Behind the Book Cover (Newsletter)

Paul Peters’ second-grade teacher told him he’d never amount to anything and he believed her long enough to spend 14 years sitting on a message he knew he needed to write down. Thankfully, he eventually realized she didn’t know what she was talking about and he wrote his first book in three months. That was 2021.

Behind the Book Cover The $50,000 Client Worth More Than 1,000 Book Sales with Erin Haag 1× 0:00 Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -29:52 -29:52 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. The $50,000 Client Worth More Than 1,000 Book Sales with Erin Haag DOWNLOAD FROM ANY PLATFORM HERE! Erin Haag will tell you the hardest part of writing her book had nothing to do with writing. It was realizing she had a process at all.

DOWNLOAD FROM ANY PLATFORM HERE! I did something special for this episode: I’m releasing the 10-minute talk I gave recently at Genius Network, with their permission. It’s everything I’ve been saying on this podcast, just distilled into 10 minutes flat. The talk centers on what I call the LEG method—Leverage, Elevate and Grow—and it starts with a hard truth: hitting the bestseller list or landing a big media moment doesn’t actually change anything on its own.

I’ve had guests who sold thousands of books with no marketing budget and guests who spent a fortune and watched it vanish. Amy Chan has lived both versions, with two different books, a few years apart. She’s the author of Breakup Bootcamp: The Science of Rewiring Your Heart, a book that landed her in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and on Good Morning America.

Criminal defense attorneys aren’t typically known for writing philosophical Holocaust novels. Then again, Ron Chapman isn’t your typical criminal defense attorney. Published under the pen name R. William Chapman, Empyrean is a true departure from Ron’s two nonfiction books. Fight the Feds and Truth and Persuasion may have Ron build his authority but Empyrean, whichwill be arriving this fall, helped build his soul.

When you have millions of people out there who already consider you an expert, it’s hard to imagine that you’d also want to do an authority-building book. Yet Jake Claver, who’s already co-written two books, just released his first solo one, Everyone Gets to Win—and it’s a fable, not a business manual.

What do most people get wrong when it comes to publishing a book? That’s what I asked Sierra Melcher of Red Thread Books, a nonfiction publishing house where 59 of 77 titles have won awards—including two Nautilus Book Prizes. Sierra believes that the finished, printed book is a side quest.

David Homan has a background so sprawling that introducing him almost broke the show: composer with seven albums, former head of a Bernie Madoff-sponsored arts foundation and now the person who quietly runs what may be the largest private network of “connectors” on the planet—2,800 of them and counting. His book, Orchestrating Connection, co-written with UC Irvine professor Noah Askin, landed at #2 on the USA Today bestseller list for business books the week it launched.

A listener asked me a two-part question: as she gets ready to publish her book and launch her speaking career, what’s the simplest, most economical path to having a box of copies on hand, and what should she budget to get there?

Most traditionally published authors go through a moment (or 100 moments) when they realize that their publisher isn’t actually doing anything for them. Some just accept that while others ask themselves the age-old question: can I get my rights back? That’s what a listener asked me this week: when a publishing contract expires, is it better to renew or get the rights reverted? I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know the details of this person’s contract, but I’m naturally biased toward reversion.