The Transcript

Should Online Entrepreneurs Write a Book?

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You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. For more information go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce. That’s Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Sean Jackson: Welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur, everyone. I am your host, Sean Jackson. I’m joined, as always, by the voracious Jessica Frick. Jessica, how the Frick are you?

Jessica Frick: I am voracious. How the Jackson are you, Sean?

Sean Jackson: I am very well. Voracious, by the way, both means appetite — like you’re super hungry — and also it means to be eager in how you approach an activity. I am referencing the latter, not the former.

Jessica Frick: Well I’m eager to do this show with you. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Sean Jackson: Oh, I know. This will be a fun show. We left the last show with our question of the week, which is: Is it worth it for an online entrepreneur to actually write a book, especially nowadays? You say …

Jessica Frick: Not really.

Sean Jackson: Okay, tell me why.

Jessica Frick: I think that it certainly could be worth your while, but I feel like there’s so much pressure on digital entrepreneurs to put a book out there, and it doesn’t have to be there. There are so many other ways you can go about it. I think that in a lot of ways, books are not as relevant as they once were. There are other opportunities to get the attention and respect. You don’t need to put all the effort into a one-time content release.

Sean Jackson: Okay, I understand the point. Basically, of all the things that you can do, a book may not be worth your time, especially given the fact that some of the production of content can lead to more tangible results more quickly than all the effort that’s required for your typical book.

Jessica Frick: Yeah, what about you? What do you think, Sean?

Sean Jackson: I think you’re completely wrong. No, to argue the other side of that — I will say you are correct in the assumption that it is a lot of effort, but most things online are a lot of effort. Either they take a lot of time to get really good at it or take time to put together. They both have a certain degree of effort. Though typically a book — be it a digital book or a printed book. In this case, let’s say it’s a printed book. Yeah, it’s a pain. All of my friends who are authors will say that it is like birthing a child — even though none of them are women, so I don’t know what they are referring to. But I like the analogy.

I do think it is huge. But here’s why it may be worth it: you can use your book to establish instant credibility and authority in the space that you write about. Seriously. It’s not like anybody’s going to read the stupid thing. You’re going to be able to sit there and say, “For this subject matter, I’m the expert because I literally wrote the book on it.”

I’ll give you an example. Rob Garner — good friend of mine who wrote the book Search and Social. It was a laborious process. His research intern actually happened to be my intern. We were sharing the same intern at the time. I know how much effort went into that book. But you know what? When Rob walks into a room now, he is the definitive authority on search and social. Why? Because that was the name of his book. Maybe it’s worth it if you’re in a space that you need that type authority. What do you say to that?

Jessica Frick: I say that your company, Rainmaker Digital, actually sold courses on how to build authority, and they didn’t require writing a book.

Sean Jackson: Okay, well, when you put it that way. That’s probably good, because Brian Clark, our CEO, has never actually written a book even though he has been hounded to do so. You may have a point there, Jess.

Jessica Frick: I am just saying, Sean. There are a lot of ways to gain authority that don’t require you write this set-in-stone piece of content. I think there are a lot of really gifted authors. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t be where I am in my career if it wasn’t for books. Somebody’s got to write them. To those of you who are out there doing that soulless task, thank you.

Sean Jackson: Speaking of today’s show, we have a very special guest, don’t we, Jess? He is a New York Times bestseller, right, Jess? What else is he? He’s a …

Jessica Frick: He is a consultant. He is a speaker. He is an entrepreneur. He has written a number of books, and I cannot wait to hear what he thinks about this.

Sean Jackson: On our show today we have the most delightful Chris Brogan, who started in his book career with Trust Agents, a New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal — and pretty much every other bestseller list out there he was on. He’s going to be joining us to talk to Jessica and I about why you should or should not write a book, what book publishing is really like, and the essential things you need to know if you’re going to go down that path. Stay tuned, and after this break we’ll have Chris Brogan on the show.

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Welcome back from the break, everyone. Jessica, will you please introduce the infamous Chris Brogan?

Jessica Frick: Today we have an American author, journalist, marketing consultant, and speaker who has spoken for many of our events. He is an all-around amazing guy. We have Chris Brogan.

Sean Jackson: Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Brogan: Hey, I am so grateful to be here and thrilled to talk to both of you beautiful people once again.

Jessica Frick: We are so happy to have you, Chris. As I mentioned before we started talking, Sean and I have been having a discussion about whether you need to write a book. My question for you is: Do digital entrepreneurs really need to write a book, for real?

Chris Brogan: No. I think the digital entrepreneur …

Sean Jackson: Well, that takes care of it. We’re done.

Chris Brogan: Okay, so let’s get to the next topic, motorcycles. Who thinks they’re neat? Who’s never had one? Me. The thing about a book … First off, I always wanted to be an author. I was five years old and I was like, “I am so going to be an author.” I figured I’d just write comic books for my life, and that didn’t quite work out. But then I started blogging.

Why You Should, or Should Not, Publish a Book

Chris Brogan: The reason I started blogging way back in 1998 was because I was submitting fiction stories to magazines and stuff like that — not paying any attention to what they really wanted, like, “Well, clearly you should publish this. I wrote it.” They weren’t taking them, which was weird, seeing as the stories had nothing to do with the magazines that I was trying to send them to.

I finally got fed up and I said, “I’ll make my own website and do my own damn thing.” Then I got semi-famous in blogging. Somewhere way back in ’08, when I’m at the pinnacle of my hype of, “Oh my gosh, Chris Brogan’s an amazing blogger,” I’m at a conference and I am asked if I want to write a book. I was really flippant. I was like, “Why would I bother doing that? That seems like a lot of work.” It was my whole life’s dream to have been a published author, and the first time I get the deal I’m like, “I don’t think I want to do this.”

To shorten the story up a lot, I take the deal, I call my friend Julien Smith and I say, “Hey, you want to write a book with me?” He was like, “Okay.” Literally that’s how the call went. So we wrote a book together. By weird circumstance it became a New York Times bestseller as well as a Wall Street Journal bestseller, USA Today, Inc. — all these other places. I was like, “Oh, I’m pretty good at this.”

Julien and I wrote another book and it didn’t do as well. Then I’ve written seven more books since. Now it’s a disease. But the first-ever book did incredible things for my career. Did I need it to have a career? No, not at all. To answer your question as longly as I could — that’s a Trump word — the answer is you sure don’t need a book to have a career but it doesn’t hurt.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, let’s talk about that. I’ve had several friends of ours who have written books, right? Rob Garner, Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, etc. All of them, they talk about the challenges of it, etc., but at the end of the day … This is what I call it: it’s the $15 business card. It is the thing that, when you walk into any room, you put that book down and you suddenly become the expert, the authority, the person who knows end-all be-all about whatever subject you just wrote about. Would you concur with that? Is that what helped in your career, giving you enhanced authority, or did it just open up brand new avenues of people who had no idea who Chris Brogan was to begin with?

Chris Brogan: That’s what I thought at first. I thought, “Well, clearly I must know something, I’ve got a book.” Some people ride that wave a lot more than other people. Some people really stick to the credentials of having published a book as if that’s why they have a voice in the fight or whatever. Now, I’ll tell you that with Trust Agents, it got into the hands of lots of people who didn’t know who I was. I’ve heard, absolutely, face-to-face with CEOs of very large companies — I don’t want to name names because I don’t want to malign people, but they would say things to me like, “Well, you must be pretty smart because this is a New York Times bestseller.”

Sean Jackson: Right.

Chris Brogan: There’s no correlation in that sentence. One is bestseller, not smartest author. My best books — because I don’t think Trust Agents was my best book — my best books sold the least. I can tell you that there’s really no correlation to me. That said, once you’re a New York Times bestselling author … A lot of people are Amazon bestselling authors. I could do that in a day. I could make one of my old books a bestseller if I work hard enough at it for a day. Once you’re a bestseller with the New York Times, that label’s there forever, and you can lord that over other people.

Beyond that, there’s not a lot of grand value unless you’re in some particular industry that really cares. Tech industries tend to care a little bit more. If you’re the guy who literally wrote the book on Java or JavaScript or something, you’d certainly probably carry a little more weight with me than some schmuck hacking around. I’m a big fan of meritocracy, so I don’t necessarily find that he or she who has published wins because they actually had the discipline to write a book. I just think that they’re the people who saw a project through. That’s the only credit I’ll give them, is that it’s hard to publish.

Sean Jackson: Right. Let’s talk about that a little bit. It’s funny, I talked to Brian Clark … When I first met Brian Clark back in 2008, 2009 he’s like, “Why haven’t you written a book yet?” Guy Kawasaki had been writing quite a bit by that time period, and that was where the evolution of a lot of the early influential marketing bloggers were moving towards, was starting to publish to gain that additional authority, if you will, by having a physical copy that is really a manifestation of what they’d been writing for years on their blog about.

Talk a little bit about what is that initial process? You obviously saw a benefit in doing it, and I do think there is a benefit — whether it’s to gain authority or to increase the exposure of your thinking to new people that may not be consumers of what you currently write. I do think those are tangible, actual benefits, but you pay a price to get them. That price is to get a book done. If you were doing this from day one back with Trust Agents, what would you do different? How would you start? Knowing that our audience who’s listening are going, “Gosh, I’m so scared about doing this. Where should I start first and what should I be doing?”

What Publishers Really Look for in Selecting an Author

Chris Brogan: There’s a Groucho Marx quote that I repeat it so often it’s almost my quote by now. Groucho said, “I would never want to belong to a club that would have me.” The day that Julien and I made the New York Times bestseller list we called each other. I say, “Hey, that’s cool,” and he goes, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool.” That was our voice too. I was like, “Hey, that’s cool.” He was like, “Yeah, that was cool. Hey, so what else are you doing?” That was it. Believe me, there’s days when I’m feeling miserable about myself that I cry into my vodka and I say, “I’m a New York Times bestseller.” Beyond that …

Let’s just say it’s day zero and we’re going to write a book. The things that I didn’t know about the book publishing industry that everyone who isn’t in there still doesn’t know is this: Number one, people publish books because the books sell, not because the idea is good. Craptons of authors tell me, “I think I’ve got this amazing...