Selling Millions of Books and The State of Publishing with Tucker Max

American author and public speaker – Tucker Max

Tucker is a best selling author three times over with titles like – Assholes Finish First. How did young kid that got drunk and told crazy stories make it? Not everyone can. We went over the details on what made him sucessful, and how he helped other authors like James Altucher crush their book marketing. If you want to publish anything – you need to listen in! (Be aware of the R rated language in this one!)

If you want more information on marketing your book – check out Tuckers new book Bookstapper!

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell by Tucker Max
• Assholes Finish First by Tucker Max
• Bookstrapper

Go to TuckerMax.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Hey everyone, I have Tucker Max on the show today and if you've never heard of him before I want to warn you - there is quite a bit of swearing in this episode. In fact, I can't even say the name of one of his books without swearing and so if you have children in the room, please don't listen to this! This would not be a good interview to listen to. Make sure you have earbuds in if the kids are around because there is quite a bit of swearing. I just wanted to warn you in advance - either listen to it now, if you have no children in the room, or wait until later. It's definitely an amazing interview but, again, children. Alright, have a good day - take care.

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today on the show I'm super excited to have Tucker Max. Tucker is a bestselling author three times over. A couple of his books are "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" and "Assholes Finish First," which I love the title of. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Tucker.

Tucker: Thank you for having me. Although I'm on your show we're in my podcast studio.

Jaime: I know, this is awesome. Thanks so much for inviting me over.

Tucker: That's the funny thing.

Jaime: It's great when you interview millionaires because they have their own kickass shit. I have some questions for you. It's funny, we were hanging out the other day and I was talking to one of your friends who said you were on his couch a long time ago.

Tucker: Yes, Doug.

Jaime: How many years ago was it that you were on his couch?

Tucker: For the few people out there watching the show who have read my books, if you read "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell," I think it's in that book, there's a story about me working at the Midland, Texas store I think it's called, I'm working in the west Texas oil fields and everyone in that story has nicknames except Doug asked me to use his real name so in the story one of my friends is named Doug and that's not his nickname, that's the dude Doug who you met. So that was 2003 or 2004 and I was sleeping on his sofa and working in west Texas oil fields.

Jaime: That must have been super cool.

Tucker: It was terrible.

Jaime: Tell me about how crappy it was.

Tucker: It was the worst - you're working in an oil field. So, okay, everyone is moving to North Dakota now because there are all these jobs and fracking and guys with no skills making $200,000 a year. Those are kind of like the wildcat or pumpjack guys and those are the dangerous but kind of cool jobs. I didn't have those because I was brand new, obviously, and I went out there and I was poor as shit but the impressive of me, of the skillset that I had, was sort of like a rich kid skillset so they made me do the lowest manual labor - like the Mexicans were making fun of me, like "You don't even know how do to do whatever? Pick up the pipe and move it over there!" Seriously, the Mexicans were like "You?re really shitty at this."

Jaime: Must have been good for your self-esteem - you?re really bad at moving anything.

Tucker: Seriously, I was doing the lowest physical labor on pumpjacks and oil derricks in west Texas.

Jaime: How much did you make?

Tucker: Doug was making a lot and he didn't have a budget to hire anyone full time so I lived with him and he fed me and he paid me $400 a week so it was like $10 an hour, or less really because you don't work eight hour days on oil fields so I was probably making $5-6 an hour.

Jaime: Impressive. I love talking about the "before" story because now we're in your amazing place - I wish I could show everyone the view. So tell us how you got from there, from being on your friend's couch, which was very nice of him, to one of your friends sleeping on your couch.

Tucker: Charlie is, Charlie Hoehn.

Jaime: I know, I love Charlie. He's not sleeping on your couch, though.

Tucker: Charlie will be on Eventual Millionaire too, probably, I'm sure.

Jaime: I'm sure I will interview him. So how do you go from that to where you are now?

Tucker: You get real drunk and you shit your pants and then you write stories about it that other people think are funny.

Jaime: Everybody's going to try that now and it's totally going to work for them too.

Tucker: You think it's funny but you bring up a good point - so many guys, especially young guys, will read my stuff and they're stupid 18-19 year olds, and they think "I get drunk a lot, I throw up on myself, I fall down, I bang chicks - why can't I be Tucker Max?"

Jaime: That is a very good question.

Tucker: So here's the thing - when I was younger I used to think that I was awesome, like the shit I did was awesome, and then as I got older I realized none of the shit I did was that awesome. Some of it was awesome but none of it was that unique. There are probably tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of other people who do shit that's just as awesome if not more awesome, right? The only difference between me and all of these other people who did all of this awesome stuff was that I had the ability or the willingness to develop the skill to write stories about what I did in a way that was entertaining and compelling to people that weren't there and didn?t know me. So young guys will think "Ah, I can do what he does so I can be him," but what they forget is that writing all of it down in an entertaining way is really fucking hard. It's really easy to get drunk and act like an idiot and make a fool of yourself and have funny things happen to you - but it's really hard to tell a story.

Jaime: Totally.

Tucker: I was the first person to really take the stuff that we all do in our 20s and write it down in a way that other people liked and enjoyed and then I put it up on a website and then a long, long story became a book and then a movie and I sold millions of books and here I am. I took something that everyone did and I made it into a consumable piece of entertainment that other people liked.

Jaime: So tell me, do you think that skill was innate or was it something that you learned?

Tucker: I definitely did not crawl out of my mommy's womb writing funny stories.

Jaime: You didn't?

Tucker: No, I definitely did not.

Jaime: But were you always a writer, like when you were younger?

Tucker: I went to the University of Chicago for undergrad for Econ, thinking "I'll get an offer from Goldman-Sachs right out of college." I could have been one of those awful douchey bankers. I interviewed with McKinsey and Bain and all those other consulting groups. I could have gone to work for one of them.

Jaime: Instead, getting drunk was way better.

Tucker: Right! And then, actually, I went to law school. So I did undergrad econ at the University of Chicago and then law school at Duke. Being a writer was the furthest thing from my mind - the furthest thing. I would make fun of writers, like "Who is this douchey pussy? I would never do this. Blah, blah, blah." I basically stumbled into writing. Do you want the whole story?

Jaime: Sure.

Tucker: So during law school - and this story is actually in my first book too, the funny part of the story anyway - between year two and year three of law school you intern at a law firm and then, generally speaking, you get an offer. They pay you a stupid amount of money over the summer and then you go and work there when you graduate. I interned at this place called Fenwick & West. It's basically impossible to get fired from one of these internships - they've kind of vacations. The law firms trick you into thinking it's really fun and easy and then you go and work there and you get paid $120,000 a year but they own you. There are 160 hours in a week and you spend 120 of them in the fucking office. It's the worst; it's the corporate salt mines - and nothing you do in a law firm matters to anyone, it's just rich people suing rich people and no one even really cares. Basically what happened was I got fired after three weeks. Yes.

Jaime: I'm very impressed.

Tucker: Long story short - I got the senior female partner in the firm to proposition me and then I turned her down and then I told everyone about it. I did literally the two worst things you could do.

Jaime: You didn't even get anything?

Tucker: If I had fucked her and told everyone I would have been fine; if I had turned her down and shut thefuck up I would have been fine. Instead, I did literally the worst combination.

Jaime: You?re a smart kid.

Tucker: That?s not the right word to describe me at that age.

Jaime: Thankfully it worked out for you.

Tucker: I made it work out. But I got fired and it was a very public thing. We had gone on a firm retreat and I got really drunk and I took the mic from the auctioneer and I did all of this funny stuff on stage and I wrote an e-mail about that to my friends who were all at different firms and then I got fired a week later not for that but for the female partner thing and then my friends, of course, were like "This is hilarious, I'm going to send Tucker's e-mail to everybody," so it became this huge thing and I basically got blackballed from the legal profession. I didn't just get fired.

Jaime: "You can never work here again."

Tucker: I probably could have gone and been a public defense or something like that but who wants to do that?

Jaime: So you were completely screwed?

Tucker: Oh, I fucked the dog shit out of myself, no doubt. In every way possible.

Jaime: Before this interview I'm going to have to say "This is explicit."

Tucker: Now it can't go on iTunes!

Jaime: Too late.

Tucker: Anyway, so from there I graduated from Duke and went to work for my father - he owns some restaurants in south Florida and I was sort of running this restaurant company and after a year he fired me from the family business.

Jaime: That takes a lot.

Tucker: I did a lot. I got fired from the family business by my father.

Jaime: You got fired a lot.

Tucker: Yes. So my dad fired me. That was un-fun.

Jaime: How do you come back from all of this? So you got fired the first time, that's really crappy.

Tucker: Publicly - in the most public way possible.

Jaime: Then your family business, which is a little bit ridiculous.

Tucker: With my name on the door - the business is called Max's Restaurant.

Jaime: You're very good at getting fired, so how do you feel after you get fired from these places? "Oh my gosh, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life." You tell me.

Tucker: It's kind of weird; it's hard to say. The precise, accurate answer is that, in the moment, I didn't give a shit, I'm like "Fuck these people, I'll go, whatever, right?" The more honest answer or the most emotionally intelligent answer that I'm only able to understand through years of experience is that all of that shit, my attitude, you know, "Fuck it, it doesn't matter, I'll do something anyway," was obviously just a major defense against some traumatic shit. Granted, I caused most of it - the world wasn't out to get me or anything, it brought 90+% on myself but my attitude in the moment, this was when I was 24 and 26, that the two things happened and I was very much in the worst kind of area, like I knew nothing but thought I knew everything so when that awful shit happens to you, you kind of have to have this ridiculous strategy, well you don't have to, but one strategy to deal with those things is to pretend like they didn't happen and just push through anyway and say "Fuck it, I'm going to succeed no matter what," or whatever. There are other ways to emotionally deal with that, but I think if you were more emotionally intelligent you wouldn't have been in the position where you got fired from those jobs anyway. So it's sort of like if you're going to go in, just fucking go all in. if you're going to fool yourself, just fucking fool yourself.

Jaime: You might as well.

Tucker: Exactly, don't half fool yourself. If you half fool yourself you get fired but you don't have the courage or the moxy to go forward. So it's either don't fool yourself at all and get your shit together or just fucking fool yourself.

Jaime: Apparently it worked out well for you.

Tucker: I made it work. After I got fired from those two things there was basically nowhere else for me to go - I trained for business and law and I got fired unrecoverably for both things. What does my resume look like? "Oh, yeah, you're that guy who got fired from that law firm." If this had happened now, it would be the lead article on Buzzfeed and Fark and Reddit. My e-mail is in my book so you can read it, it's ridiculous, but it was as public as can happen - every law firm had this e-mail. This was back when e-mail forwards were a thing. And then my dad fired me so I got fired as publicly possible from the legal business and then I got fired from the family business so who's hiring me at that point? No one; no one's hiring me. At that point it was pretty clear, I literally didn't know what to do. One of my buddies called me up, he's now an editor at Really Clear Politics actually, he's doing great, and he was like "Look, man, you're obviously not good at law, you're not good at business and I think really the common thread is you're not good at taking orders from authority or working in a corporate environment but these e-mails that you've been writing to us are the funniest shit that we've ever read," so the whole year I'd been writing my buddies e-mails about the stupid drunk shit I would do when I would go out drinking, because we would do all that stuff together in law school and then we were all in different cities after we graduated and I was bored out of my mind.

Jaime: They were successful and you weren't.

Tucker: Well even before I got fired I just hated the job and so my whole existence was banging awful, vapid girls that I hated and writing e-mails that made my friends laugh. So my buddy was like "this is really funny, you're really good at this - why don't you go and make this a job?" and I was like "Be a writer?" and he said "Well I don't really see you taking the writing path but put up a website." I only half took his advice - I sent query letters out to every publisher and every agent in the business, like a thousand of them, with all of my stories, and of course no one wanted to publish it - zero interest, and when I say zero I mean zero. So I had nowhere else to go - I had to put my stories up on the internet, and remember, this is 2001 or 2002 so Geocities is about to be bought by Yahoo! This is way before Myspace, before Facebook, before Twitter. I had to learn how to program a site in HTML, which is not hard.

Jaime: I used to work for an internet service provider and it was awful.

Tucker: There you go. It's funny when I think about it - my original site looked pretty much like what Tumblr looks like now. It was just text, nothing else.

Jaime: See? You were way ahead.

Tucker: If only. So I put up my stories and then sent an e-mail to my friends and bit by bit by bit I got a little bit more traffic, a little bit more, and this is still 2002 - most people were not on the internet in 2002. This MTV producer found my site because she was friends with someone who had read the stories, thought they were funny, they did this documentary about internet dating and I was one of the guys in it and the site blew up from there. I dated Miss Vermont when I was living in Florida, the ex-Miss Vermont, and I wrote about her because she was a public figure. I used her name and she sued me. I ended up winning the case, it was a big first amendment case, it was actually a really big deal, it was on the front of the New York Times and everything. I won the case but it was kind of like Barbra Streisand syndrome - you try to shut it down and everyone hears about it, so it blew up from there.

Jaime: That?s inane. Give us the timeframe and traffic numbers on it, though.

Tucker: I was getting 100 visitors per day, probably, before MTV and then MTV crashed my server over and over but once it got stabilized it was anything from 50-100,000 a day - and this is 2002, remember.

Jaime: That's insane.

Tucker: And after Miss Vermont sued me I was peaking at anything from 250-300,000 readers a day. It obviously didn't stay there, it went down, but from there I had book offers. It was a long, winding road from there, too.

Jaime: Were you making money from it at that point, though? So you were writing stories, were you like "Whoo hoo! I'm popular? but I'm still broke."

Tucker: I was in the worst situation - I was like what Vine stars are now or something. Except not even because there?s at least a path of monetization for them. in 2002 the idea that you would pay anyone anything on the internet that wasn?t related to porn was a joke.

Jaime: I remember it well.

Tucker: I'm not even sure if PayPal existed but it was still relatively new, people didn't think it was going to stick around, this was right when College Humor started, there were very few monetization models. It wasn't that I wasn't interested in monetization it's just that I was more interested in writing and stuff. It's not that I didn't care about making money but I had a very different conception of Hollywood and the way it actually is, but the Hollywood and book business is a long, different story. I think I put ads on at the end of 2003 or 2004 and I made about $2,000 the first month and I was pretty excited.

Jaime: What were you doing for money before that? While it was really popular were you still broke?

Tucker: I was broke as a joke. In 2003, 2004, the site is huge but I'm making no money. The real truth is that I was, for the most part, not making any money. I did put a collection of my stories on, I think it was iUniverse or Lulu, one of those self-publishing websites, one of them existed then and I put a collection of my stories together into a self-published book. You couldn't get it on Amazon, it was only on iUniverse and no one bought shit on the internet then so I made maybe $500 a month from that and that barely covered my rent. There were other odd jobs every now and then, like I would host speed dating stuff in Chicago and mostly the way that I ate, especially good quality protein, was I would meet five different girls at once, maybe not at the exact same moment, but at the same time and maybe three or four of them were below my standards but I would keep them around because they brought food over all the time or I would go over to their place to eat or I would make them take me out. I was good with women before but I got to be great with women when I realized that if I wanted to drink tonight I had to figure out a way to get a girl to buy me a beer. It was sink or swim, motherfucker.

Jaime: Smart.

Tucker: If I wanted to eat, it was "How can I get this girl to bring my ribs?"

Jaime: A problem solver. That's awesome. I love your story, I think it's ridiculous but I love it, which I'm sure you've heard before.

Tucker: It is ridiculous.

Jaime: You're a ridiculous expert in the book industry now. I know you fell into this crazy space but tell me about that, because a lot of people are hot on book marketing now, they're hot on books, because it's so easy to do now, and you do this all of the time.

Tucker: I actually just finished the definitive guide to book marketing with Ryan Holiday, it's going to come out any week now and we actually have a rough draft so I'd be happy to show you a copy. Most of the information out there on book marketing is really shitty - I don't necessary mean the digital marketer, direct sales people, I mean a real book. Ryan and I have had a book marketing agency for three years and we've done all of Tim Ferriss's books, Robert Green's books, I'm not sure if I can talk about his book but there are a bunch of people we've worked with who are big authors and we've had a lot of smaller people come to us, saying "I can't afford $20,000 for a launch, I might be able to afford $1,000," so I'm like "What do you want? We can talk on the phone for an hour," but that?s not enough so they ask "What book can I read?" and there isn't one, they're terrible. They're not just not very good, they're criminally bad in advice. Most of it, if it's not totally worthless, it's actually counterproductive.

Jaime: Good to know now, when I launched my book two months ago. Thanks!

Tucker: Well you should have come to me.

Jaime: I should have!

Tucker: So we did this and we thought it would take a week but it's taken us four months because we were like "What about this?" and "We've got to put this, we've got to put this in," and we ended up writing a definitive tome. It's 50,000 words, we've got three massive case studies, like we did James Altucher's "Choose Yourself".

Jaime: Did you? That's amazing.

Tucker: It was one of the very first self-published bestsellers. We did that one, we did Robert Green's "Mastery" which was a number one bestseller and then Ryan's book, "Trust Me, I'm Lying". The case studies are really fucking good. So that's the marketing stuff and I also have my own publishing company. I Kind of cracked the publishing code for big authors, so you basically triple your royalties. I tripled my royalties on my third book - the same number of sales but I made way more money.

Jaime: Why? Negotiating contracts or what?

Tucker: It's the difference between being an author and a publisher. If you think about what do Simon & Schuster actually do - they will give you an advance, I don't need an advance; they design the cover, they're terrible, their in-house designers are terrible; they have editors who are good, but you can always hire great freelance editors. Some of them are good, like my editor at Simon was great, but there are great editors out there who you can pay. What else? Marketing, they're terrible. Publishers now will even say "We're not going to do any marketing. We don't know how to do marketing."

Jaime: Yeah, they did some PR for my book and I got onto their blog and I got onto Yahoo!'s homepage twice.

Tucker: Exactly. You're ten times the marketer than anyone in any publishing house. You don't even know book marketing, you just know enough about marketing, period. Book marketing is just a division of marketing, the principles are not fundamentally different. All of that stuff I can subcontract out or do myself so what value do the publishers really bring? Here's what they bring - they can print books, they can put them in warehouses, they can get them on book store shelves. So basically, really all they have are relationships with sales teams at book stores, physical book stores, and that's it. I can do Amazon myself, I can cut my own deal with printers, I can warehouse the book myself - there are companies that do that, drop shipping and all that shit - so all they do is have relationships with book sellers and most book sellers, in fact none of them, will not talk to authors. So I went to S&S and I said "Alright, I'm not an author anymore". I got a $2 million advance on my third book and they offered me a little bit less and I said "That's not good enough. I'm going to cut a deal with you." Harvard University Press obviously don't have any trucks or warehouses, they don't have sales staff at B&N, they're just a university press, so who does a lot of stuff? Simon & Schuster does. Simon & Schuster has a whole distribution arm - they distributed a ton of books for publishing companies that are not them, right? So I went to them and I said "I'm now Tucker Max Publishing Inc. I now want to cut a publishing deal with you," so I went from making 15% of hardcover price to making 89% on net receipts, which is what you get from the book store, so they take an 11% distribution fee and that's it, I make everything else.

Jaime: But you were doing the marketing and half of the other stuff anyway.

Tucker: Exactly, so I didn't have to give up 85%.

Jaime: And that's just what it was like before - that's what the deals normally are with publishers in general?

Tucker: Simon & Schuster is a publisher but they're also distribution. I was the first author to do this, the first mainstream author. It was one of those things where I just broke down what they do and what do I absolutely need them for, and the one link in the chain I couldn't get around was Barnes & Nobile. Everything else, I could get around them. So I was like "Okay, what do you charge?" It was ridiculous - I'll tell you how the meeting went down. I did my second book with Simon & Schuster and my editor for my second book was in the room with his boss who runs the whole division, gallery books, and she's one of the big people at Simon & Schuster but it's all creative. I told them what was going to happen, they got up, left the room, went to talk to some senior VP and they came back in, told us to leave and the CFO and senior VP of distribution and one other senior C-level exec came in to talk to me. They couldn't make the deal - it was so far above their pay grade. But they said "Are you guys cool if we sit in on this meeting?" and we said "Yeah, why?" and they said "We have never seen Simon & Schuster talk to another publisher and do distribution level negotiations. We would like to see this." I was like "Okay," so I let them sit in and the CFO and everyone came in and I just basically told them what I was going to do and they were like "Okay."

Jaime: Just like that - "Okay!"

Tucker: It was either do that or lose me to another publisher. somebody offered me a $2 million advance so it was either you guys lose me, match what the other publisher is going to pay, which you're not going to match, or I'll put all the money out and you just act as distributor and it's a brand new model and if I start a company and tell other authors what to do I'll be happy to use you guys for all of these services and they were like "Where do we sign?"

Jaime: You have all of the leverage in that.

Tucker: Because here's the thing - you couldn't walk in there and do that. The only reason is, if your book takes off and you sell a million copies you can walk in and do that. What's funny is I don't even need Simon & Schuster, I only need them because Barnes & Noble won't talk to me. They literally won't talk to me - they'll only talk to major publishing companies.

Jaime: Do you think that will change in the future?

Tucker: It wouldn't shock me if they went out of business and Amazon bought. Amazon is reticent to buy brick and mortar stores but now they've had to capitulate on that I think maybe they might go into retail. I don't know business or anything but that's just my guess. If they do, I think the whole thing will fundamentally change.

Jaime: Then you don't need your deal anymore!

Tucker: I don't think Barnes & Noble are ever going to talk to me. They don't have to - they see themselves as fancy book people and fancy book people don't talk to authors. It's so stupid. I could fill this podcast for hours with stories about the book business and you wouldn't believe that they're in business to make money because they don't think they are. It's crazy.

Jaime: Yes, it's ridiculous. Just from the little pieces that I know so far, my mind is blown that they?re still in business.

Tucker: Because they had no competitors but now that they do have competitors you notice them getting squashed all over the place. Crushed.

Jaime: Totally. What do you think they should do?

Tucker: There's nothing they can do.

Jaime: They're just screwed?

Tucker: What should a dinosaur do after the meteor hits? Just lay down and die - because dinosaurs can't turn into mammals, they're dinosaurs. There's nothing they can do. The market is going to totally evolve. It takes fundamentally different types of DNA and different thought processes and decision processes because the technological changes have fundamentally upended all of the assumptions and old book publishing houses are built on totally different assumptions and they just can't change. The people who can build 21st century publishing companies are people like me and they're not hiring me. People like me and you don't work at Simon & Schuster.

Jaime: So tell me this - somebody who's new, because I went back and forth as to whether I was going to go published or self-published for a very long period of time, I talked to amazing people and I ended up going published.

Tucker: You didn't talk to me!

Jaime: I know.

Tucker: You should have.

Jaime: I already signed the deal before I met you. I talked to really great people that I interviewed, bestselling authors, and they suggested the credibility factor and to get into Barnes & Noble and that's the reason why I did it, because I want to do more speaking, so it made sense at the time.

Tucker: Those are only two reasons.

Jaime: Those were high on my priority list back then.

Tucker: And you wanted to make the bestseller list. It makes it much easier. It's not required but it makes it much easier.

Jaime: I want to talk about that in just a second but for somebody who's just starting, like they've always had a book and really wanted to do it, what do you suggest? Especially if they have a business and it's been going for a while and they've got something that's incredible, what do they do?

Tucker: It's funny that you should mention that. I've had a ton of people ask me this question and it's a really good question. We talk about this a little bit in the marketing book, we don't go too deep into it, but here's the basic answer - I didn't pivot my publishing company but I have a division in my publishing company now that handles people who want to solve this exact problem because so many people ask this question and it's such a big problem and nobody's really solving it the right way. Because you're totally right - a book is a fantastic lead generator and it has authority and all of these sorts of things. I think you go self-publishing unless you have a big enough platform that you can leverage book store placement into high sales and possibly placement on the bestseller list. But the reality is that, first off, it's not easy to get a book deal - in fact it's harder and harder every day because the book companies are betting more and more money on the few things that sell. It's the same thing with the movie business - they're closing ranks on the fat tail and leaving the long tail behind. So every year, every month, it gets exponentially harder to get a book deal and most people, I think, don't write stuff that's going to sell 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 copies. They don't. It doesn't? mean you shouldn't write a book and it doesn't mean that a book can't do fantastically for you, it just means that they're not going after a major publishing deal for business reasons, they're going after it for ego reasons. So, okay, if you want to do it for ego reasons, that's fine, just recognize that and say "It matters to me that I get chosen by people." I think it's total bullshit, in fact I know it's total bullshit, but what I think doesn't matter to someone who that matters to. Like a lot of guys who have a lot of money think that they have to buy a Ferrari. I think that's really lame.

Jaime: What's your car?

Tucker: I just have a normal BMW 6 series, but it's affordable, it's an $80,000 car, it's not that big of deal, as a percentage of income. But if you have a big platform,

Jaime: What's big?

Tucker: If you've got Dave Asprey or someone - I've been talking to him and trying to help him understand what he wants to do. He could have gone either route: he could get a big deal from publishers because he's got a big platform - he's got, whatever, 200,000 people on his e-mail list, he's got this huge podcast that does, whatever, 100,000 downloads an episode - for the vast majority of people, it's not worth the time and effort to go after a traditional publishing deal. It's just not worth it, because it's so hard to get, it doesn't get you any more sales, in fact it restricts a lot of what you can do, the book won't come out for 18 months - there are a lot of downsides and there are very few upsides. So if you have a big platform you can leverage that will get you on the bestseller list or, for ego reasons, it really matters, those are the reasons to do it. for most people I think, if you're in some business where you think that having a book will help you, what you should really do is, unless you?re a good writer, and most people are not good writers - most people know their business really well but they don't know how to write about it, so to tie it right back into what we started talking about, a lot of people can get drunk and start acting like idiots, but how many of those guys can write those stories down? There's a big difference between those two things. So I actually started a division of Lioncrest, and we haven't even named it yet, I don't even know what we're going to call it, but I've had so many people coming to me, asking me for help - you've a marketing person, you can help me think of a name but we call it Booker's Business Card internally, I don't know if that's a good name, but the point is I'll take someone like you and we'll get on the phone and we'll talk about "What's your business? What do you want to write a book about?" and you'll say "I'm in popup retail. I want to write a book about popup retail stores can help you move a bunch of products, when it makes sense and when it doesn't make sense." That would be a great book because if you're in that space, that information is hard to come by. So I'll interview you - well, I won't do it, one of my assistants will, but they're really good with interviewing, I've taught them how to talk people through it - and we'll come up with the outline, what points you want to make, etc. I'll help them with the outline, we'll get a really good outline, and we'll say there are, say, three main sections of the book and then we'll do three one-hour calls and each call will be my editor asking the person a bunch of questions - "How dos that work? Why do you do it that way? How does that work?" It's like an interview but the interview is designed to get all of the information that they know about popup retail out of them. then we take that, transcribe those tapes, because talking and text are very different, so we turn it into written text and even after transcription we have to change the sentences, cut out all of the "Uhs" and "Ahs" and all of that bullshit. There are a couple of editors who I work with who are really good at this and they take it and turn it into really great, clean prose. From there, we do the whole book production - we do the cover, we do interior layout and then, if they want, other things - if they want a book launch plan, the marketing for their book launch, if they want a landing page, all of the basic marketing things we can do with a book. Some of the people that I do this for are great marketers and they do this on their own but some people are in retail and they don't know what they want to so they say "Here's X number of dollars. I want a perfect plug-and-play book with all of the bells and whistles," and we'll put it together. I haven't thought of a good name for that package, though.

Jaime: Maybe we should make everybody come up with names.

Tucker: I tell you what - my e-mail address is tuckermax@gmail.com. That's my real e-mail address, it's been on the website forever. If you come up with a good name for that package I'll basically give you one of those packages at cost.

Jaime: Wait - I want to come up with a name!

Tucker: Not for free, but at my cost, so essentially for free.

Jaime: I love this.

Tucker: People can do it on their own too, by the way. You don't need me to do this - every step of that is doable but most people want someone who has expertise to guide them through it.

Jaime: Well people should be busy working on their business. I know how much of a distraction a book is when you're trying to go through everything else, which I didn't realize beforehand even though I was told. I love that you did James Altucher's and all of those other really awesome books. Give us a couple of kickass marketing tips for marketing your book.

Tucker: The first thing I always have to say for marketing books is that the best way to market a book is to write a great book. I can't say that enough.

Jaime: Clichw. No, I'm kidding.

Tucker: It's clichw but it's true. People come to me with these dog shit books and say "Hey, turn this into a bestseller!" There's not enough money in the world to do that. The world is fundamentally changing, people are much smarter now, it's much harder to sell dog shit to people now, you've got to do good stuff.

Jaime: Darn! I'm really happy that the world is changing, thank you very much.

Tucker: That's the most important thing. Most people Imagine marketing as "Let's throw a parade and get as much attention as possible!" For 99% of people, that's the wrong strategy. You need to figure out what in your book matters to other people. What matters? What does someone else care about? Who are those people and where are they? Go to those places and show them or tell them exactly what it is that you're telling them, that they want to hear, and they'll flock to it. So take popup retail, for example - if you take that book, I don't want to hear about it. I don't give a fuck about popup retail. There's nothing you could tell me about popup retail that would get me to read a fucking book about popup retail. But there are 5,000 people, let's say, or even 20,000 people in America where that's their job. It's very ancillary, but a book on how to run a popup retail store would be very valuable to those people so you can charge like $30 for that book or even just charge $9.99. The woman who's doing this book has a popup retail consulting business so the book is kind of the lead generator for the consulting business. It's a great book if you care about popup retail, don't get me wrong. She wanted to buy this huge package from us and I was like "You can't spend $20,000 on this. Seriously. I'll take your money but it's a waste." Part of it was "Who cares about this? Tell me who your reader is? The information that's in this - who is this valuable to?- She outlined five basic types of people and I was like "Okay, where are these people getting their information?" and she was like "They read the New York Times," and I'm like "Everyone reads the New York Times. The news isn't going to cover you. What trade publications or blogs or whatever?" and once she understood it that way, then she started thinking about the things that she reads and that people in her business read and we got her covered on about ten blogs that I've never heard of them. none of them have any circulation or over 10,000 hits a month - one of them might have a little bit more - but she sold thousands of books - not tens of thousands, but she sold about 5,000 books in the first couple of months.

Jaime: That's really impressive for any author.

Tucker: For a tiny niche - and she has so many clients now it's almost too good, she can't service all of her clients. I didn't charge her for this, which kind of pisses me off.

Jaime: She was throwing money at you and everything.

Tucker: It was one phone call. She's super smart and entrepreneurial so once I'd told her what to do, once she understand it, she was just like a tiger and ran off with it. she's probably only going to sell 1,000 books a year but it's going to be 1,000 people who really want to know about popup retail and that's her client base so if she gets 50 or 100 of those people as clients a year, she charges a lot of money, like popup retail consulting, who knew? It's a big business and she's the alpha female and now it's nuts for her because she didn't waste any time trying to get business. I know it's sexy to go after the big names, but for 90-95% of authors it's far more effective to go after smaller, targeted niches that hit the audience that you're writing for.

Jaime: Perfect. I mean it's marketing. No offence, but that's exactly what it seems like it should be - you're targeting the exact right person.

Tucker: Like I told you, book marketing is just a subset of marketing. We know a lot of the same people, people who are great marketers that have sold a lot of shit really well and then, all of a sudden, it gets to book marketing and they lose their mind and start doing a lot of crazy shit.

Jaime: Because they've wanted it since they were little and they want it to be huge.

Tucker: Because a book occupies this weird cultural place - it's this very high status symbol, it's seen as very high brow and all of these things - and it's not that that's not true but, for the vast majority of authors, that's not the category that they fit in. it's like trying to market the way Apple does without Apple's money.

Jaime: But we all want to be like Tucker Max and sell millions of books and all of that fun stuff.

Tucker: Here's the thing - I don't sell anything off the back of any of my books. My books are what you buy. I'm selling entertainment. Even though my books are non-fiction they fall really in the fiction category in terms of marketing. Almost everything that I teach in book marketing doesn't really apply to my books, or very little. There are a few things in the margins but I can't do basic content marketing with my stuff.

Jaime: An info product on how to get girls!

Tucker: Exactly. There are no backend sales from my books - my book is the product. I think for most people in your audience, the book is a lead generator for their product, which requires a totally different way of thinking about it.

Jaime: Which can create more revenue on the backend, you don't have to sell millions in a book store, thankfully. I'm really glad we don't have to sell millions of books; it's really hard to sell millions of books.

Tucker: It's so hard.

Jaime: You wouldn't know!

Tucker: It's so hard.

Jaime: Awesome. I could talk to you for a very long time but I have to wrap up. So the last question, that I didn't give you a heads up on, is what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million? You see, I should have given you a heads up.

Tucker: The problem with that question is I don't know what they're doing to get there.

Jaime: Okay, let's talk about the one book - what's one action that they can take this week?

Tucker: Let's say you just have some business and you want to use a book to market that business. It won't work for everybody but let's say for 50-80% of businesses a book can make a lot of sense. I think what you should do this week is figure out 'Do I have the money to hire somebody to do this for me?" and "If I do, how much will that cost?" If you organize all of the freelancers yourself, you can do it for as cheap as around $5,000, probably, if you really know what you're doing, if you know how to negotiate them down and how to put everything together. I'm talking about the strategy of book-as-business-card, where you're not doing anything. I've seen people do it for less but it's usually terrible, terrible shit. Maybe if you're really good at the internet and really good with freelancers you could get it done for $2,000. So for between $2,000 and $5,000 you can do it yourself. If you want to hire really good professionals, because professionalism is one of the things that differentiates books - how good is the cover? How good is the inside? How well is it written? How clearly are the ideas expressed? What does the Amazon page look like? What does the landing page look like? All of these things make a big difference so if you're going to hire good professionals yourself you're looking at anything from $15,000 to $30,000. If someone were to come to me and say "I have this great idea. I want a book, I want all of the bells and whistles and I don't want to think about anything - I want you to do everything. I want the maximum package for everything," then it's going to be anything from $30,000 to $70,000. When you say "maximum" you can go a little bit crazy with it; it can get a little bit ridiculous.

Jaime: But that's huge. I think that's the one thing that's really important. Amazon is littered with books that aren't very good and it's harder and harder to stand out from it all.

Tucker: You stand out with quality.

Jaime: Exactly.

Tucker: I tell you what - let's go for a meta lesson, and this ties in with what I just said. What can you do to get closer to $1 million? Start understanding what the differentiators in your business, in your field, are. For the most part, in almost every field I look at, the differentiators I see are quality of execution, professionalism of execution and a quality of product. There are very few fields where being the first one in is the way to win. If you can find one of those fields, that's great, but those are hard to find now. You're a lot better off deciding "Okay, I'm going to pick this field and I'm going to crush this fucking field. I'm going to have the best book, I'm going to have the best website, I'm going to have the best sales process, I'm going to have the best product. I'm going to be amazing at every step," because that's something you control, whereas if you're lucky enough to find a field that's empty or almost empty, that's luck and you don't control luck. You do control how good your shit is.

Jaime: Just before this we were talking about how you are launching a podcast. You were talking about how amazing and kickass your podcast is and I said "How long has your podcast been out?" and you said it's not even out yet!

Tucker: We're 20 episodes ahead of time. I've dicked around for months editing, shooting - I don't want to jump in with a half-assed piece of shit, I want to do something. The first episode will still be nowhere near as good as episode 50 but I at least what espied one to look professional, like someone who knows what they're doing, not like something shot on a handycam in the basement.

Jaime: By the time this comes out hopefully your podcast will be out. Everybody should go and download it as fast as possible.

Tucker: Probably not.

Jaime: Then wait. Sit waiting, hoping. He's just going to dick around for a while longer.

Tucker: Procrastination is a different problem.

Jaime: I know, but we have to wrap up! Where can we find out more about you?

Tucker: About what?

Jaime: About your book marketing stuff, your website. Tell us about anything you want to promote - your e-mail list, anything.

Tucker: Go to BookStrapper.com. I got fed up with all of the terrible information out there about book publishing, book marketing, book writing - everything about books and surrounding books - so the book marketing book that Ryan Holiday, Nils Parker and I wrote together is a series called Book Strapper, which is the idea that all authors now have to do things by themselves so you have to bootstrap. So it's a Book Strapper's guide to marketing your book. So just go to BookStrapper.com, it will be up there and all of the other guides will be up there eventually too. That's the place to start.

Jaime: Go there and check it out. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, or having me come here. I really appreciate it.

Tucker: My pleasure.

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Tags: Amazon Book Writing, Assholes Finish First, book marketing, Book Publication, content, millionaire interview, State of Publishing, Tucker Max, Value

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

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