? What's the word counts? okay. That tells you how many minutes they need to spend to get this takeaway. And you can kind of debug your books reader experience in that way.

Well, the way you're describing book makes that I always seem fun. IT seems like building like a web APP like it's an analytics like how many words that take to get this concept across and you're doing testing and tweak and you're building IT like an engineer rather than writing IT like one would think of a traditional author whose as a sort of tortured existence hudden over a type rider.

exactly. I mean, word comfort section is like the loading times for a page or the responsiveness of an APP because like that they act the website IT does something for the visitor, right? And but there's delays and delays annoy them.

And in this type of useful non fiction word can't works the same. They're not there for the word, so there for the outcome. And if you can deliver the same outcome and you were words that you've got ten them there faster, that's equivalent to reducing your loading times on your website.

And when you do that consistently to the whole book like this, quite a short book, this is thirty thousand words, takes two hours to read, and you know, it's it's punchy. Well, at least that's the goal. I hope that is you really Better.

It's unna because like all of your books are pretty short, at least the two that i've read, the mom test is what probably almost exactly the same .

length that was just coincidence, not planning. I tried to make them make sure as I can while still getting everything across the second book. Workshops of apple guide was twice as long okay, that's just there was more to cover.

Yeah I am am reading a review on amazon actually writing books three hundred and fifty pages. The mom tested about hundred and twenty six pages if you got a two star of view from the sky from the united kingdom, like this book is one hundred and twenty six pages and yet at cast twenty two pounds but it's like doesn't exact opposite of how I felt when I bought the mom test. And my oh my god, i'm not gonna ste hours of my life.

Reading a bunch of random crop to like every chapter everywhere in the book is actually helpful. And so you end up writing this book that I actually even I feel Better recommending the book to people because it's short. I not like him on a burden. And my friend with this like know five hundred page home want to give them like you a short, useful guide that they can easily return to flip to you.

And so people do sometimes get mad is very rare. We've had two people leave those skeleton reviews and complain they both been from england, something cultural about that, where they want a nice thick book.

Yeah, but it's interesting in this kind of a place where all it's common for useful books to start out with a perfect five star rating, because the only people who are hearing about them are people who have the problem and get individual commended, the book as a solution, their problem. And they d love IT, and then they evanier zed other people. And over time, because the people who which was written for receive so much value, they start recommending IT more and more widely.

And so IT eventually starts reaching people IT wasn't written for. And then they won't recommended IT personally. They just heard about IT because so many other people were were recommended IT to receive value.

So as these books, like typically the the the ranking started five stars just peer per peer and then get pulled down to somewhere around four point seven four just because it's like a victim of their own success. And I also made that mistake with advertising early on, where I realized we could target broadly, and because the book at such good reviews, people would buy IT. And so for two months, we were really excited like, oh, we can get a unch more sales.

And then I realized I was pulling the reviews down because we were advertising IT to people that wasn't written for that. We went back, really turned up the campaign stop. A lot of them completely tied up. The language really clarified, like you is, for this sort of person in this situation.

right of high lights. Why word of the recommendation is so good? Because ultimately, like, okay, if you advertise, you're going to be hitting a lot of people who you don't really know who they are. You can try to control that but like you limit to but like word of mouths is going to be people who have like a read book and they know exactly what they're talking to, to recommend your book to and they know what that person's problems are and they know that if you're book of apply to that person and they end up basically recommending your book to the right people. And so by building a book as like sort of engineered from the ground up to be recommendable ah, you sort like I guess increased in the percentage people who read your book who actually should read your book.

There are some books that kind of enter the public consciousness. The conversation, a big one. Recently, the last one I can take of was a why we sleep and lean in or two examples in non fiction.

And IT seems like everyone's talking about them for like a month and then no one's talking about them. And that's a very different type of recommendation that's much more like riding the P. R.

Tsunami or know this P. R. wave. And if reaches critical mass, that happened in fiction with a powder and with fifty shades.

And that to me, I looked at that also, and a lot of people, IT was hard for me to find the language to describe, like I called the recommendation loop and triggered by someone having a problem in your book, able solution. But IT was hard for me distinguish between this, because people like, oh yeah, people talk about Harry potter all the time. Is that what do you mean? It's like a it's a little different now that's more like a critical mass thing.

You can't design for that. If IT happens, you try to write IT IT, but you can't design for that or test for IT as the product creator. So that's not what I I worry about.

So describe this concept of the the recommendation loop that you worry about because you have like a sort of a good passage in the book where you break down, okay, you return with the mom test was IT actually look like for somebody recommend the mom test to to know the person. And by understanding with that process looks like you not understand why people share and recommend books.

It's so important. So for the mom test, is that an entrepreneur has heard or an indie hacker theyve heard that they've got to talk to their customers, but they try and they're like, okay, why i'm going to do IT. This is uncomfortable. I don't really want to do this, but everyone says it's a good idea. So they go, they do IT and IT doesn't work very well, either it's really awkward or they can tell them not in a good information or IT seems like busy.

Or no one even agrees to talk to them in the first place and they go, huh that sucked and then they they either ask for help, they search for help or they're just talking to a body like at any hacker's me to say and like a what if you've been doing I tried this IT was really tough. And as soon as they kind of verbalized or express that problem or they they search for IT, they're trigger ing a recommendation loop and this is potential is not guaranteed. But they basically saying, I have this problem and and then if the other person knows about the solution, which you know in in the case, the mom test, like, oh, you're having trouble talking to customers, you're getting bad data is awkward.

You gotta read this book IT is the solution to the problem you're having right now. As IT worked for that, people started using IT like they teach him in a lot universities now. So that's more preemptive.

They're teaching IT to people before they have the problem. And those people don't love IT as much. They still like IT because, you know it's it's a short fun read, but they're not like this change my life.

Where's when people actually have the problem? Is like this change my life and you you get such incredible eventually ous amount of and originally, one of the problems I had was the the the, my early draft of that book were too broad. They were trying to do too many different jobs.

I was trying to explain how startups worked. Then I was trying to justify why customer development is worth the effort. Then I was trying to explain the traditional approach. Then my approach IT was trying to build people up to the point where they understood the context of the book.

But by then they've they've SAT through fifty pages of theory in their board and they hate me, and they throw the book away already before they even get to the good stuff. And so by just saying you're already at this stage in in in your life in your business like this is my ideal reader profile, you already know what customer development is. You already agree it's a good idea, but you're having trouble actually doing IT.

That's where my readers that and I just start from that assumption, which let me begin with my revise on page one. And in this work, I assume that they can write. I assume that they can make the time and build the writing habit.

I don't give any real encouragement about you can do IT or like here's how to write a beautiful sentence. I'm taking that for granted because you get to choose you're designing a you get to choose what it's for. So choose the people who are you're going to have the sharpest, best advice for and they are going to be most excited. They are going to feel the pain and also be most excited to tell people about IT afterwards.

And that's such a hard decision to make. So many founder struggle that I struggled that like, how do you basically say, you know what, my book, my product, my website is not for these people. For examples of andy hackers I can look at, the community is like a tool for inspiring people to get started.

And who needs the most inspiration? It's people, the very top of the funnel of entrepreneurship, people who think they might one day start a pieces with them, not quite sure, and i'm trying to like convinced what they can do IT and push them over the edge. But simultaneously, I got a lot of people who are over the edge and who have started the company and who are working through these actual concrete problems.

They're like a different set of customer. There are different types of person. They want different advice, went more practical advice.

And these two groups of people want very different things. And it's very difficult to just say, you know, I don't care about group A. I don't care about about group b, our vice vera. And so the fact that you can do that with your books is not only like necessary, but also like impressive because IT requires making some kind of sacrifice.

The way I thought about that and what we assured me is that that no one buys the second best book for what they need. If they're looking at two books and one of them, like, imagine a year, whatever, growing you want to grow vegetables. Like out on our terrorists.

We don't have land, but we get lots of signs. We grow terrorist vegetables. I've got a book on the shelf that's called something like how to grow vegetables in small spaces on a terrace. Because when I was looking at amazon, there's books called to everything about vegetables or farming or whatever or plants.

And i'm like and then I see this one that speaking exactly to my situation and and I like this person probably understands my constraints and trade off and situation, and that's more likely to be the best solution for me. So I bought that one. And people do that like by just being more specific, like recently I I got a coach.

I'd never worked with a coach before. I was having some trouble with focusing and everything really and the the business is starting to grow. We need to hire people.

So like, okay, I need to figure out this management thing that i've typically always avoided because, like, I prefer working by myself, so I need a code chinese and help. And I went on and I searched coach, and I was like, oh, this going to be a big search. And then I like A D, H.

D coach and suddenly it's like, okay, here's a person who gets exactly where on that and what I need. And I don't know if he's any Better or worse than the others. I did compare, but because he was he'd scope himself down to a niche that related to me. I was like, so that the person for me and and I was the easiest hiring decision, right?

yeah. So what is your what is your opinion of these books like like James and mark books that do you have a broader audience like James? Atomic habits? There's no real knife ce for atomic habits.

Anybody can essentially develop Better habits. And mark work this out, out, out of not giving a fuck. Pretty much everybody wants to not give up the problem that most people have.

How can I care less and just be more competitive myself and be happy? And yet they've somehow been able to sort pick this holy grave targeting abroad. Audience said, that hasn't east down. And also is like solving this insides of problem where people, their books and they are selling millions of copies.

It's so good, and I I wish I had an answer for you. Obviously, theyve crushed IT, right? I A one hundred thousand books.

They've sold ten million. So there are two of the maneuver bigger than me. So I idea, I hope to one day figure that out because, as you say, that would be the holy grill.

It's like all the benefits and wonder of a book and a book this sells ten million copies doesn't take longer to create that a book sells ten copies, right? The production costs is essentially fixed. Part of me feels that you can try to be the category winner, but it's hard like you can try to win social networks as as an entrepreneur.

It's hard. It's like you're jumping into a winner take all market. One person's going to win. Is there going to be you? Maybe they both did IT.

Is there space for two books like that maybe in the same ease? I don't know, but it's like it's hard, right? With one of the things I was looking for was reliability. So seventy percent of non fiction, traditionally published on fiction, doesn't even sell enough copies to pay back the events. The authors never earn a dollar of royalties.

And for me, I was like, I I don't need that much money to never have to work again, right? IT is more important to me that I had a reliable path toward secure passive income. And then to, I mean, this is just a VC bootstrapping metaphor, isn't IT right? I was like, I want reliability the way to make a reliably successful product. Since not a genius, the only way I know how is to get specific about who is for and what he does so and will win more easily. And that .

smaller arena percent chance of making like twenty thousand dollars a month, a one percent chance of making ten .

million dollars. I was chatting with you. I all recently, he wrote hooked tractable. And those two books were both huge successes.

And he said, for a third book, he he what he's working on now, he wants to target everybody he's like, I know this was and he is going into the eyes wide open it's like, I know this is going to be a harder task. I know that in my flop as a result, but he's two books that crushed IT. He's like, okay, let's go for the big prize, right, if I saw them.

And he's in a position where you can do that. And his approach, he says he wants to write one book every five years. So every five years he takes the year tube to read a book, and that kind of to allow him to stop in process as last five years of thinking and experience. I love that approach, and he plans to do that for as long as you can.

So you talk a lot about books needing to basically solve a problem like this recommendation leap that you are. We speaking of this, basically somebody encountered a problem, a friend or colleague of facilities like, oh, i've got the perfect solution of the problem. You should read a this book. And I think one of the helpful aspects of that is basically like the title, you know, like what are you say on the cover of your book and you call this the promise. So should somebody think like the promise I going to deliver the writing a book.

the equivalent you know, for business has a value proposition and a customer service in a book has a promise or a value proposition. And under reader profile, you know who is for and what IT does for them, again, for this type of non fiction. And you there's this trend in traditional publishing, these, like one word, lofty titles, like success or transformation, heard like like bob, I don't know.

And a lot of what the traditional industry seems to do is to to maximum ed a lot there. Plane is built on bookstores and impulse buying. And you see IT in the featured shelf space.

And you go who I want, a light ball moments or whatever the book is called, and that could apply to me. And you grab IT and they've kind of got this. This narrative is easy going.

It's like OK for everyone, but amazing for nobody. And IT seems to thrive under the shelf space business you impulse by IT. That's not the type books I want to write. I I want books that write there for a certain type of person. And so that means being specific.

These one word titles for me, they don't work, because when someone looks at the cover season, amazon, they need to know, is this written for me? And does this deal with the problems I have right now? So the mont subtitle, like the montessori, is we are nabs act.

But you're looking at the title, subtitle pair and the subtitle is how to talk to customers and figure out of your business is a good idea when everybody is lying to you like, oh yeah, I kind of get that and the workshops arrival guard is how to design and teach educational workshops that work every time. Like i'm kind of our boss because if I was more clever and a Better word, smith, maybe I could make this shorter while maintaining the description of this. But for me, the description of this comes first, and and i'll make this some title. As long as I need to explain what the books about .

and who is perfect of cheating, I can get on the title. And we just add an extra sentence here. But IT makes IT super latest because of write useful books, a modern approach to designing and refining recommendable non fiction like there's no way to look at the cover of this book and not know exactly what you're going to get .

out of IT that goes back into your amazon readings. And this is a place where books are kind of different from other web products, but amazon creates a pretty powerful fly will and reviews are big part of that.

And so if you can be specific about who is for so that people can choose not to buy IT, if it's not for them, then that keeps your reviews really high because you're only getting reviewed by the people who you wrote for, you know, until the book becomes successful enough that the wrong people. So are reading IT, we mentioned, but and is helpful if you can get the first twenty to forty reviews all at five stars, then IT really puts the fly wheel in your favor. And the amazon has some interesting works behind the scenes, like there's hidden flags that get thrown for a book.

If you get five days in a row of organic sales and organic reviews and IT increases the amount of places where amazon will put your book. And if you think about amazon as a search engine, they're not only trying to show you the most relevant result, they're trying to show you the combination of relevance and conversion rate because they get a cut of product salt. And so if your book gets reviewed Better, sells Better, right? They're gona push IT hire er up the rankings even if it's lacking in relevance because they are like, hey, this book converts people buy IT they love and they will actually add you into extra category that you didn't even list for optimism. It's like someone do you're advertising for .

you have you ever had the book contagious? It's a great book, I highly recommended. But I I read this earlier this year at least alf of IT and IT reminds me so much of the principles that you're talking about and write useful books about share ability. And so I think a lot of people who we think about like products and books that had shared the sort of like that, our intuition and tells us people share things because they love them, right? Like if you write something that somebody really loves you, you make a product that that is a delightful people will tell their friends and family about IT.

And it's like that's hind to sort true sometimes but like not really you know there's one of stuff that like you and i've read that we don't tell anybody about and then you are saying earlier there's like books you've ad really like this is crappy written in the cover is own wrong but like you recommended IT anyway because it's like IT solves this insisted problem for people and the sort of chef chief sort of take away from this book. Contagious is like, but is like five or six things that make an idea contagious, that make a share. And one of them, like the number one, is social currency, which is that like, one of the reasons why we share things is because we want to look good ourselves by recommending things to people.

And like IT turns out of your friend or your coworkers a problem, and you know the solution to that problem. And this is very neat package to book title that you can give them or you know an APP or a product or something. And you can say that then that's awesome when you look good and feel good about yourself and they think highly of you.

And so I thought that was very interesting reading sort of your recommendation loop and thinking about contagious and thinking about the times I have recommended a book to somebody IT has been when I thought that I would probably make me look good to recommend that book. I know they are going to read that book. I know it's going to be actionable.

I know they onna like IT. The same history when founders asked for introductions if someone ask me for an intro and they're amazing, right? The start going crazy.

Their growth is great. They're profitable. Like, of course, i'm get introduced in every V C.

I know because the VC is going to be excited to hear about them. I look awesome. Everybody's happy. And IT took me a while to realize this, that people don't do this introduction for free and they do them for a reason.

And you, the same is true, i'm sure, start benefit from this in the early days because back then you are dealing with these messy payment gateway. Setting up payments was a nightmare. And every start to found that would be like h every ny hacker.

Or how do I do this? This sucks. Like, why are these services so bad? Something like h you gotta try stripe IT solve this.

It's like OK great there. IT is exactly. But in order for this to work.

obviously the book has to actually good right people. And they read IT. They can be like, this is shit, put IT down, like they're got to be getting these dog man hit from every page.

They got out some maximum. How do you actually write a book that is effective and engaging? How you how do you make sure that what you're writing is something that people are going to enjoy and recommended their friends?

premanufacture? Pt, I use teaching and coaching, and I basically look for volunteers. So when we are writing the workshops of, we tried to find a few people who were trying to get started and raise their rates as france workshop facilitators, and we just coach them, and we got their rates from like five hundred per day to two thousand per day.

And for them, that was a pretty meaningful change. And they were really happy with that. And we're like, okay, that was just running the process.

They were going to in the book. And we found the places were stuff ed in work they couldn't understand and they couldn't apply. So we try changing them where we remove them.

Pretty helpful. Uh, you may already have this, you know, like you spend your whole life doing any hacker stuff. So you've helped a lot of through this transition.

So if you sit down to write a book, you would probably already have all of this loaded in, which would make your first draft just fundamentally Better because you already have this teaching experience and this customer contact. It's one of the reasons books like April done for ds. Obviously awesome about product positioning.

So many of these great books, they come out of people who have had a coaching or a teaching practice beforehand. James clear did IT differently, right? He did IT through blogging, and arv called at the same and martial g and also, they all use blogging, their way to test the early ideas and figure out what works.

I think both are fine. And then post manuscripts, you kind of go into the tank. Can you write the first three drafts? And this is the stage where, like, I just got a program, this, I just got to do the work and that that's the bit of the modern process that still feels the most like the traditional process.

You just need those drafts. You don't need to do the whole book, but you need a chunk that's big enough to deliver value once you got the many scrip you jump in to early beta reading, beter reading is not prey sales, and IT overlaps like carefully through beta reading. I like to start and even doing early access, where my beta readers become paid beta readers and the early access right, then they get the finish book and what people get wrong about beta reading is, well, one, you want the right tools.

Google dogs is fine. Or we're building one called held this book that I used for my book that you know doesn't make a nice things and you don't want to be sending PDF because books like any other products, they rely on the speed of iteration and the number of iterations. And if you're sending PDF, people take, say, four weeks to get started or to read IT, you don't know, are they making progress? Are they not reading IT that they reach t one and give up so you want to use an online tools so that you can kind of see the engagement and also importantly, see the abandonment?

If they left lots of comments and chapter one and two, and then they disappeared, something happens like, was chapter three undesirable with chapter two a bit of a grind and wore them down and they didn't want to continue like what's happening? Did they realize the book was misrepresented and wasn't for them? And so you want to run this? And like tilera, I do two to eight weeks early on a faster because usually like the book is worse.

So people give up sooner. And so you only have data to improve the first couple chapters, which makes the iterations really quick. And then as you make the book Better, people are getting further and further through IT.

They're loving IT. The comments in the begin are getting really good. The comments at the end are still confused because you haven't had this many attentions on the end bit and those gets slower and over over time.

I just you have more words to deal with. I look for a couple signals. I look for most bata readers are reaching the end and receiving value.

And I look for at least some of the beta readers are bringing their friends so that basically asking for permission, saying, hey, I know someone who really needs to read this. Can you invite them to the manuscript also? And and that's early evidence of the recommendation loop.

And so the teaching gives me effectiveness. The data reading gives me effectiveness and engagement. And then you get these early signs of the recommendation loop functioning. Yeah, I said.

you know you're optimizing for the right thing because it's set to if if you optimized for like i'm getting lots of people who tell me this is great. None of them bring their friends that you've written a book that people like, but it's not recommendable you we have a book to people like I hate IT. But then like you see in the google out that you've got like tent friends in here.

what what else is important about beter reading is really helpful to get negative and big picture feedback. So you can need to tell people that are OK with that, that you need. There's a little bit of guiding the testers to the right kind of feedback.

I'm not sure what the equipment would be for a web APP, but you want to know the bad news, right? And you don't want them focus on types when you are still trying to fight out if they wanted. That works. You is like the customer development journey, like discovery of validation and a set a you can go through these steps with the book in order worrying about editing too soon and making the words beautiful is the equivalent of premature scale in in, in, in a tech products or like be a hundred percent secure when you're still not sure if anyone even wants IT. And so you want to do things in the right order, IT just lets you get more indications out and get a Better product.

Yeah, I was just looking at um I build A A job board freni hackers and I was just looking at other job boards online. And one of them is created by Peter level swimmin earlier moto k for like remote business, no mats finding jobs and like all of his websites to get like a feedbacks x and it's like can leave feedback even when you go to post a job. Part of the processes leave feedback for how to make this job thing Better.

And he kind of guide you have to like leave feedback. He's not just like leave feedback. He said, here's what this box is for.

He's here's the type of feedback I want. He said, please be radically honest. He's encouraging people to be negative because that's I, it's good feedback. Ks, I love that idea of guiding people to get the right sort of feedback. And you can do if for web apps and for for books.

apparently. Yeah, IT blows people's minds, but IT is pretty sure way. Ford, like what the the guys who wrote start up of.

You read half men and then cos nature, then read a really good post mortem. After the book came out, obvious he was a very successful book. IT did well, saw W A lot of copies, but he said they'd followed the industry's traditional process when they were writing IT.

And so they worked really hard on IT. For a year they had lunch today, they had the publisher of this. And then after I was edited, they sent IT out to early review readers, and I am parthenon, but then basically said, we immediately learned that the book was completely wrong, but we didn't know why, like the book didn't work, but we didn't know why.

And so our choice was to release a book that we knew didn't work for readers, or to kick the launched date back nine months and basically restarted. And they obviously chose to take back the launched date to rewrite the whole thing. But by then, they're already done the editing, they already done the rewrite, they're already done all this stuff that the worst time to learn that IT doesn't work for your readers. And I I love that post morning because I was so IT was so honest and you know they did the work to their credit, they fixed IT. But if it's Better, if you're going avoid that in the first place, you know using this modern stack and treating the book like a product.

it's a lot more fun too. I think sort to include your self and isolated and just like build something without showing anybody, you're really like write a book about talking anybody is like it's not that fun. It's out that energizing.

You're probably going to be full of doubt. Listen, this pocket you got to be go to right for people. But if you're like worrying people the entire way, you've got beta readers with the testers and you're getting feedback, you can kind of course correct. It's more fun and you're not doing IT alone.

And IT completely deals with posters in rome and also the uncertainty of launch you'd like imagine the stress of i'm going to launch. I don't know this is going to work or not with and not so much for the protest, because the man test, I got kind of lucky, because i've noticed that a lot of products, people and entrepreneur s they tend to approach books this way intuitively.

And whatever that would ended up working, I I rent the process more intentionally for my second and third books. And IT was crazy because I felt no fear while releasing them, because I knew I would work, because i've seen the data from from readers, and especially with with write you for books. I actually IT started because a friend of mine in barcelona, a said, hey, I am, i'm gonna ad a book and you give me some advice and I said, yeah, before we meet, let me send you just some tips and read these tips first and then we can talks were specifically about your book instead of rehashing the basics.

And they ended up being a ten page long bullet points, just like, do this, don't do this. This matters. This is important. bbm.

And as soon as we showed up the first words out of our mouths, where can I send this list to a few friends? I was like, oh, that's an interesting early signal. And then basically from then I was like, cool.

yeah. Let me talk to them. Let me answer their questions. And that was my reader conversations, and I just iterated from there and that that list of ten pages list ally expanded out into the book over time.

We've talked about how how to write a book that's recommendable basically such that you hopefully of all the same introductory ism mom test for every year. You look at the revenue and it's more and more than the previous year, and you have done nothing, but you gotta kick start that through somehow. You need like some initial seed pool of readers. And so you've got a chapter in your book is all about finding basically your first thousand readers. How does somebody do that once they're in their book?

So the four approaches that I use is, one is the podcast book tour, the physical books tour, a total waste time. But the podcast bookstore is amazing, right? A really good, you see your time if you enjoy IT, and you have, you know, the interest, other options.

Amazon's ppc ads are great if you are self published because it's a bidding marketplace, right? And since the margins are so much higher on self published books, you can outbid all of the traditional publishers and still clear good profit. And I see sell published authors all the time.

They double themselves and they try to Price their book cheaply because they think that's gonna distinguish. But from a customer perspective, the difference between three dollars and ten dollars is negligible, and it's much Better to be ten dollars. And then you have the idle room to run your ads.

So this what we did for the workshop survival guide exclusively, was just asked for people's mAiling addresses and send fifty copies to people we thought would enjoy IT and who were connected. And apart from that, we just ran ads. I was burned out.

My coauthor, devin, was about to have his first baby. Neither of us had the availability. And so we're like, okay, let just run the ad and wait a few months.

I told about five hundred copies per months and after six months, organic sales from recommendations were ten times higher than those are driven sales. That's the easiest um writing in public. I think arva call did the best demonstration of this recently.

You know, writing this post, talking about IT using the books own success is and exist to talk about the book. He kind of turned his beta reading into writing in public. And that's a killer strategy if you think of the book is basically thirty thousand world to potential content marketing, if you can break IT into the right units and give them the right framing so they're valuable.

Early dress of a section can be you know a post an article. That's a great, great option. There's so much there.

I'm trying to get Better at IT because I I enjoy writing in private, but I don't necessarily enjoy the sharing. And so i'm looking at my manuscrip like I missed a trick when I was intervening orbit about his approach. cool.

How did I leave on the table? And what am I missing? Oh, give away is the other one, if you can give away.

This is how I see at the motel one event. Let me give away five hundred books and let me give away two hundred. And then I use content marketing to sell one hundred.

So I saw that, got eight hundred books seated. And then I was like, great, that's enough. Books are they gonna liver die on the own merits and the own strength.

And yeah, they give away of the quickest. But it's like it's different skill sets, right? Like writing in public is like marketing content.

Marketing giveaway is more like b to B B sales because you're negotiating with conferences and try to figure out if they are willing to take the reputation risk and how much money can give you for printing costs. The podcast bookstores like P, R. So there's different approaches and you you pick what fitter your skills and what seems easier for a yeah you .

talk about you've been trade off to each approach. And so for example, the podcast book tours like the most scalable because you can reach so many people at once, but like the sort of like building in a writing and public approach that arva took, is like the most reliable and valuable, yet time intensive. It's going to take a lot of time to turn your book.

And all this content marketing, amazon paper click advertising is the easiest but not the most salable. And then even give ways in box sales is like the fastest. So you've got the contact, you ve got the events, you'd give away tons of books superfast, but you get to have that sort of to build on.

And i've got to say the pod test book tour is pretty ool because as a podcasting, my favorite to interview your book, authors like you like your self you you won't like and can I can show like I tmg like, let's talk. You got to book. I want to talk about IT because authors like tend to know the most stuff, like you literally spent years researching in particular subject you're going to have.

We can talk for three hours. We skipped over the last majority of your book where like other people, even founders, i'll talk to them and it's like they are most of their time, like coating and like filing taxes and like. They are like learning a tony stuff that they can really share. And so I think the park as book to a work superman.

yeah, it's great. It's fun and meet people. It's another nice side effect of writing a book is that you you're doing interesting stuff.

You're showing your thought. You make connections. Jane loy, talk about this with the news letter.

L. S. Is basically working on that product. The second notion, info products. But it's close enough to a book.

SHE said that that built the foundation for her career because the people SHE interviewed, the people who are working in public, they learn they are trusted. And SHE got a great thing. Rob.

I think people should go. Your book, it's called right, used books is called the mom test. I think pretty much any andy actor, where you're writing a book of building an APP, you should be the on the mom test. But right, use the book is super interesting. I think a lot of the concept that are broadly applying to anyone, whether you're writing a book or building an APP, if you want to know how you people share things and you want to get some useful strategies for getting stuff out the door, check IT out. Thanks a for a comment on the show.

Rap, I was an absolute pleasure. Carton, thank you so much for having me and good like to everyone out there. Let me know if you launch a book above to see IT, where are you?