Tucker Max

Let’s do it.

Tucker Max

You want to talk about overall media exposure or do you want to talk about books specifically? I’ll go either way if you like.

Tucker Max

We hear that all the time from people. People need to learn how to create a book to bring in more profit. Authors come to us and basically what they do is they make a classic mistake. That sounds like what your friend is going. They start with the end in mind. That is smart with a lot of things. It’s the completely wrong way to think about books.

It’s not that you can’t start with the end in mind. It’s that people start with the wrong end.

The mistake your friend is making is he’s thinking about himself. What he wants from the book is to get on Oprah, to get a huge amount of attention. The problem is Oprah doesn’t give a crap about him and neither any reader of the book. No one cares about you, or your book is the number one reason.

A thing you must understand as a book author is no one cares about you. No one cares about what you want. Everyone cares about themselves.

Tucker Max

Learn how to create a book that adds value. The only reason we’re going to get them to care about your book is that your book gets them something that they care about. If you understand that, then you can write an excellent book that is engaging and valuable to a lot of people. If you do that, then, you have a shot at getting on Oprah. Or launching a company or hitting a bestseller list or whatever it is. You want your book to get you.

Tucker Max

Here’s how you do this.

It’s not just important to know how to create a book. It is the only thing that matters, and if you do not get it right, nothing else you do will work. If you get it right, you can almost screw up everything else and still, the book is going to help you.

My company helps authors do this, and we have a Three-Part Strategy.

Before we write one word of the book, we figure out the marketing and the marketing angles and the hooks. If you don’t think that at the beginning, you’re not going to stumble on it by accident.

Tucker Max

Here’s how we do it.

The first question we ask the author is, “Why are you writing this book?” “What result does this book have to get you to be successful for you?”

Like your friend who wants to be on Oprah. That will be okay. But I seriously doubt that if his book doesn’t get him on Oprah, everything about the book is a total failure. That’s probably not true.

The thing to understand though is that no one writes a book just to write a book.

You write a book because you expect that book will get you something. It’s going to get you attention which then you turn into sales. Or it’s going to get clients interested in you so they can join your coaching program. Or it’s going to get people interested in their health and eating right. This means people are going to buy some product you have or they’re going to use you as their guru.

There are a million things you can get with a book, but you must know first and foremost exactly what those things are.

Even being on Oprah is not actually what that guy wants. He wants what getting on Oprah will get him. Even if it’s just status, credibility, authority, that’s totally fine. That’s valid.

You must know why you are writing the book and how to create a book that benefits you. Once you know why you’re writing the book. Then the next question, number 2, you ask yourself is, “What audience do I need to reach to get that why.”

Tucker Max

For example, if you’re a CEO coach writing a book to drive clients to your executive coaching business. Then, your audience is very clear. It is the people who need CEO coaches. That’s your audience. Whatever it is you want to get, your audience is the people who can give that to you.

The third question then becomes, “What do you know that is interesting and valuable to your audience?” And that becomes the topic of your book.

The reality is if you don’t know anything that’s interesting and valuable to people that need CEO coaching. You probably shouldn’t be a CEO coach. So it helps you understand if you should even write that book if you have that book in you.

Once you understand that, then you write the book that’s interesting and valuable which will help reach your ideal audience, and that gets you what you want.

That’s three step process works for any book, anyone trying to get something from their book. Know how to create a book using these three steps.

Does that make sense?

Tucker Max

It makes a lot of sense Tucker. The three steps to how to create a book are amazing.

It makes me want to ask you this other thing. Because I know a lot of people are thinking they’re going to get rich off their books. I’ve heard a lot of different stories being passed around about books, and you work in this industry more than I do. I know a little bit because we’ve interviewed some experts.

I’m curious. Do many people make a good amount of money?

Tucker Max

There were about 350,000 – 400,000 books published in English last year. I think there were about 2000 that sold 100,000 copies. I figure that was 200 or 2000. It might be 200. 100,000 copies seem like a lot, but it doesn’t look like a crazy number. At most, there are 2000 books. I think it was 200, to be honest.

I know that there were fewer than ten books last year that sold a million copies. A million copies is a lot of books. But nonetheless, your odds of making millions of dollars from selling copies of books are about like your odds of winning the lottery.

However, we have a book remarks. We’ve worked with 300 authors, and then 300 books.

Tons of our clients have made tens, hundreds of thousands and some millions of dollars, not through book sales. But, by driving customers to their business by doubling their speaking fees or getting more speaking gigs.  And by raising their status and credibility, authority. In some ways shape or form, they turn it into business for their company.

Tucker Max

It’s a fantastic question, and I get this all the time.

That’s why I went through that three step process is because all the time, people will come to me with your question. “Okay. My book finished. Now, how do I market it?” I’ll look at their book, and I’ll say, “It’s impossible,” and they’re like, “What do you mean it’s impossible. You’ve market all these things.”

Tucker Max

I’ll say, “Well, the problem is not book marketing. The problem is your book sucks. You don’t have a clear audience that you’re going after. You don’t offer any value to any audience, so there’s no way to market it. You’ve already made decisions, and what you thought of as the creative process, they were marketing decisions that you’ve limited the ability now to market this book down to basically zero.”

Tucker Max

So as long as you write a good book that appeals that some of them. You’re probably going to move copies. If you’re writing a book about how to lose weight while working on a crab boat in Alaska, you’re probably not going to sell any books because no one cares about that.

That’s my entire point. If you’ve done your job right before you wrote the book. You identified what you were trying to get. You determine who you were trying to reach. You identified exactly what you were offering to them that was valuable. Then you put it in the book. Once you do that and the book’s complete. All you have to do is now put that book in front of the people, that you already identified as your audience.

If my audience is people who want to lose weight, then there are a million ways to get traffic for that whether it’s guest posting or a paid ads or YouTube. All the standard marketing strategies work.

You just have to put your stuff in front of the people you wanted, but the key is to identify super clearly who is my audience and why do they care. That’s the key to marketing.

If you can’t answer that question, no marketing strategy can overcome that.

Tucker Max

Yeah. Everyone loves the sexy new things.

We had an author on a call the other day asked us what we thought his Snapchats strategy should be. I started laughing at him. “What are you talking about dude?” Snapchat is just not in the purview of what you need to even think about. If you’re thinking about marketing a book, it makes no sense at all.

Tucker Max

Unless if you’re Gary Vaynerchuk and you have a massive audience. Like being on Snapchat, and you release a book. You’re going to talk about your book on Snapchat.

But he’s not Gary Vaynerchuk. If you don’t have a huge audience, you don’t go on Snapchat or whatever to build an audience. It doesn’t make any sense.

Everyone wants to think about the sexy things but the fundamentals, may not be fun.

If you focus on the fundamentals, you’re going to get a huge amount of results.

Tucker Max

Yes.

Let’s assume what you said, you have a clear audience and a clear value proposition. What do I do now?

The answer depends on what your book is and what you are trying to do with it.

For example, if your book is the entry point to selling a video course. Or some coaching method or things like that, I think Facebook ads are fantastic.

Tucker Max

Other authors have a pretty decent funnel. You see a lot of authors will do like a 10-page PDF. They’ll give away for free that’s almost like a summary or the best parts of the book. And then, that will upsell the book. The book upsells the course or the coaching or the community or whatever it is you’re doing.

For a lot of different categories, Facebook ads work incredibly well. I’m not the expert on those Facebook funnels. I’m sure you guys have probably interviewed those people. That works really well.

That’s for broad categories where there’s clear demand, and you’re just trying to carve out a piece of that demand.

We see a lot of our authors do and what we advise them to do is to go the opposite way and go super niche. If you’re a professional and you have a lot of very specific knowledge, that knowledge is probably valuable to a small group of people.

And so, what we tell them to do is actually target those people directly.

For example, one of our first clients was an expert in pop-up retail, which is a small subset of the retail industry. There’s no way she’s ever going to interest you or me in her book, so she didn’t try. Instead, she made her book deeply about pop-up retail. There’s honestly probably 5,000 people on earth who care about pop-up retail to buy a book about it.

However, those 5,000 people really care a lot. They are really into it. A lot of them are decision makers in retail that could hire her to be a consultant, which is what she is.

Tucker Max

So, she focused essentially on a small niche media that spoke to influencers in retail. Every media outlet just about she got was something you and I would never read in a million years. It had very small coverages, but they’re all about retail.

She only sold a thousand copies of her book. She had probably made close to a million dollars in consulting fees and contracts already.

Tucker Max

What you’re saying is exactly right.

Almost everybody will buy the thing that they think is designed for them over the thing that’s designed for a broad audience.

One of my favorite examples is a friend of mine had an SEO business. It was doing pretty good. It was fine but he was really trying to figure out how to distinguish himself.

Tucker Max

I wish I could take credit for it. However, it was another friend of ours who said, “Dude, aren’t half of your clients dentists? You have like three or four dentist clients.” One of them came on and then referred his friends.

He’s said, “Yeah.” He goes, “All right. Why don’t you just roll out like a different landing page called SEO for dentists and make it all geared to dentists. There’s probably no competition for those Google keywords. Just go do that, and he’s like, “That’s stupid. Who gives a shit about SEO for dentists?” And the guys is like, “What about all the dentists?”

He did that and he 10x his business. He ended up selling offers, stopped on closing down his broad SEO business. He became the SEO for dentist guy.

Now, I think he even subdivided more to like orthodontics. All this weird subdivisions, and he has 20 front facing businesses. They’re all deeply niched businesses doing SEO for basically people who messed with other people’s mouths, and he’s crushing it. He’s doing incredible because he went the opposite of what most people think.

Tucker Max

Let’s go back with the fundamentals like we said earlier.

Media exposure is always about getting relevant information in front of a relevant audience. Again, once you know who your audience is and you know why they care. From that point forward, it’s just the matter of understanding where your audience is. That’s it. That’s all you have to think about.

Tucker Max

Like for SEO a dentist, all he had to do was buy keywords. There are some dental publication that of course, only dentists read. Somehow, he got profiled in that. He got profiled in it. Very soon, they would never do a story on SEO. They’ll do a story on SEO about dentists because their audience is dentists.

Here’s the key. When you’re pitching media, the journalist doesn’t care about you. They care about themselves, and what they want is they want pageviews. They want people to read their articles. That’s all they care about. That’s how they get judged. How well did their articles do.

If you can go to them and say “I have X information” and you can show them why it would be relevant to their audience, then, they’re going run that. You’re doing them a favor.

Getting media exposure is easy once you understand that journalists and media need attention too.

Tucker Max

If you can get them stories that get them attention, not only will they run them, they’ll come back to you for more. You’re giving them something they want and need.

The problem occurs because people are like “I want to be on Oprah,” and it’s like the SEO for dentist guy. Oprah doesn’t care. She’s never in a million years going ever to have anyone doing SEO or SEO for dentists on her show.

Tucker Max

That’s the point. You laugh at that example but then all day long, I see people who have stories that no one cares about. Or the audience they’re pitching don’t care about but they keep pitching them. Because they’re thinking about themselves. They’re not thinking about what are the needs of the people in pitching and their audiences.

If you frame it that way, it’s easy.

Tucker Max

Yeah. That’s exactly it.

I say this all the time to people. If you just focus on the fundamentals, then everything is easy. No one wants to concentrate on that fundamental like, “No, no. I just want to be famous.” “No, no. I just want to be on the New York Times,” and it’s like, “Dude, if the New York Times doesn’t care what you’re writing about, how are you going to do it?”

They don’t want to hear that. They don’t want to listen that sort of stuff. They just want their attention, fame or money super fast. That’s just how it works. Those of us who put our head down and work on the fundamentals get the results.