459: Unexpected Twists On My Book Publishing Journey – A Behind The Scenes Look | Family First Friday

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, where I teach you how to start a business or side hustle from the perspective of a father with two kids. Now, welcome to a new segment to the show, which I’m calling Family First Fridays in honor of my book, The Family First Entrepreneur. Now, today’s a very special episode because my book officially comes out next Tuesday, which is the culmination of three years of work. And I know that when Tuesday rolls around, it will feel somewhat anti-climatic.

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but I did want to record a candid episode to describe all the work that I put in and the thought process behind everything. Now let’s start with the why. Why did I want to write a book in the first place? Now, contrary to popular belief, writing a book wasn’t really going to make me any sort of life-changing money or any money at all, actually. It probably won’t even have that much effect on my business. I’m just guessing this. And if there is a payoff, I knew that I wasn’t going to see anything for at least three years.

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So writing a book obviously had zero to do with the money. Now, even though I did get a six figure advance for writing it, all the money, literally every penny of it went back into marketing the book. Now I had four main reasons for writing it. So one, for some reason, and I can’t even remember how this came about, I’ve always had writing a book on my bucket list and I never really considered myself a writer.

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but I wanted to officially publish something at least once in my life. And along those same lines, I’ve always dreamed of walking my kids through Barnes and Nobles, actually at the time of Borders, but Borders went out of business, and basically showing them my book on the shelf. Incidentally, this is something that we’re gonna do Tuesday at the Barnes and Nobles in my area. Super excited about that, by the way. The third reason was that for as long as I’ve been doing business,

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My mom has never really understood what I did for a living. And as a result of that, I don’t think she’s ever really fully appreciated any of the accomplishments that I’ve done in business. Let me just give you some examples here. When I started selling hankies, her first reaction was, really? Do people really wanna buy those? Can you really make a living selling them? Then when I started my blog over at MyWifeQuitHerJob, she was like,

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how can a blog possibly make money? Are people gonna pay you to read your writing? And I was like, no, ma, that’s not how it works. I make money through advertising, affiliate marketing, and core sales. And I remember my mom asked me, affiliate what? When I started my podcast, she was like, wait a second here. So people are gonna pay you to listen to you speak for an hour. And I was like, no, ma, the podcast makes money with advertising.

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It’s kind like radio. And then she was like, oh wait, you mean you own a radio station? And then I was like so fed up with it. I was like, no, not really. Nevermind. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. But when I told her that I was going to publish a book, she got all excited because for the very first time in my life, it was something that she could relate to because she buys books all the time. My mom is actually going to be here in the Bay Area for my very first book signing on May 18th at Books Inc in Palo Alto, California.

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By the way, if any of you guys listening are in the Bay Area, you are more than welcome to stop by. I’ll probably say a couple of words, sign some books, and just hang out. You’ll get to meet my brother, who’s a judge. You’ll get to meet my wife, my kids will probably be there, and my mom, who discovered a cure for a disease. Everyone in the family is going to be in attendance. For more information, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash party. And incidentally, that’s going to be the link where I’m going to update you on where I’m going to be for all of my book parties.

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all over the nation. Also, I just want to mention this, in the event that you see my book in a physical bookstore, please snap a photo of yourself with it, email it to me, and I’ll send you an official Family First Entrepreneur t-shirt. I designed the shirt, I think it looks pretty cool. Now I’ll have a form set up to automate everything, which I will place over at mywifequitterjob.com slash shirt. All right, so two links there, mywifequitterjob.com slash party for the book signings.

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In the event that you see my book in the wild take a photo of yourself and submit the form over at my wife quitter job comm slash shirt Now the last reason which was kind of like an afterthought was that everyone has been telling me that a book is a great lead gen for my other businesses and That all the work would just pay off with an increase in respect and credibility Now supposedly having a book can lead to more speaking engagements as well

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And that’s something I’m actually not that interested in. Although I mean, to be straight up, I think I could be bought, but it would probably require an inordinate amount of money for me to do the speaking circuit. Which leads me to the next questions that I’ve been getting asked. Why did I go traditionally published versus self-published? Now for me, self-publishing was never really on the table at all. In order to get your book into a Barnes and Nobles and have a chance of hitting a bestseller list,

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pretty much need to be traditionally published. Now, while self-publishing will probably easily make you more money, money was never my goal. It was pride. I mean, it was ego, just to be quite frank. If I was to publish a book, I wanted it to be published by one of the big five publishers and hit one of the national bestseller lists. And in a way, this entire process kind of brought back memories of getting into college. When I was young,

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I knew I wanted to go to Stanford to study electrical engineering. So I figured out exactly what I had to do to get in and I executed. Getting a book publishing deal was not any different and neither is hitting the best seller list. When I first started this book journey, I knew absolutely nothing about books. So the first thing that I did was hire someone who knew a lot about writing books and that person was Jeff Goins.

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Incidentally, Jeff is gonna be coming on the pod and will likely be the next episode actually during launch. We’ll see if we can get that together. Jeff is a bestselling author of many books and he’s probably one of the most talented writers that I know. And we randomly met in 2015 at FinCon. He was one of the keynote speakers and I enjoyed his talk so much that I bought his book, which he signed and I still have his book on my shelf today. And at the time, I had no idea that I’d ever work with him, let alone…

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ever even see him again. But things in life always seem to happen by accident. And I’m not sure if I’ve ever used this analogy on this podcast before, but I always think of life like playing the lottery. And the more people that I meet, and the more work that I do, and the harder I work, the more lottery tickets I get. And if you are able to amass enough lottery tickets, then good things are just bound to happen. And Jeff was just one of those lottery tickets that allowed me to hit the jackpot.

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Now let’s shift gears and talk about the process. The first step was figuring out what the book was going to be about. Now most people start a book from complete scratch, which ironically looking back, I think it’s actually an easier process. When I first talked to Jeff about this book project, I already had about 800 blog posts of like 3000 words each, an online course with over 400 videos spanning over a hundred hours of content, probably like 350 episodes of my podcast and a bunch of YouTube videos.

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That is a lot of content to go through. And the problem and the challenge was organizing that information because the topics I wrote about were just all over the place. I had posts on business in general, posts on e-commerce, posts on philosophy, posts on parenting, posts on investing, you name it. It was like all over the place. So the first piece of the puzzle was putting everything on the table. I literally just dumped all my content to Jeff and his team and they started going through it.

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And from there, we had a bunch of meetings to sort everything out and just kind of talk it through. Now, I didn’t want to just put out any business book. And in my opinion, a lot of these business books out there, they’re all dime a dozen. And I didn’t want to put out a book that had already been written before. so, you know, I focused on my story and why I was different. And then after just kind of talking it through, for multiple hours with Jeff, it finally dawned on the both of us.

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Most business books today are written by single guys who have no responsibilities in the world. Their priorities are to grow, grow, grow. And they have the time to hustle and work 80 hours a week because work is their number one priority. And I’ve interviewed over 450 entrepreneurs on the podcast who are just killing it. You guys have probably listened to some of these episodes. But what most of you guys don’t know is that many of the guests on my show aren’t really happy in their personal lives. They’re killing it in business, yes.

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but not necessarily with the rest of their lives. I literally just got done with an interview with a very successful entrepreneur who’s in the middle of a divorce. I once interviewed a billionaire whose biggest regret in life was losing his family because he worked too hard. He spent too many hours in the office. Now, was I the only one who didn’t want to work that hard? Was I the only one who wanted to just be a great dad and spend more time with my kids? So I asked around a little bit and it turns out there are a lot of people like me out there.

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We don’t want a business to become filthy rich. We want to start a business to be free and to make enough money to be free can be easily done without working 80 hours a week. In fact, right now I’m running two seven figure businesses in less than 20 hours per week. It can be done. So that became the theme of the book, Family First Entrepreneurship. Incidentally, in case you guys are listening to this and you don’t have a family, you don’t need to have a family in order to take advantage of the book. Essentially the book is about how to work less.

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and make more money. Now the first step in this process was putting together a book proposal. I actually have it right in front of me right now as I’m recording this and looking back and I’m just reading this right now, it was pretty hilarious. First of all, this proposal was 49 pages long and divided into the following sections. Highlights about the author, about the collaborator, marketing and publicity about the book, the target market in the audience.

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comparable titles, an annotated outline, and a sample chapter. Now creating this proposal literally took a year. I worked with Jeff on this. I didn’t even know what need to be in a proposal, but he walked me through the process. And then after the proposal was written, all 49 pages of it, I hired an agent to pitch the book to the big five publishers. I knew no one in this industry, so I needed an agent. And the advantage of having an agent

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is that they already have relationships with editors at the big five publishing firms. So what my agent did is he shopped around the proposal to his contacts and his friends. And I met with a bunch of different publishers via zoom to see if my book was a good fit. And then we just set a date for each publisher to submit a bid. And on that date, we picked the winner. Kind of like selling a house. It really is. Ultimately, I decided to go with Harper Collins, mainly because of the editor Hollis. Hollis had worked with Gary Vee

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and a ton of different authors in the past in the business space and we got along great. And if you guys are curious about the particulars of the actual book contract, I’m actually happy to share the exact terms in a separate episode. Let me run it by the publisher first before I do this, but I’m happy to share because again, I don’t care about the money, I don’t care about the contract, I’m an open book. But in a nutshell, I got a six figure advance and I get royalties of roughly 15 % per book sold.

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And hypothetically speaking, let’s just use some round numbers here. Let’s say I got a hundred K advance to make up that advance, assuming the book costs 30 bucks, which it does would require about 22,000 books sold before I make any more money than the advance. And that’s pretty tough to do by the way. And I’m to get into that in a sec. Kind of like the economics. Anyway, the, after the contract was signed, it was time to start writing. And with the help of Jeff,

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I was able to pump out the guts of the book within about nine months or so. Basically, we molded a lot of my existing blog posts and material into cohesive chapters, and then I recorded audio to fill in the blanks. And incidentally, that’s how I write a lot of my posts these days. I simply narrate into Google Docs and just edit the output, because I can speak a lot faster than I can write. Now, once I had my first draft, I sent it to the publisher for editing.

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And I had heard a lot of horror stories in the past from friends where their editor forced them to change or cut out large portions of their book. But that definitely was not the case with HarperCollins. There was one time where I made some Asian jokes. You guys know me. I rip on Asians all the time in the book, and they suggested that I remove it. Now, since I was busting on China in this particular case, I decided to remove it because I do try to go to the Canton Fair every other year.

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and I would hate to have my book blacklisted over there or somehow get stranded in China. Anyway, writing the book was probably the easiest part of the process, the most tedious, but I would say the most straightforward. Now the final step of the process is where I’m at now, marketing and the launch. Now let me just start by saying that selling and marketing a book has probably been one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do. It’s really hard to sell. The book is only 30 bucks.

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but it’s actually harder to sell than a $2,000 course or even a $1,000 ticket to an event like the seller summit. And here’s why in this day and age of video, social media, TikTok, short form video, people just don’t read books as often as they used to. I looked it up in 2022, there was only 288 million printed books sold total. Now you contrast that to YouTube where five

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billion videos are watched every single day. And don’t even get me started on TikTok and social media. The average TikTok user spends 1.5 hours per day on the platform. There simply isn’t as much of an attention span these days to read a book that can take you several hours to finish. People just want short-term dopamine hits these days, which makes me question the future of humanity. Anyway, here’s a stat that’s interesting. Only 48 % of adults finished one book.

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in the last year. Anyway, you guys all know that my goal is to hit the bestseller list, which is no easy task. You have to sell five to 6,000 books in a single week in order to hit it. So what did I do? I wanted to hit it, so I hired a book launch coach. Now I’ll have them on the podcast at some point, but navigating the crazy world of book publishing and bestseller lists, it’s a whole episode into itself. So first off,

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Those five to 6,000 books have to be hardcover and they have to be sold in the United States for it to count. E-books and audio books do not count, which is kind of backwards since so many people consume content electronically today. Like my wife, she only reads e-books. I have friends that only listen to audio books and to not count those seems kind of ridiculous to me. Anyway, my book launch coach told me flat out not to try to sell the book at all.

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Instead, sell the bonuses and then throw in the book and I took that advice to heart. So right off the bat, I offered three incredible bonuses worth $690. My three day workshop on how to get started with a print on demand business, a two day course on how to make money with content, whether it be blogging, YouTube or podcasting, and my six week family first challenge, which starts in June, where I will walk everyone in a private Facebook group on how to find their next side hustle.

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And it’s funny, when I first launched these bonuses, I might’ve sold 100 books total. And at that point, I knew that this was gonna be a major uphill battle to sell these books. So I’m gonna tell you my strategy right now. I had a four-prong attack to sell these books. So number one, I had the bonuses, which I just talked about. And in addition, I launched an expiring bonus every single week in the month of April to create a sense of urgency. This worked really well, by the way. I actually made most of my sales in April.

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people often just need a kick in the butt to get started. Two, I went on a bunch of podcasts. Now, fortunately, I’ve developed a lot of friends with popular podcasts over the years and I’ve had them on my show. So for this launch, I basically called in lot of favors and at one point, I was recording like four podcast episodes per day. I don’t recommend this by the way. It’s both draining and exhausting and it remains to be seen what effect it will have on book sales.

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Now regardless, going on a lot of podcasts at the same time is great for creating a buzz and immediate blitz, which hopefully we will move a lot of books on launch week. Three, I worked with a bunch of close friends to have them blast their email lists, announcing the book. And then four, this one was important, I worked with any company who has ever sponsored me in the past to buy books in bulk and have them distributed to their audience. So basically I would record videos.

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do sponsored ad reads on my pod or write blog posts in return for books. Then the company would give them away to their list and then pass me a set of physical addresses for the books and we’d have them shipped out to these people. Here’s the thing about hitting the bestseller list. Every book sold has to have a unique person or IP address associated with it and you can’t simply buy 6,000 books or else it’s not going to count towards the bestseller list. And that’s what made this really challenging.

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There are ways to buy yourself onto this list. So for example, an acquaintance of mine literally spent $1 million on ads to move books and this person eventually hit the New York Times bestseller list. But there was no way in hell, like I’m Asian, I’m frugal, there’s no way I was gonna spend more than my advance to promote my book. Anyway, here we are, exactly four days out and I’m pretty close to my goal. And every book counts though. So if you haven’t ordered the hardcover version yet,

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I would love your support. I must say though, that this whole book experience has been extremely rewarding. There have been people who I haven’t heard from for years reach out to congratulate me or to help me push the book. And it’s been extremely gratifying. And you know, in any case, I hope you guys enjoyed this mini peek into my book publishing journey. And I actually hope to meet all of you at one of my book parties. First one is in Palo Alto, California on May 18th.

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and the rest will be found at mywifequitterjob.com slash party. And in the event that you see my book in the wild, please take a picture of yourself holding the book and just send me the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash shirt. And I’ll send you the official family first entrepreneur t-shirt. Pre-order the book now over at thefamilyfirstentrepreneur.com. I appreciate you guys.