5 Genius Business Tactics Turning Broke Authors Into Millionaires
All right, we're live, Sean. I've got a little bit, a few actually stories, but it starts with a person I hung out with the other day. You know Ryan Holiday, right? The author Ryan Holiday.
Of course. He came on the pod. He's awesome.
I was hanging out with him the other day and he said something actually to me in person, but he had previously said this on the podcast that we had, I think he's been on twice. He said something about how he actually made a funny comment. He's like, most, most authors say they make more money through speaking than they do actually selling their books. Those people, they just didn't sell a lot of books. However, I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Uh, Ryan has sold a ton of books. We know that for sure. But he also mentioned to me that his other things, like the Daily Stoic, which is his daily newsletter. So Ryan Holiday wrote a book on stoicism. He's written 6 or 7 now at this point, but he has this other property. It's a daily newsletter called the Daily Stoic where they sell coins and merch and advertisements. He has told me that that has made more money for him than selling books, like, which is crazy because that's what he's known as, as an author. And so what I wanted to talk to you about today was I went down this huge rabbit hole where I found ways that authors are making money other than just like writing a book.
Well, you got, you got to tell the coin thing because the coin thing is the perfect simple example of this. I don't know what he confirmed exactly, but explain the coin thing because I think it's the perfect simple example of an author making money, not off their book, but a lot of money in some other way.
Ryan Holiday's whole shtick is stoicism. It's a philosophy that is fairly useful and it's just like how to deal with hardship in your daily life. And for some reason he decided to come up with a coin and it's a coin that in Latin it says like you're going to die or like today's one of your last days alive or something like that. Like something like in inspirational thing, but it's in Latin, so I'm not exactly sure what it says. And a coin's a great product to sell because it costs $25 to sell. It costs like a dollar to make. It ships for whatever, a stamp, two stamps. So however much that is, 80 cents. There's no returns, there's no sizes. It's just like the easiest thing ever to sell. And on the podcast, I don't remember if he said the exact number, but I believe he said tens of thousands of coins. Which is millions and millions of dollars. Is that what he said?
He did, he did say that. And he also said that he works with some mint, some mint in the United States. And I guess it's, it's one of the old famous coin mints. And he, I think he was like their biggest customer also. Like he's like, they're minting more of his Memento Mori coin than they are anything else.
So what I want to do, and that was surprising to me. I had an inkling and then he kind of revealed that that is true where he made more money not from selling books. But I had, uh, I went down this rabbit hole and what I want to do is I want to show you 3 people who are making significantly more money than you would think. And they are doing it in ways other than just writing one book, making whatever, 10% of the revenue that they, of which they sell. All right. So we're going to start with the first one. Sean, do you know who James Patterson is?
I do not know who James Patterson is. Who is James Patterson?
I did not think you would know who he was.
Sounds like a guy who makes sandwiches, maybe a former baseball player. Who are we talking about here?
You, you are very smart. You're a very high IQ. Q smart person.
Oh God, here it comes.
The fact that you don't know some of the most basic things like of pop culture— like it's, it's beyond pop culture at this point. This is— these are things that you see all over bookstores, whatever. It shocks me that you don't know this.
Is he the vampire in Twilight? Yeah, I mean, who is this?
No. Okay, your second guess was a lot further away from the first guess. So listen to this. So have you ever heard of this Stratmeyer Syndicate? You probably haven't, right? Of course, if you haven't heard James Patterson, you also probably haven't heard of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. Have you heard of those things?
I know who those— they write murder mystery. They write mystery novels, right? For kids or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they are the main characters in murder mystery novels. So the way it starts is in the 1930s, there was this thing called the Schrattmayer Syndicate. It was this one guy, he came up with this company in the '30s where he was like, hey, not a lot of people are writing children's books. I'm going to go ahead and start publishing children's books. And then He was like, you know what, I need to write more books, but I don't feel like dealing with the hassle of working with these artists, authors who like are just a pain in the butt to deal with. All I care about is making like kind of cookie cutter novels that children like. So what he did was he goes, I'm going to actually just come up with these characters. So Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and he had a variety of other series. And I'm going to have these authors write these books, but I'm just going to say it's written by the same author every single time. I'm not going to give a person like their little bit of fame. I'm going to pay them a fair rate, but it's, and, and, and they're going to follow my rules and maybe eventually they'll become a famous author, but for now they're just going to follow my rules. And that's what he did. And there was that one point where like every kid in America could name Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, things like that.
Stratmeyer Syndicate. What a name. Uh, so wait, sorry. The syndicate is, I think I missed something here. The Syndicate is the set of novels.
The Syndicate was the name of his company. He called it a syndicate, which sounds like a drug, like a drug syndicate. It sounds like something illegal. 'Cause usually syndi— that was just the name of his company and it was a legitimate company. This wasn't like anything shady, although he did a bad job of naming. It'd be like naming like your kids' children's book, like Warm Candy and Vans or something like that. Like he did a very bad job of like naming his publishing company called The Syndicate. Kind of weird. But basically he came up with these rules where he was like, all books need to be part of a series. Uh, every chapter needs to end with a preview of what the next chapter is going to be. The beginning of each book needs to give a summary of only one page, what happened in the previous books. And he just had this like outline of how to like make hits. Well, fast forward, uh, 70 years, there's this guy named James Patterson. At this point now he's 75 years old. He started, uh, in advertising in New York for the J. Thompson Advertising Firm, which is some huge firm. But on the side, in his late 20s and early 30s, he starts writing novels. And they do okay. Like, they're not like that big a hit. Um, but he keeps at it and he's a workaholic and he keeps going. And eventually at the age of 47, he retires from advertising and goes all in on publishing these novels. So he's been doing it now at this point for about 20 years and he's finally starting to see success. And the whole point of his novels is they're thrillers. Some people might say they're kind of like trash formulaic thrillers, but the thing is, is people love them. And at this point, he sold something like 500 million copies of his books. And at one point he accounted for 16%, or sorry, 6% of all hardcover novels sold in America. So the guy's a hitmaker. He sold, he sells a ton of them, but here's the craziest part. Since he started writing about 48 years ago, he's published on average 7 books a year. And at this point, even though he's 75 or 74, he's doing something like 30 books a year. Now, how on earth does a guy do that? That's like ridiculous, right? At this point to be doing that, it's ridiculous to be doing that at a young age. It's more ridiculous to be doing it in the '70s.
Well, more than a book every 2 weeks.
It's ridiculous. Well, here's how he does it. He has co-authors and a little secret with James Patterson, even though he's well-loved in America, he actually has only written about 20%, like solely written 20% of the books that his name is credited with as writing. The way that he does it, he has a team of co-authors. And so what he does is he pays these guys out of his own pocket. He kind of comes up with a framework. They flesh it out. He reviews it almost like a movie script and he's like, writes notes in the, in the, in the margins and he gives it back to them and they kind of flesh it out. And at this point, he's done it so much that you'll see that there's James Patterson with Dolly Parton. I think there's a James Patterson and then the co-author is Bill Clinton. And then the other co-author who's like the person doing the actual work is listed below it. But this has been so success— successful that at this point he's made something like $800 million. What? Yes, that's how rich this guy is. He owns like 3 or 4 homes. Each of them are worth $40 million. He's donated something like $50 million according to his website to small bookstores. But this has been a smashing success. I'm shocked you've not heard of James Patterson.
I think I have seen the name. What's like his most famous book?
I don't even know the name of his books, but he's almost like, uh, do you know Tom Clancy?
Yes. Okay, he's like Tom Clancy. Does Tom Clancy do the same thing or does he write all his own books?
No, Tom Clancy, uh, would write them, but Jim Patterson does not write as much. But you know, like Jim Patterson at this point is sort of like Tom Clancy where you're like, oh, it's a Tom Clancy novel. And I don't even know what Tom Clancy, I can't even name his novels, but I know it means like, it's like a spy novel.
Right. Okay. So, um, let me ask you a question. Did this guy start out writing all his books and then over the years was like, how do I scale? And he's like, what if I got another author? Or from the beginning, was he like, Did he have this plan from the beginning, or did this come about organically trying to scale up?
So over the last 20 years that he's been killing it, I don't, I don't think one of his books, I'm not sure exactly, but most of his books have not themselves been bestsellers. However, he has been a bestselling author if you add up all of his titles for many decades. And he learned early on, he was like, well, like, I don't know if any individually are going to be a hit. I'll just make a shit ton of them. And so he discovered early on to his career, he goes, we're going to be about quantity. And at this point, he says that for the last 40 years, he's worked something like 70 hours a week and he writes all day. And when we talk about writing, it means working with a team and things like that. But he discovered early on, he's like, we're just going to do quantity. We're going to pump these babies out. And so at this point, Jim Patterson, he's a face. He's a guy. He's a real person. But it's almost like a brand and he's like, gets these authors to kind of come under his brand and he makes jokes, but he'll say things like they should pay these, like these referring to his co-authors, they should pay me to be a co-author because I'm teaching them so much and they're giving their name out there and he actually gives them press. So they're able to like list, but it's almost, uh, it's almost like the way the music industry works of like have Nicki Minaj coming on your song. You have to pay Nicki Minaj. You know what I mean?
I like that. That's the first one you went to, Nicki Minaj. All right, so this is interesting. What do you like about this guy? You like that he basically— to me, one thing I like is I feel like he broke the precious rules of writing and book— like, being an author is this high prestige. Usually it's a high prestige, low volume labor of love that may almost never make money. And if it happens to make money, you kind of got lucky with this one smash hit. And, uh, you know, the honor is in slaving away at this novel for 4 years. And he's, that sounds like he broke all those rules. He's not precious about it. He's like, cool, let's write books people want to read. Let's make it formulaic. Uh, let's make it so that I can hire people that are going to write these books. Um, let's scale this baby up. No individual, we're hitting singles and doubles, baby. We're not going for home runs necessarily because these will all add up. And it sounds like the cool thing is that this guy almost like productized this type of book and treated it more like a business person than he did an artist.
Well, in reality, what he is, is he's an— he was, he was the CEO of the Thompson Agency Group. So that's like a, that's part of a huge corporation and he's basically an advertising executive turned author. And he brings some of that pizzazz to being an author and it has worked really well. So he's both a business person and an advertising person. Let me give you two more that I think are even more interesting. Have you seen these books lately written by this guy named Jack Carr? It's kind of all the rage right now.
I've, I've heard the name, but I, I haven't read anything.
No. All right. So Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL. He served in the Navy SEALs from 1996, I think, to 2016. And he started writing these books called, uh, the first one was called The Terminal List. It came out in 2018. And if, if you go to The Terminal List on Amazon, you'll see it's, it's one of the highest reviewed books I've ever seen given the quantity of reviews. It has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of reviews and it's like a 4.5 5. I read one of them 2 weeks ago. I think I even suggested that you read it, but it's really great. It's basically like the equivalent of a romance novel for a woman. It's like James Bond for the man. It's like basically the story of a guy who goes through all these hardships where he's a, he's an ex-Navy SEAL. His family gets hurt. He's got to save them. He's got to get revenge, whatever, all that, like epic man shit. However, I started reading his book and I noticed something really interesting. He names products and brands like crazy in his books, and I'll give you an example. So this is a, a, a few excerpts or one excerpt from, from one of the books where he talks about, he reached inside and removed the 9mm Smith Wesson M39 from his chest, better known in the SEAL teams as the MK22 Hush Puppy. And then he goes on to saying he grabbed a box of his 9mm Super Vel subsonic ammunition. That was sitting next to his Yeti cooler. He is, I swear to God, he'll talk about things like, for example, he'll talk about like—
He sipped his Athletic Greens.
He names brands like crazy. Like there was one point where he was talking about like, they're like, he needed the best, most durable equipment. So we started using a Hill Person fanny pack or something like that.
And I'm like, what? I like, dude, can we name it like my, he's like, he, he put on his headphones and turned on My First Million, his go-to on Tuesdays and Thursdays for all types of entrepreneurial inspiration. And then dude, he went to war.
He named stuff like crazy. And the, the main character, his name's James Reese. He's like a James Bond type of guy where he does a lot of bad stuff, but like you really like him and you kind of want to be like him. And he just names all of the products that he uses and it's crazy. And so. I was interested. I'm like, why is this guy naming all these products? So I go to his website, I Google Jack Carr Brands. I just Google that. He's got this whole website. I think it's just jackcarr.com. But if you Google, uh, Jack Carr Brands, uh, what you'll see is he has jackcarr.com and he creates— do you know like that website, um, Uncrate or, uh, uh, Gear Patrol? He basically has created his own version of that where he has all these gift guides or he'll be like, Here's all the gear that James Reist used in this book. And he has these beautiful guides on his website. And lo and behold, if you highlight over a lot of them, they're all affiliate links. And in fact, and in fact, oftentimes on jackkarr.com, he sells his own stuff. And so one of the main parts in this first book that I read is he's got this fancy tomahawk, which is basically like an ax. And he uses this tomahawk to kill people and it's like a really high quality tomahawk. Well, jackcar.com sells that exact same tomahawk. And I thought that this was brilliant because when reading these stories, he's talking about the cars that he's in, like the, the type of car that he's in is like a main part. I'm like, I want all this stuff because this character James Reese is so cool. All I have to do is go to jackcar.com and I could buy all of this stuff. And it's amazing. I love this strategy.
Yeah, this is brilliant. I've never— I never would have thought that product placement in books would work like product placement in movies does, but that makes perfect sense. This is his— this is his Feastables. This is his Prime tomahawk, dude.
It's awesome. And by the way, I was just giving him a little shit. Not all of them are affiliate links, but a lot of them are. And if you go to like his Amazon page, he even has this cool feature on his Amazon page where it lists all of the products in the books.
Now, do you think this is just like, um, you know, for example, a lot of people ask us a bunch of questions about like, oh, what do you use for this? Whatever. And it's like, sometimes writing the shit down is actually just, it's valuable to them. It's useful to me. It saves me time. Uh, and I know that a bunch of podcasters do this, but it's, it's like small income. It's side income. It's not their main thing. Do you think this guy's like, he's got to be making more off of his books than he is off of this, uh, this Amazon affiliate thing, right?
I think he's making more off his books, but my third example is I'm going to show someone who's making way more off this thing. And I think there's a world where Jack Carr will make way more off that side thing than the original thing. Meaning when you think of a Navy SEAL, you think of like many things, including like the cool types of gear they have and you like see what they're wearing. You're like, that's neat. I would love to have that thing. Or, you know, it's like cosplaying to be a tough guy. There's a third, here's right.
I mean, like he says, Indian cardigan. Yeah.
As he walked around his home wearing Birkenstocks. Yeah. Yeah. Does JCPenney like sell like really good boxers or something I could talk about? Um, um, the third one, Steve Rinella. Have you heard of Steve Rinella?
Um, 3 for 3. No. Who is Steve Rinella?
Okay. This one is, I would, I would not think you would know who this guy is. So he originally starts as a magazine article guy for Outdoor Magazine. So he basically, he's from Michigan, went to school in Montana. He loves the outdoors. He also loves writing. And so he starts as a freelance journalist. He works for Outdoor Magazine. He works for like Men's Health, these things where he's able to like talk about the outdoors and they pay him a small amount of money, whatever. His first book that he writes is about foraging, which is basically just, he wanted to create, the books sound silly, but they're actually awesome. He wanted to write about how he went and hunted and foraged his own Thanksgiving dinner. But like in doing that, you find like the meaning of life and you see like the history of food, whatever, and outdoors. It's awesome. The second book that he did is called American Buffalo, and it's this amazing book about him hunting buffalo and how the buffalo are really important to American history, whatever. If you're not into that, you're not into it, which I don't think you are. But for the people who are—
What gave it away?
Yeah.
This is like, you know, my body language right now is the body language of a girl who's about to get grinded on by a guy at the club. Unwantedly. No, no, no thanks. Foraging for my food. No, thanks. I'm outta here. Would you like a free copy of my book? It's signed.
Nope. Yeah, you're, you're not into this guy, but you're gonna be into what, what I'm about to explain. So he writes this book, American Buffalo. It gets pretty popular. So then he creates this website called meat eater.com. Have you ever heard of Meat Eater?
I have heard of Meat Eater.
Yes. So Meat Eater starts as a series of podcasts. They have a show on this thing called the, the outdoor or the sports channel, something like that. And it starts working out well. Eventually Churnin, I think, you know, Churnin, they invest into it. And at this point in 2023, MeatEater is a website where Steve Varnella blogs about outdoors. He publishes books, his books under the MeatEater name. He has recipe books. He has more podcasts, whatever, newsletters. However, they went and bought a bunch of brands. They bought a duck call business. They went and bought a clothing line. Now in 2023, they announced that they did $100 million in revenue from selling all of the products on meat eater.com, of which his kind of claim to fame, or at least where he gets a lot of the traffic from, is his books and then his podcasts and things like that. And so this is an example of a guy who I think has made significantly more or will make significantly more in terms of enterprise value from selling the product that he talks about in the books or selling the lifestyle. This guy's super fascinating, dude.
Going from American Buffalo, a book about buffaloes in America or whatever, to having $100 million in revenue on your business is like— that's not the American dream, but it's, it's something. It's someone's dream somewhere.
It's, it's an American's dream.
That is I can't believe that that happened. That's insane. Churnit is so smart, by the way. They took this one thesis of content to commerce. So they were like, hey, anybody who's world-class at content, it's not valued properly in the market because media is such a shit business that they're valued as a media business. But if you can flip their business model from content to commerce, then this thing is going to, this thing is going to take off and it's going to take off in the same way that our YouTube subs are going to take off. When you go to YouTube and you say to yourself, Goddamn, I'm learning a lot from Sam today about Meat Eaters and about authors and about all these people. And they're going to go to YouTube. You're going to go to My First Million and you're going to click subscribe because you love us so much. Thank you very much. That's the plug.
That was a good one.
Pretty seamless, right?
Good job. I think, um, if I had to make a prediction, I think that Meat Eater will be worth many, many, many hundreds of millions, maybe even a billion dollars in the next 10 years.
I believe it. These, these lifestyle brands, once you get like Uh, there is no, no niche too small with these lifestyle brands. MeatEater is actually pretty big compared to some of these lifestyle brands, like the Hodinkee, the watch brand, luxury watches only, right? Or there's things for like, you know how people, when they get into biking, they become like, you know, lamer, they start dressing like SpongeBob, spandex and like clip-ons and then they walk into a coffee shop after like a 90,000-mile ride that morning. Like those people are super valuable as an audience and they need content that's like so lame. Like that, that it's the thing that they care about. And so there's like an endless niche of these like really, really hyper-specific lifestyle content brands that I think can be built. Uh, you just have to come from that space. It sounds like this guy, Steve Ranalla, uh, you know, came from that space, which is pretty, pretty cool.
You want to know the, uh, here's a curveball to the situation. He lives in Brooklyn. For real. He lives in Brooklyn. Yeah. Well, he lives in Brooklyn. I was doing research on him. And he's like from Montana and he's like, I know Montana better than anywhere on anywhere, uh, anyone else in the country.
I knew enough to get the hell out of there.
Yeah. And now he lives in Brooklyn, which is what I thought was kind of weird. Um, but anyway, those are my 3 examples of strange ways or shocking ways that a bunch of these authors are making money. I know that you were thinking about becoming an author. Does this change? But I think you've paused. Yeah. I'm not sure if you paused it or if you've—
Well, I think becoming an author, uh, to make money is just, uh, that's like saying, you know, I was hungry, so I went to church. It's like, yeah, just because they have some food there doesn't mean that's why you go. And so like, I don't think making money is the reason to write a book. If you're going to want, if you want to make money and you're smart about marketing and all that, there's 100 times easier ways to make money.
Did you just make up that analogy? That was a really good, uh, that was a really good analogy.
I did my morning routine today. So, you know, the brain is on, um, the brain is awake. The thing that I've looked into is how much these authors make. So there's like tiers to this. So if it was 10 tiers, the first 5 tiers, tier 10 through 5, is just all of them made no money. Actually, maybe tiers 10 all the way to number 3 all made no money. But a couple of interesting data points that are in our world. So I think the top tier is like the J.K. Rowlings of the world, uh, J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, which is like, you actually are mainstream canon, right? You are, you're a part of the meta. Like you, you became the equivalent, you know, you're going to get a Netflix show type of thing.
So that's like, have you ever thought about, by the way, have you thought about J.K. Rowling and how she invented an entire universe and made up rules to like a game or a language that people refer to now, like the word muggle? I think about that. She just thought of that word.
At least twice a week. You know, people do the Roman Empire thing. I don't give a shit about the Roman Empire, but dude, I do think of like Diagon Alley. I think about Hogwarts. I think about all these places, right? Like I think about that twice a week, uh, how cool that is.
Someone just made it up. Yeah. It's weird to me that when I think about that, I'm just like, that's, that's so odd.
No bullshit. What percent of you is like, might be real? Is there any part of you that's like, well, I, I mean, I am just a mogul. How would I know?
The way that I think about it is it, she is so good at inventing this thing that she couldn't possibly have invented it. And she's just telling a true story. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's just impossible to think that one brain, like our brains are each 6 pounds, but that came out of hers. I don't understand how that happened.
Dude, I've been at an airport where it's like you have the smart cart thing and I'm walking between, you know, 9 and 10. I don't run at it, but I'll take my finger and sort of drag it against the wall just in case there's a little give in that wall. I'll see. So there's that tier, right? That's like God tier. Then there's the James Clear, Atomic Habits, David Goggins, Mark Manson. I think these guys have cleared like $30 to $50 million off of a single book.
That's a lot. I would say more like $20 million.
So James Clear, I think, I don't know how many he's sold now. His thing is escalating, by the way, which is really interesting. He tweeted this out recently and it was something like, I'll try to find it, but it was basically like, first year was like, you know, maybe like $100,000 and then the next year was like $200,000. The third year was $1 million and then the fourth year was like $4 million and the fifth year was like $15 million. And he's just gone up and up and up. I think now he's sold, uh, basically, I don't know, 20 million copies or something like that worldwide.
And so, you know, no way, really? That many? 20 million? Yeah.
Yeah. Oh my God. His book is like a runaway train, basically. So I think, I'm pretty sure his book has grossed like $150 to $200 million, probably $150 million worldwide. It's my guess. I might be off by $30 million in either direction, but I'm not off by half.
And he's just a guy in Ohio. I think he's just a guy. I knew him before here. I talked to him before the book and he was just like a blogger in Ohio. It didn't seem particularly fancy.
And he doesn't talk like this.
Not in a million years.
Yeah, I knew him before he stopped talking to me. So, so I think that's like the next tier. David Goggins's book, I think, has done like $35, $40 million in sales, and he did it through Scribe. So he kind of like owns more of that. Tim Ferriss surprisingly didn't sell that many copies of 4-Hour Workweek. I thought 4-Hour Workweek was like a, to me, it was like, that was a huge book. It obviously did super, super well, but I think it sold 2 million copies. So 2 million versus 20 million, right? 10x more for Atomic Habits, which is pretty crazy. A fun one is Eric Jorgensen. So, you know, Eric Jorgensen, he was like a startup growth guy. He lived in some, I don't know where he lives. He lives in like Kansas City or something like that. And Eric Jorgensen wrote the Navalmaniac, which is basically, he's like, yeah, Naval's tweets are the shit. What if I printed them out basically. Like, what if I printed it out and stapled it together, right? Obviously he did more than that, but the core idea was he didn't write the book. He didn't study Naval's life and write a biography. He didn't create a bunch of original wisdom. He just took Naval's existing wisdom that was super fragmented, packaged it up into a really easy-to-use book, and he actually gives away the ebook for free, I think, online. I'm pretty sure Eric, he's never told me this, this is my guesswork based on some back-of-the-envelope stuff. Pretty sure Eric has made like $3 to $5 million off of the Navalny Act himself.
No way. I don't believe that. That is so much money.
I'm 82% confident that that's a real number.
Dude, if you're even half right, I would be—
he's definitely made more than a million dollars. I think it's like $3 to $5 million off the Navalny Act.
Okay. Well, that's insane. Does Navalny get anything?
Navalny got distribution. I don't think he gives Navalny money from it. I don't know.
I'm gonna make you famous, baby. You're gonna be a superstar. That's what I'm gonna tell you. I'm gonna create the Sean, Sean-o-Mac.
Dude, you said that way too naturally. That was not the first time you've said that. Is that what you told Trung?
That's insane. I, uh, that, that, and it basically, the concept is ridiculous, right? I mean, it's good.
The concept is genius is what it is. He, he took somebody else's genius that was fragmented and was like, Why would I write my— nobody wants to read the Erik Jorgensen book, but a lot of people want to write the Naval book. And Naval is kind of open source with it. He has, he's said this many times, he's like, the best thing you could do is let other people reshare your ideas. They're stealing your ideas, but really they're propagating your ideas. It's one of the highest compliments, one of the best strategies you can have to get more distribution. And so, I think he was happy that Erik, and it took him like a year, he put a lot of effort into it.
Not nearly as much effort as the guy who actually came up with the content.
Uh, well, Naval's made $500 million in his life, so I think he's done fine too, right? That's, that's the whole idea.
No, and Eric, by the way, I think Eric's now the CEO of Scribe, David, the company that did David Goggins' book. So, and the company that I think you might be using.
Uh, yeah, not yet, but, um, okay. So another crazy story. So I've never heard of this book and I doubt you have either, because are you a sci-fi reader?
Not exactly. Only like the most famous ones.
So have you ever heard of this book called Wool? No.
Uh, talking to me about science fiction is like talking to you about bison. You know what I mean?
Ain't going very far. That conversation's got a lot of dead ends.
Yeah. Uh, that's a hard yes and.
Well, basically here's the, here's the idea. I was looking at the, uh, at the charts and I saw all of the Game of Thrones books. So it's like, you know, A Song of Ice and Fire. And it's basically George R. R. Martin, George R. R. Martin, George R. R. Martin. There's 5 of his books. And there was one book on top of it called Wool. And I was like, I have never heard of this book. What is this book? So I went and researched it. So the author, this guy Hugh Howey, which sounds like a fake name, might be, I don't know. Um, his origin story is he's living in North Carolina. He's broke. Uh, he was doing some odd jobs. He was like, oh, there's a roofing gig. Yeah, I'll go help you out. You know, I'm a technician. Sure. I'll help you out. And basically at some point he's unemployed and he's like, you know what? I'm gonna write a book. His wife was kind of supporting the household. He's like, I'm gonna write a book. And she's like, okay, honey, great. Uh, sure you don't wanna get out there with the old resume? And she's like, no, no, I'm gonna write a sci-fi book. And like, it was like the idea was like something, he's like, what if aliens had this flying car or whatever? I don't know what it was. Some crazy idea.
He, this conversation could go way different. It'd be like, hey, by the way, like I know that you love having these action figures in the plastic still, but can we make a little bit of room for the baby?
Oh, you're gonna write a book? I'm gonna go find another husband. So he puts the book out, he sells less than $1,000 of the book. Okay. So first, first try at it failed. Most people would obviously quit. Strike one. He's like, oh, I'm just getting warmed up. He's like, that was, that was good, but I can do better. And he still has no job. He needs to kind of start, you know, paying for the bills a little bit. So I love this part about the story. He gets a job, but he's like, he's trying to find not the highest paying job. He's trying to find a job that will make a minimum amount of money that he needs to live with the maximum amount of free hours. So he ends up finding this job that he could do for about 25, 30 hours a week. It pays only $10 an hour, but he's like, I'll take it because there's a lot of downtime where I'm just sitting there not doing anything. I could be writing during that time and it's only 30 hours a week, so I can spend all of my free time doing this. And I also don't even want a good job that'll make it hard to quit later because I want to be an author. And I'm not gonna trap myself in a job that's like hard to leave. Then he changes his schedule. He's like, I'm gonna wake up 2:00 AM every day. I'm gonna write before my job. I'm gonna write during my lunch break. I'm gonna write after dinner. It became a compulsion for him. And in 3 weeks, he writes this book Wool. 3 weeks. So again, just like James Patterson wasn't precious about the whole idea of writing books, this guy was like, 3 weeks, not 3 years. And so he bangs, he bangs out this book. He puts it on Amazon for 99 cents and he sells like 1,000 copies. He's like, boom, 1,000 bucks. All right. Love it. And he's like, uh, and the, but like, you know, his small reader base, it's kind of like YC. They say you want like a small number of people. You'd rather have 1,000 people that love you than 100,000 people that just kind of like you. So he had 1,000 people that really loved the book and they were like, dude, we gotta write a sequel. So very next month before they get cold, he writes a sequel.
By the way, Wool, Wool's 530 pages. He did that in 3 weeks.
Yeah. So then he, uh, he writes a sequel a month later. He, uh, or like, you know, 2 months later, whatever it is, and he sells 3,000 copies of that one. He's like, all right, I gotta keep going. So he writes 2 more and he sells 10,000 copies. And finally he puts out the collection, all 5 of the books that he's written in a very short period of time. And the first month he sells 23,000 copies of the set. And now he's selling it for $6 instead of 99 cents. He makes basically $140 grand that, um, in, in gross revenue that month., and he's self-publishing this whole thing, so he's keeping 70% of it, whereas a normal author is going to keep 10%, maybe 15% of it. And all of a sudden, the months roll by, he's now sold 500,000 books before anybody knows it, which is a shit ton of books to sell. That's like, you're in the top, top percent of a percent that are of authors at that stage. And he's getting approached by publishers and he's like, okay, what's the deal? And they're like, We'll give you, you know, $250,000. Like, I'm already making $250,000. They're like, okay, we'll give you more money. He's like, well, I'm, what, why would I give you, why would I take some money today for like, now I give up all my upside. And they're like, well, we can help you get distribution. He's like, I've sold 500,000 copies myself. And they're like, how the hell did you do that? And he's like, and so his strategy is like guerrilla tactics to get his book out there where he's like, all right, I need to influence the influencers. So he sent basically copies of the book to bloggers and reviewers at Goodreads. So not like influencers, but book influencers. So people who review books and Goodreads, like high-ranking Goodreads people. So then he's like, all right, that's good. Next step, he goes on Reddit and he does an AMA on Reddit for 12 hours. And so he's just like, I'm just going to soak up all the Reddit love for this day on Reddit. All right, does that. Then he starts encouraging fan fiction and fan art, whereas most authors are pretty, again, precious about It's my IP. They try to like, you know, take down anybody who writes like variations of their book. He's like, no, no, no, go crazy. I built the universe, but you guys can fill up all the stories. And he would basically incentivize people to design other alternative book covers for it. So now their little audience would, you know, their art, that artist audience would see them designing a book cover for this book called Wool. That was pretty cool. He picks 30 of the diehard readers and he's like, okay, how do I get my diehards? To help me and become like, you know, super evangelists. And so he made them beta readers. Again, everybody's so precious. They keep everything under lock and key. He took his super fans and was like, you're going to be readers of the, of the early editions of new books before they come out. So he did a bunch of community building, essentially, like stuff that doesn't really scale, that each one individually wasn't a game changer. But if you add up that and the 20 other things that he did, you could see how he like, that's not what made it successful, but he did start turning the crank. And at the beginning, the crank is pretty hard to turn, but eventually, you know, you, you, you, if you power through that first part of the crank, it'll start to move on its own. And that's basically what happened for this guy. And so then someone comes up to him, they're like, look, I don't think you should sell your book rights, but I do think you should sell your film rights. You haven't actually— you're not going to make a film yourself. So he sold his film rights and, um, and he kept his, his, uh, book rights, you know, as an independent person for a while. I think maybe he sold it now. I'm not sure. But he also met George R.R. Martin once. He went to a book signing for George R.R. Martin, and he's like, hey, George, it's me, Hugh Howey. And the guy's like, never heard of you. And he's like, I'm the number 6 guy on the sci-fi list. It's your 5 books, and I'm number 6, said George R.R. Martin. He posted this thing that George R.R. Martin signed his book and said, to number 6, keep trying. And then a couple months later, a couple months later, he actually hit number 1. And so, uh, just a pretty cool story of like a self-published author that, that really made it happen. Like entrepreneurial hustle story.
That's a great story. Do you use Goodreads? Do you know anything about Goodreads?
I've used Goodreads. Yeah. I met the founders of Goodreads.
Yeah. They're, they're really cool people. Really nice people. It's a cool product, but, but it's old now. It's been around for a long time.
But it's got a great moat. I can tell you a little bit about Goodreads, but this guy, Hugh Holly, he has— so I use Goodreads religiously. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, that's kind of like my, it's where my library, I keep everything. This guy has 750,000 ratings, which is huge. And if you're in the hundreds of thousands of ratings and you have over a 4-star review, you're like the best of the best. He has a 4.15 review out of 5 for almost a million reviews. It's amazing.
Yeah. And it all started with a standalone short story, basically. It wasn't even like a full book. It was like a short story that he published at the beginning of that first 3 weeks. But again, that's kind of what you want. It's a prototype, right? He treated it like an entrepreneur would, not like an author would.
He's like the blue-collar version of sci-fi. This guy's like the Larry Bird of sci-fi. You know what I mean? Like French Lick, Indiana. Yeah.
Dude, how insane is it that Larry Bird was so amazing and would just literally drink beers on the bus to the game? And people used to smoke cigarettes at halftime of those games. Isn't that absolutely insane now? Now LeBron James sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber, but the guy who was basically the LeBron James of his time was literally just downing Bud Lights after games.
And he was so skinny and so pale, had the worst haircut, the shortest shorts. The best mustache. The best mustache, but he like kind of looked like a, like a human version of like Big Bird and he just killed it. And he's considered one of the top 5. Yeah. That guy's amazing. He gives, uh, he gives the weirdos hope. Uh, this story is amazing. Hugh Holly. Um, that's a good story. Um, you want to do one or two more things?
Yeah. Uh, my shill. Use Shepherd. It's great. You need to hire somebody? Go check it out. It's how I hire a bunch of people. If you want to hire people like I do, Use Shepherd. How was that?
All right.
There, that's the topic. There was no thrill in that show, but I kept it short.
Do you have one more thing?
Oh, well, I guess we didn't talk about this. Uh, this is kind of cool. James Clear just launched an app yesterday, which I think was the stimulus for this whole thing that we didn't, we didn't talk about.
Andrew Wilkinson, uh, partnered, he, he, Andrew Wilkinson, our friend Andrew Wilkinson, he put out this tweet where he said, uh, we partnered with James Clear. Tiny owns 40%. James owns 60%. We made this. App. I actually didn't look at the app. It's a productivity app or a habit tracking app. Yeah.
It's what if it was just something completely different? It's just a social media app. It's a network. It's a photo sharing app.
It's just some like stupid game. It's like you, like they recreated like Snake from Nokia. That's so funny.
By the way. Okay. So let's talk about a couple of things here. Great idea to release a habits app. Uh, you want an app to be habit-forming. Literally, that's like, only successful apps are ones that you use habitually. So creating a habits app is a good idea. There's lots of, there's habits apps, but they're not made by James Clear. So I think this is like, no, no-brainer idea.
He could just create anything that was a habit, like just like some supplement or drug, like, I'm going to get you addicted. We're going to make this habit.
Watch this.
We're going to call it crack.
So I think genius idea by him. Maybe doubly genius idea by Andrew to pull this off. I think it's amazing what he's doing. He's done this now with Huberman. So he launched, uh, the yerba mate drink with Huberman, which I think is also a genius idea. I think what Andrew's doing now is the new playbook of what Chernin did. Remember I was saying like Chernin's playbook with the content to commerce, they did it with Barstool. They did it with Eater. They did it with like a bunch of these media, media publications. That was a really good model. And it's played out over the last 10 years. I think what Andrew's doing now is going to play out over the next 10 years, which is he's partnering with these experts and authorities. And he's like, look, I already have MetaLab that can do the design, the engineering. Uh, I have, I own a portfolio of businesses. I've, you know, made a billion dollars doing this whole thing. So let me find a CEO. We'll build the whole thing. You just have to promote it. And it's a perfect fit with what you do. I think it's just like such a good model. It's also really fun for him, right? Because he's going to get to hang out and rub shoulders with people who he likes and respects. He's got like a cool cocktail story of being like, oh yeah, we built the James Clear app. We did the Huberman drink. We did the whatever, right? Um, they've done a bunch of these, these apps now. So I just think it's an awesome win all around. Like I'm, I'm really happy for him.
We should have Andrew on to talk about it, but my prediction is that this won't make nearly as much money as some of his other boring things that no one would ever talk about. But it's cooler than all of the other ones. Like, it's significantly cooler. It won't make as much money, but it's way cooler. Like, to be able to like—
I think this thing's gonna make a lot of money. Why do you think this is not gonna make money?
Well, I just think that it's his other stuff just does so much better. If I had to guess, I think the—
Paul can do like hundreds of millions on meditation. I'm pretty sure that you can get like 30, 40 million of ARR on a habit app.
I think maybe you can. But Andrew also owns all these boring agencies that are like the thousandth most popular agency, and they also make many, many tens of millions a year in profit.
No, no, no. If you add them all up, they do, but each individually does not, right?
Like, if you add them all up, they do.
His agency, if you add up what he's going to do with Huberman, with James Clear, and the next 5 that he's going to do like this, those are going to add up to be much bigger. The Huberman drink is a brilliant idea. That is an absolutely brilliant idea. The James Clear app, like he's getting the right type of things. Like you don't want necessarily the A-list celebrity because the A-list celebrity for every, you know, George Clooney or Ryan Reynolds that you get that have a hit, there's tons of others that they don't really care about promoting it. They're too busy, but it's not a fit. They don't have like a direct relationship with their audience because they're actually on in Hollywood. They're not like have a direct channel through social media. And so. The people that he's finding are like, this is meaningful for them. It's a perfect fit with them. They have a direct relationship with their audience and they haven't like, um, they have like love from their audience. It's not just like people who are fans of them. It's people who have deep trust in them. And I think that that is a, I think he's picking the right influencers to do these shows. I would bet that he's going to make hundreds of millions off of these plays. If you, if you add up the, you know, 3 to 5 that he's going to do in this category, I would bet that that's a 3 to $300 million prize.
I guess we'll have to have him on and, uh, ask him about it. I'm— he, he's like a Spider-Man. He's— or like an octopus. He has his tentacles like all over the place. I see this, I'm like, how the fuck did you weasel your way into that thing? Like, he just like, he knows everything. Like, he not knows everything, he knows everyone. I don't know how he gets his fingers on all these things. I'll be like, check your email.
I'll be like, hey, uh, where's our email? We're influencers, Andrew.
Where you at?
Well, where's our offer?
He also plays dumb with me all the time. I go like, you're, I'd probably be like, hey, have you heard of this guy named Huberman? I've been loving his podcast. And Wilkinson will be like, yeah, I think it's a nice podcast. I also enjoy it. And then like weeks later, be like, yeah, we partnered with him and launched this company. Yeah. I'm like, okay. Like he does that. He does that kind of on a regular basis with me where I'll be like, if you heard of this thing, it's kind of neat. And I'll be like, yeah, I agree. That is neat.
He is a super networker. He is an absolutely incredible networker. I admire his networking skills. He's like, cool, I like Bill Ackman. Now I'm friends with Bill Ackman and he's an investor in my company. Oh, Charlie Munger's my hero. Years later, I'm having dinner with Charlie Munger and he's offering me XYZ. It's like he is really able to, when he puts his mind to it with who he wants to meet, he is able to make that shit happen. And, um, and I think he does it in a way that's mutually beneficial. It's not like, uh, you know, most people when they're like, oh, I want to meet this person, it's like just begging for, you know, time or attention in a way that's not additive to the other person. I think he does it in a good way that's additive to the other person.
Yeah, he's fascinating in the way that he's able to, but he also, he also turns a weird networking opportunity into like real businesses. Like usually more often than not when I meet people, I'm like, that was nice to meet you. I'll see you never again.
Uh, and this is awesome, right? High five.
That's like where my brain stops. Yeah. What a guy. Yeah. Yeah.
That's like, I'm literally like, you know, Dumb and Dumber when he's walking out of the 7-Eleven. He's like, Big Gulps, huh?
All right, catch you later.
That's me at every networking event.
Same. That's exactly how I am, where it starts and ends right there, and it's just like a passing memory. And yet Andrew somehow like makes it into money and turns it into dollars. I don't know how he does it, but he's very good at it.
He told one story on the pod where he was like, I wanted to meet Dan Gilbert. I met Dan Gilbert. And then they had this challenge with this, like, or he had a product. I have a design agency. So we just made him a website for free. That was really nice. Cause he used that as his currency to like, you know, hey, I think you're awesome. And we did this thing. This is awesome, right? Oh, it's cause my agency's awesome. Cause I'm awesome. And he just uses it to sort of like open the door. He'll put in the work basically. And he'd be like, oh, Whenever you're free, I'll fly there and let's, you know, I'll, I'll meet you. You know, I'll make the effort to come to come make this happen.
And the takeaway is to have an agency, to either have like an agency or like a sick house. It's like, oh, you're in town, come stay in my home. And then, you know what I mean? Like you have to have like some like awesome experience.
Should I do that anytime someone's traveling? Like, oh, do you want to stay in my house? And I just rent an Airbnb that they can stay in. They're just absolutely indebted to me.
Well, it's kind of a good tactic. Chris Sacca said that he had this house in Truckee. And, uh, you know, he would like lure, which sounds weird, more weird than it actually is. Right. He would lure these like interesting founders. Get a white fan in the house of Truckee. Yeah. Come to my bed.
Yeah. I got AWS credits.
Come over. And he would like get these guys to come up and to become friends with them. And it was like, they're, they're like, well, I would love to hang out in Truckee. And just so happens you have a house. And that's how we become friends with them. But maybe having an agency is better than having a house.
Uh, when I lived in San Francisco, I was just constantly getting like meeting requests or event invitations. And it was like a good problem to have, but at It's still a problem. He's like, I was playing defense. I was just reacting to whatever was going on. He's like, when I moved to Truckee, then I played offense. I would figure out who it is that I want to actually spend time with. And then I would proactively plan and like set it up so that Travis Kalanick came for the weekend and stayed with him. He's like, we're not going to just get coffee. We're going to hang out for a weekend. And like for every 50 coffee meetings I do, like one weekend is just so much more powerful than 50 coffee meetings. And so he's like, we hang out, we spend time together. They meet my family. We chill in the hot tub. We brainstorm in the morning. Then later that evening, a new idea comes and I'm just very helpful for these people. That's how he did his Uber investment. He did the same thing with the founder of Instagram. That's how he did his Instagram investment too, was he invited Kevin Systrom to come stay at his place in Truckee and he stayed there for whatever, a few days, a week or whatever it was. And by the end of that, like they were kind of bonded. And I think that was, Chris Sacca did a lot of cool things and that's definitely one of them.
I don't know if a 3-bedroom place in the burbs is going to do the trick. I think both of us are going to have to step it up.
Can I interest you in Walnut Creek? Yeah, we'll go to Safeway. We'll come back.
It's like the only appeal— you like marble countertops? I got marble countertops. Like, um, All right. Is that it?
Is that the pod?
That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.