018: How to Write a Book That Sells for Decades with Tim Grahl

What does it take to write a book that keeps selling far into the future? What is the art and science behind writing an amazing book?


Tim Grahl is legitimately one of the best book marketers in the world, once simultaneously having five authors on the New York Times Bestseller list. He knows everyone in the industry, everything about the industry, and he’s sharing his secrets with us this week.


Discover what it takes to create a book that stands the test of time and makes money for decades. We’re discussing books that are an example of what to do in this industry, and Tim is discussing how he uses a perfectly executed flywheel in his business Story Grid.


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Tim: I do think there's fundamentally something wrong with that where you know you need to change, and you back off. There is something unheroic about that. Yeah, you can live your life that way. That's totally fine. Nobody's going to come and like tear you down for that. But it's like are you going to be okay with that?

Billion Dollar Creator is a show teaching creators how to capture attention and turn it into real wealth. We will deep dive into brands, celebrities, and entrepreneurs who have done it before and show you how you can apply it to your business as an everyday creator.

Nathan: In this episode, I talk with Tim Grahl, who I've been friends with for more than a decade. He is legitimately one of the best book marketers in the world. Top five for sure. Something that I've always respected about him is back when he had clients in the book marketing world, he had five of them on the New York Times bestseller list at the exact same time. So he's who I go to whenever I have questions about books. He knows everyone in the industry, in the space.

So one of the things we dive into in this episode are actually the size of the book industry. It is wild how big this industry is compared to what I expected. We get into what it takes to write a book that sells more and more year after year for a very long time. Then the other thing that Tim is amazing at is actually the art and science of writing, of how you actually write a great sentence and a great book and on from there.

Then probably my favorite part of the episode is where we dive into flywheels. If you haven't watched the episode from a couple weeks ago about flywheels, that's a fantastic one that you should start with. But Tim has a very effective flywheel for his Story Grid business as he's building a publishing empire, right. He's trying to do publish hundreds of books that will sell for decades. He's built a very powerful flywheel around that. So it's a great episode. Let's dive in. Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim: Thanks for having me, Nathan.

Nathan: So when you and I are hanging out in Nashville, Boise, wherever, Atlanta, wherever we find ourselves at a mastermind or just over dinner, we're always talking about books. Specifically, just the reach of books overall.

You were quoting some stats to me the other day. I think we severely underestimate the size of the book industry and what's going on there. Because a book is not an expensive product. So there's not really like the flashy business built around a book. But share some of the stats about just the size of the book industry compared to some of these flashier industries that we think about more often.

Tim: Yeah, it's the flash all around. There's no, you don't look forward to the award ceremony every year for books, right? That doesn't.

Nathan: What even would that be?

Tim: I didn't see any Barbenheimer or whatever news articles about the release of the newest book. But what people don't understand is that if you look at like the music industry, I went back and looked up some stats. So in 2022, the music industry was $42.5 billion. If you look, the global movie box office, global for movie box office in 2023 was 29 billion. In 2023, book publishing made $98.6 billion.

Nathan: Wow.

Tim: So people do not understand how big the book industry is. It just kind of quietly makes tons and tons of money. The reason why is because the products just last longer. So the example I like to use is The Lord of the Rings was written, The Fellowship of the Rings, came out in 1954. Then the other two came out in 1955. Those still sell really well and make tons of money for the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Okay, so how many movies and how much music, how much money do those make from the 1950s now? I mean, it's miniscule, right? So, books lasts a long time, and they tend to grow over time instead of diminish over time.

So you look at books. I mean, we both have examples, but this is what books can do. So this is why it's such a bigger industry is because they tend to last a long time where like the new Barbie movie won't be making a lot of money 10 years from now. Where a book that does really well this year, or maybe even comes out slow but builds, it's still going to be making money for the author 10 years from now.

Nathan: I mean, there's so many examples here of different books. One that I think of a lot is our mutual friend, Josh Kaufman. What was his book, The Personal MBA? I think this summer it just hit a million copies sold. Something like that.

Tim: No, it’s been a while back now, but yeah.

Nathan: Okay.

Tim: I think he's at, I don't know, the last I heard was something like 1.2 million or something. Here's what's interesting about that book. I use it as an example to talk people out of going after the New York Times Best Seller list is that book has never hit the New York Times Best Seller list, never hit the Wall Street Journal Best Seller list. I don't think it's ever hit any major best seller list. Yet, it's sold well over a million copies. It still sells really strong. It's now been out like 12 years.

Most of the books that you see pop onto the New York Times list, there's so many books that hit the best seller list that don't ever break 100,000 sales or even 50,000 sales. A lot of times books will, they'll come out, they'll sell 10,000 or 15,000 copies and never sell another 1,000 copies the rest of the life.

So this is the other thing too is there's no gold or platinum level reward for books. Like The War of Art, we talk about a lot, by Steven Pressfield, it only sold a little over 9,000 copies the first year that it came out. But then every year since then it's sold more copies than the year before. So it just keeps growing and growing and growing and growing.

The other thing is, Steve has not touched that book since he wrote it. So there's no extra work involved besides a little bit through the publisher, which he doesn't have to do. He just gets checks. So this is what's so fascinating about books to me is if you can get one.

I have one, Your First 1,000 Copies. I wrote it in 2013. It's not making me rich, but it brings in over 1,000 bucks a month. It's this little just drip of money that I rewrote it in 2018, but other than that I haven't touched that book since 2013. So it's like these things have a long shelf life that most things don't.

Nathan: When we were having dinner in Nashville, we were talking about Your First 1,000 Copies. If you're pursuing something as a side hustle, right, it’d be fairly natural to say hey, I'm going to take some money that I made, and I'm going to buy a property and long term rent it.

If that makes me, say between paying down my mortgage and the cashflow on top, let's say I make 1,000 bucks a month. That'd be pretty good, right? You're like hey, this book that I wrote 10 years ago is doing more than that without having to take out a $300,000 loan. So this is actually a better stream of revenue.

Tim: Yeah, just to make sure the metaphor holds, there is no big payoff at the end, right. So I can't go and sell it at the end. But it is this idea of like my partner, Shawn Coyne and I run Story Grid. We have a publishing house. We're going to continue to publish books. Our goal is that our grandkid’s college is paid for by the books we publish over the next 10 years.

So if you have this long term view of the kind of wealth that can be built a little bit at a time, that 1,000 bucks a month and you have 10 of those, now you're talking about something that has a real impact. This is a thing, not just your life, but think of like C.S. Lewis’s estate and his family and how they've been taken care of by stuff that he wrote a long time ago.

Nathan: So let's run through a couple more examples. Like I think of Ryan Holiday in this camp where he's putting out is it more than a book a year? Or is he write out a book a year? It's a lot.

Tim: I think it depends on the year because he's also starting to, I don't talk to him a lot. So I just watch what he does. So he's also going into a space where like he's working with other authors. So like I think The Daily Stoic wasn't fully written by him. He had a co-author.

Nathan: It was him and his agent. They co-wrote it together. His agent, Steve, I believe is his name, was like hey, you should write this book. Because Steve had a firsthand insight into a couple of other like daily journal type books that had done really well.

Steve was telling Ryan, write The Daily Stoic. Ryan's like I don't know. I'm just trying to get stoicism to be this thing that anyone cares about at all. I'm trying to hide it and package it inside of more approachable philosophy. Steve kind of insisted and predicted from the beginning. He said this will be your best-selling book. It is. Oh, yeah. It's well over a million copies sold now.

Tim: Ryan is so interesting to me. In fact, if there's one person I struggle with being jealous of in this industry, he's just such a workhorse. He works really hard. He stay super focused on what he's interested in. I don't think anybody's working harder than him for his success. I just think it's amazing what he does.

But yeah, it's like each book stacks. Then, of course, then his speaker fees go up. His email list grows. He has his own bookstore now that he's selling books through. It creates this whole ecosystem around, or as you might call it, a flywheel, around everything that he's doing. But, again, all the way back to his very first book which.

Nathan: Trust Me, I’m Lying.

Tim: Yeah, the PR book. That book still brings him in money. So that's, I think, the thing, I think we're so - they used to do a product launch or putting out this new thing or that new thing. We don't think about there is this little industry over here that just kind of chugs along and makes almost $100 billion a year. Books just keep on selling for a really long time.

Nathan: Thinking about the difference between the course industry and a lot of areas that creators are in compared to books. Traditionally a course has a lot of revenue upfront. People are making hundreds of hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of dollars off of their course. Then it has a fairly short shelf life, right? Like not many people are running the same course and improving on it five years later, 10 years later.

There's definitely people who are doing it. I think of like Ramit Sethi with his Earn 1K course has been going for a long time. I think Marie Forleo is still doing B-School and having a big impact.

Tim: You have to change it constantly. So they continue to adjust it for the market and what's changing and all of that, which is, I mean, wonderful. Obviously they're doing really well with that. But like the book Ramit wrote, besides an update on the 10 year anniversary, he doesn't do anything with that thing. It just keeps selling and, again, keeps powering everything that he's doing.

Nathan: Right. So it's just interesting. I imagine two different slopes of this spike and starting high with the course and then tapering off basically to nothing over a long time horizon. I'm not talking one to two years. I'm talking 10 plus years. Whereas the book starting with this slow burn and growing from there. It's a different model, but it allows you to compound it rather than seeing the other side of the course creator jumping from thing to thing and not really having the compound returns.

Tim: I mean, the other thing is that, I mean, the course industry is relatively new. Everybody I'm talking to, and including myself, is seeing like it's getting harder, prices are being pushed down. Less people. Like there's more competition because anybody can kind of jump in.

So the other thing I like about the book industry is it's been around for a really long time, obviously, and this is the thing I love. The book industry has been around for hundreds of years. I've only been around for 42 years. But even like so many people keep calling for the death of the book. Oh, people don't have attention spans anymore.

Nathan: That’s only for TikTok, not books.

Tim: Yeah, well, even when people say that I'm like then why is the most popular podcast on the planet a three hour long, rambling conversation? You know what I mean? So it just doesn't make any sense. So people keep saying people aren't reading anymore. I'm like well, I guess I've got to give all this money back I'm making off of books. So.

Nathan: We’ve been thinking about Christmas this year. I mostly bought people books. Right? Other people mostly bought me books because that's what I was interested in. We all get to a certain age. It's like hey, just give me the book that you most enjoyed this year and that's all for Christmas.

Tim: Yeah, yeah. So I just think it's fascinating. I mean, a big part of what I've dedicated many years now to is figuring out okay, what separates books out? Because books are just like everything else where a small percentage of the books published make the most amount of money, right? So like Atomic Habits is making way more money than my little Your First 1,000 Copies book, and they would both be in the nonfiction, how-to category. So I think it's super interesting looking at what it takes to create a book that will actually stand the test of time.

Nathan: I want to dig into that. But you mentioned Atomic Habits. We're recording this in January 2024. James just hit number one on all of Amazon for 2023 for the second time. So the book was published in 2018, I believe. Then I think he didn't hit any top 100 in 2019. It was something like that. 2020 he was top 50, top 60. 2021 I think was really high. I think 2022 was number one, 2023. I mean, the numbers are wrong. 21 was number one. 2022 was number five, I think.

Tim: Well, because I do think with the pandemic and around the pandemic when it really started hitting big. Yeah, so and I'm looking at it now. I've got it up on the Amazon here. This is the thing. So I've been in the book industry now for, I don't know, like 13 years or something. I've literally never seen this before. He has 121,000 reviews and ratings on Amazon. Like that is…

Nathan: The book’s been around for five years.

Tim: Insanely high. Like I don't know of another book. There's no way to run a search on Amazon. But you look up Harry Potter, it doesn't have 100,000 reviews. So it's pretty amazing. But that book, I almost don't like talking about it because it's so far, like such an outlier, that it's almost like - I think a lot about the book, but I don't love talking about it because it's hard to use as an example of something you could do. Because you can't do what he did because it's also like the right time, the right place. Obviously, he did an enormous amount of research.

But it built off of this growing wave of how-to books around habits. He hit it at the right time. It's so well written and so well researched. He did such a great job building an audience before it came out. He had this enormous audience before it even came out. He got one of the best agents in New York. I mean, it's just like everything hit for that book at the right time and the right place.

So it's this weird combination of a really well written book, a really strong platform, and just the right fucking time. You can't duplicate that, but I've just loved watching the book since it came out because it's just been amazing to watch how successful it's been.

Nathan: Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely phenomenal. But you were starting talking about the difference between writing a book and writing a great book. Maybe first, what goes into? What's the difference in reach? Because I think a lot of us think about, okay, if I'm going to try to hit the New York Times bestseller list, or I'm going to try, I need to pay a ton of attention to the platform. Right? That's the most important thing.

It'd be easy to look at James's success and say oh, it was the strength of his platform at launch that contributed to the success of the book. I think that contributed to the initial what now is a blip compared to the success of the book. It was a successful launch, but yeah. Dive in.

Nathan: Well, so James had a big platform, but he didn't have a bigger platform than Michelle Obama. He's crushing Michelle Obama in sales. So this is the thing is people try to just throw out well, he had a big platform, or he had famous friends that helped him promote the book. It's like yeah, but not bigger than Michelle Obama. Right? So you can't just do that.

Again I'm probably like one of the top in the world at book marketing and book launches. Please don't try to hire me. I don't really do it anymore. But if somebody would come to me and say how do you sell 100,000 copies of your book? How can I launch my book and sell 100,000 copies? The real answer is I don't know. There's really no direct way. Unless you come to me with like a seven figure budget, I could probably pull it off.

But for any kind of like normal book launch budget, there's no way to like sell 100,000 copies on purpose. But so that's where the goal is across the industry. I'm not far from the first one to say this. The goal is always like get the first 10,000 copies out into the world. Get 10,000 people to just give the book a try because books only work by word of mouth. Like the only way you sell 100,000 copies is to sell 10,000 copies. Because you can't sell 20 copies and then hope your book actually gets out into the world.

I think of it like launching a rocket into orbit. It's like it takes a whole lot of effort and energy to get it into orbit. But then once it's in orbit, it's pretty easy to keep it going. So if you get 10,000 out then the book, you basically find out if your book’s any good or not at that point. Because I've worked with plenty of authors. We sell 10,000 copies, and then nobody ever buys it again.

Then you have somebody like James Clear who probably, on his launch sold say 50,000 copies. I have no idea. So that's a great lunch. But it's not the millions and millions and millions of copies that have sold since. That's all word of mouth. In fact, most people listening on this podcast probably has a copy of the book, first of all, but didn't buy it because they were on James’ list.

They bought it because they saw it on 20 different podcasts, or they went to a bookstore, and it was like lined in the front of the bookstore. The reason it was lined in the front of the bookstore was because it was selling so well, not because James did anything special to get it there.

So that's the thing is books only grow by word of mouth. The other thing is they grow slowly because it's word of mouth. So I probably shouldn't share exactly who it is anyway, a book you've heard of, a nonfiction book you've heard of. I was talking to an author several years after the book came out.

I was saying it takes a year for your marketing to really hit. You just have to do it on faith for a year. He's like, “Man, I am so glad you told me that.” Again, this is a super best-selling nonfiction book. He goes, “I came out with the book. It launched really well, had a really strong launch.” He goes, “And then for a year I was on every podcast. I was traveling. I was speaking. The sales just kept going down.” He goes, “And at the one year mark, it went like this, and then it just went up and never stopped.”

You even described that with James’ book. Like it didn't become a multimillion dollar best seller the first year. It was years after that. It was because he kept pushing the book, kept pushing the book, and then it finally tipped over. Then everybody knew. It was like all of a sudden he was one of those 10 year overnight successes.

Nathan: Yeah, it's fascinating watching that. I've seen it a bunch of different times. I was talking to Dan Martell with his book Buy Back Your Time, and he did the whole book launch. He wrote a really good book. He was doing the thing where hey, I'll come speak at your conference if you buy a book for every attendee, right? He did all of the usual launch and promotion things, had a really solid platform, and promoted it heavily.

The book did well. I don't know what list it hit at launch or that sort of thing. But talking to him the other day, he was just saying I learned that well so Dan's a software guy. So he talks in terms of like virality and K-factor and all that.

He's like, “I learned that my book has a K-factor. For every one copy I get in the right person's hands. someone who is at a certain level in their business. Basically, if I get the book in the hands of an entrepreneur, then I know that that results in another quarter of a book getting out to someone else, right?” Every book sold has a K-factor of 1.25 or something. So once he realized that, he's just been trying to get the book in as many people's hands as possible of actual readers. Not warehouses.

Tim: When we were promoting this book a few years ago, Shawn and I, it's a 730 page fantasy novel, right? What Shawn was saying was it's easier to sell a copy of a book than get somebody to read it. He's always said it, but it was the first time I realized okay, if I don't like fantasy novels, and you're all right, you can read the 730 page novel or pay me $29, which would you pick? I'm like I’ll just pay the $29 so I don’t have to read.

So it's like I don't really worry too much about book sales. I worry about getting people to read it. I will give a copy of a book, whether I'm promoting it or it's my own book or it's the book I'm publishing, I'll give a book to somebody if I think they'll read it. Because I don't need that sale. I need the sale of the next five people they tell, right?

So that comes back to I need to write a book that is so good that when somebody reads it, they'll tell five other people. Because if I don't, it doesn't matter how many I sell on launch. It's just going to fall off a cliff. It's the amount of time and effort it takes to write a book, you might as well. If you're going to do something that's just going to fall off the cliff, you might as well launch another course because it'll make more money. If you're going to write a book, it's worth putting the time and effort in to make it something that people will tell five other people about.

Nathan: So it's easy to say something you we have to write a great book. I think if we're using the software example of K-factor, in software.

Tim: I don’t know what K-factor means? What does that mean?

Nathan: So K-factor is, it's been a term in like virology for a long time of watching the study of like communicable diseases, basically. If someone who gets, this is a terrible example. But Ebola has a very high K-factor, meaning that for every person that is infected, a lot more people get infected in immediate contact. But the problem with Ebola is, problem, good thing? I don't know. It that it kills the host so quickly that it doesn't actually spread very much. Whereas COVID has a very high K-factor, right? That’s why we had a global pandemic.

So it's basically a study of, for every reader, how many more readers does that turn into when we're talking books terms. In software if you think of like something like Dropbox when they had their refer friend to get more storage thing years ago, that was a K-factor play. In software, we get to do something where we get to watch our users. We've got great analytics.

There's a tool we use that ConvertKit called Full Story where I can actually turn it on, and I can just watch. As if we're screen sharing, I can watch someone use the software in real time. I could record thousands of sessions and then see okay, someone went through the setup process. Oh, it looks like out of 1,000 sessions, 100 people got stuck right here.

Tim: Oh, that's so interesting.

Nathan: But we can't do that in books.

Tim: Well, this is what's crazy. I wish Amazon would do this is - they do know because of Kindle. So they know how far when people drop out of reading a book. If I, as an author, could see my Kindle stats, I could go back and edit the book and fix places where people are dropping off.

Nathan: So you want YouTube watch time, basically.

Tim: Yeah. They have the stats. They have it because that's how you get paid with Kindle. I won't go down that path. But yeah, but that is also like you can do that anecdotally with books anyway. But yeah, I mean, it's easy to say write a great book, but it's hard to actually write a great book.

I mean this is what we pursue at Story Grid is how to actually learn how to write a great book. But it really just starts with looking at masterworks, which is books that you're if I could write a book like this, it would be a win for me.

So it's like if you want to write a book about self-help, it's like you should be studying Atomic Habits and studying how long are the chapters? What are the titles? How many words does he use that or more than three syllables? How long are his paragraphs? Read it yourself and when do you get bored? If you get done with the book, what were your three favorite parts?

Analyzing books and how they do. I mean, I remember I've done this for Ryan Holiday books. I printed out the introductions of three of his books. I sat down, I'm like okay, he changed subjects here and here. So how long was each section? I literally, counted the words and put the word figure.

Then it's looking at that kind of stuff and studying that kind of stuff of how do you structure a book that people actually read all the way to the end and leave a review on Amazon? So those are the kinds of things that you can do. Writing a book is one of those things that we all think we can do because we know how to like type sentences, but writing a great book is the hardest thing I've ever set out to do.

So it's really fascinating, to me, how the whole process of how it goes. But yeah, taking the time to do something great is the difference, again, between selling 10,000 and selling 100,000 or a million.

Nathan: One thing that I'm wondering is how you really study those drop off points because like we're talking about there's not good data. Or the data exists, but it's not available to us. I was thinking of years ago, there was a course called The Foundation, which was about creating a bootstrapped small software company in a specific niche. These two guys working on it, Andy Drish and Dane Maxwell, they knew that for the launch of this, they wanted like the absolute perfect video that would hook you.

So they wrote a bunch of scripts. They worked on it. They were really working on the timing and everything else. Dane and Andy lived in different cities. So what they would do is get on a Zoom call together. Dane would have the script because he was the talent. He was going to record it. Andy would go find someone else at the co-working space he was at. He was like, “Hey, can I run something by you really quick?” They're like, “Yeah, sure.” He'd go, “Hey, my buddy Dane, he has a video he’s working on. Would you mind watching it?”

They would deliver it live. So it's like here, if I'm doing that to you, I'm putting the laptop in front of you, and I'm sitting back and watching, right. So Andy’s sitting back and watching as Dane’s delivering the script. We're totally just watching your reaction. At what point are you hooked and intrigued? What's the body language? At what point do you kind of look away or go like, I was trying to do work.

They tweaked and refined that script until they got it super, super dialed in. When I saw the end result, it was one of those four minute videos that had me completely hooked all the way through. What I want to know as an author, or a want to be author, is how do I do that for books? Right? How do I get the book that is going to keep someone interested and have a big payoff?

Tim: Yeah, I mean, this is what I do the entire YouTube series on. We have a three year course on.

Nathan: Yeah, give me the 30 second version.

Tim: I had a friend one time that should know better that called me and was so give me like the secrets on how to write a novel. I'm like I don't know what you mean. He's like well just give me like the rundown real quick. I'm like I've been working on this for years. This is not something that like I can just…

So it really comes down to understanding. So obviously, you could do something like that with a book. You could definitely do that with like chapters. One of the things I tell readers all the time, and I've actually done this myself, where write a scene and just send it to six people and just wait to see how many people want to know what happens next. We're kind of leaning towards fiction when I'm talking about that.

It would work for nonfiction of leave a hook at the end of here's what you're going to talk about next. Do not ask them for their feedback or anything else. Just send it to them and say hey, let me know when you give it a read. Just do three of them, one of them, none of them, all six of them respond with well, what's the next chapter? What happened? Now you've got them hooked, right? You know they want to know the next thing. So send them the next chapter. If they don't, go back and work on your first one, right? So.

Nathan: So this is like Andy Weir writing The Martian live on the internet, where everybody's following him. I mean, it's a little bit of a different example. But everyone that was following him was like hey, where's the rest of it?

Tim: Yeah, Andy, that book, I've studied that book a lot. I love that book. I think it's so well done. His second book was atrocious. His third book, Hail Mary, was really good. Another guy that did this was one of my favorite authors. Max Barry wrote the Machine Man one chapter at a time, and you could sign up for his email list. Each day, you would get a page of the book sent to you. It was a way to force himself to write the first draft of the book. But he also got to see what parts worked and what parts didn't it.

I think that you can, if you're looking at the nonfiction, especially kind of how to, self-help space, this is where you can start looking at well, what are your most popular blog posts? What are your most popular YouTube videos? When you are giving a speech, what parts do people lean in and pay attention? Those are the parts you need to lead with the book. Front ending the book with the most compelling stuff.

But also like understanding how narrative works. Things have to change. You have to have an inciting incident all the way through resolution. You have to have a clear object of desire for your protagonist. Here's the kicker is that with how-to, self-help, the protagonist is the reader. That's why it's written in second person. So you have to think about your reader as the protagonist. So you have to incite your reader. Then you have to build a progressive complication to make the problem worse and worse and worse until you offer them a solution.

So, again, I haven't looked at Atomic Habits. I've read it but not analyzed it. I'll guarantee you this is in there over and over and over because it works. So it's learning, again, this is how Shawn started, my partner. He's been an editor for over 30 years. Actually, we went back and checked recently because like less than 30% of books in traditional publishing turned a profit. We went back and looked, and his track record is 85%. So he's two and a half times more successful than the publishing industry.

How he learned what he knows is studying masterworks, and looking at books and books that work and have stood the test of time, and looking at how they're structured, how they're written. If you just take the time to do that, you learn so much. You start with the books that are I want to write a book like this, right?

So my next fiction title comes out this year. It's called The Shithead. When I set out to write it, I wanted to write my version of The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, which is this amazing novel. So I read that book. I studied that book. I looked at the arc of that book, the structure of that book.

Now, you would never read my book and be like oh he rewrote The Accidental Tourist, but it's structured in a very similar way. Whenever I got stuck with my book, I went back and said well, how did Anne Tyler solve the problem in her book?

So I wish, like so many people, the first thing they do when they're like I want to write a book, and they have this idea, they open up a Google Doc, and they just start typing. They haven't really, or they make an outline, but they don't compare their outline to other books and how other books have worked. So I think that kind of stuff goes into writing a really great book and understanding it's going to be hard and take a long time. But the payoff is, I mean, enormous.

Nathan: What you can do with it is phenomenal. Something that you do with Story Grid, and I want to get into the business of Story Grid and the flywheels in just a second. But you take the most analytical approach to writing, scene structure, everything else that I've ever seen before. Can you apply that in nonfiction the same way that you've been doing it in fiction?

Tim: Yeah, and we have. We have a masterwork guide to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. We actually consider nonfiction downstream of fiction. So it's actually an instantiation of fiction. But yes, the analytical approach is really important. If you want to drive me insane, give the advice of hey, you got a book idea, just sit down and write it. It's like okay.

That's like saying hey, your favorite song is Hotel California. Just pick up a guitar and play it. It’s like well no. Well, why not? Oh, well, you have to know how to play chords and how to tone a guitar and how to pick a guitar, how to strum. To play the guitar is call it 20 different micro-skills you have to learn and then put together, and then you get to go be creative.

Writing is the same way. Again, just because you can write an email or a blog post doesn’t mean that you can write a book. It's a completely different skill set. So there are these fundamental skills that you have to learn, and that you can, this is the thing too is it's not fucking subjective. It is objective, right.

So it is I heard this great quote from Quentin Tarantino. It was one of the interviews he did, and he was talking about perfect movies. He started naming perfect movies. He's like Back to the Future is a perfect movie. What he means by perfect is not that everyone will like it, but if you like movies like Back to the Future, you will like Back to the Future, right. He mentioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He's - that's a perfect movie. Now most people probably won't like it. But if you like movies like that, you will like that movie.

So this is the thing is it's not luck. It's not random. There are, just like playing the guitar, it's not random whether or not the chord progression works, right? There is an actual clearly objective way that chords and notes have to be played. If they aren't played that way, it's wrong. It's just wrong. So writing a book is the same way.

Nathan: There are laws and principles of music theory. Then if you break them without understanding them.

Tim: That's the thing. You have to be so good that you can now break the rules. But you don't get to break the rules at the beginning because you break the wrong rules.

Nathan: Yeah, I want to talk about the flywheel behind Story Grid because we did an episode, I guess two episodes ago now, about flywheels, introducing the concept, walking through Sahil Blooms flywheel and a bunch of them that we've implemented across ConvertKit. So I think listeners are familiar with the concept now.

You've got a flywheel for Story Grid that I think is just phenomenal. I understand how it all fits together. I think your audience, because you did an episode on your YouTube channel explaining it, your audience understands how it all fits together. Talk through that. Like how, maybe let’s just dive in. That YouTube video that you did. It’s titled The Plot Thickens: Inside Story Grid’s Evil Master Plan, and you have like sort of this like evil doom and gloom thumbnail for it.

Tim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nathan: Why would you, in a world where most people are I'm going to put out content. Then over here, I'm going to have my true business model. You think I'm fully altruistic? Great. Let's keep that going. Then behind the scenes here's what I'm actually doing. You don't share those normally. But you're out there. You're saying look, here's the whole thing. Here's everything that I'm doing. Here's why. Here's how I'm using your attention to make a bunch of money for decades to come and just sharing that. Why do that?

Tim: Yeah. So I mean this kind of comes from kind of two angles for me that I finally did that video. One is I kept getting questions from people. Why are you putting out the YouTube videos? I would have phone calls with potential customers, and they were kind of skeptical about what we're doing.

Everybody's real question was all right, are you full of shit? If so, where are you bullshitting me, right? As that was kind of, I got off the call with somebody that it is a legitimate question. You should assume everybody's full of shit until they prove you otherwise. So I am not offended that people assume I'm full of shit too.

So I got off a call where I somebody kind of came in with that attitude. We had a great conversation, and it ended up great. But it made me think of Alex Hormozi, the big business he's blown up on YouTube and everywhere else now. For the longest time, I would not watch his videos. Because every time I saw him, I was like that dude is going to try to sell me some cryptocurrency just by the way he looked. I was totally judging the book by the cover. So.

Then a good friend of mine was like, “Hey, watch this video.” It was Alex Hormozi video. I was like all right, fine, because my buddy Matt told me to watch it. Then I watched it. I'm like this is the best training on sales I've ever seen. So I just nosedived in to all this content.

What I really like about him is that he is super clear about what he's getting out of it. So one is he's like the bigger my platform. So he owns a company that acquires other companies, buys into them, and then helps them 10x or whatever. He's like so the more people that know who I am, the more likely people will want to sell me their business instead of somebody else.

Also, if I can teach you how to grow your business to the point where I can buy in, maybe you'll sell it to me, or let me come in. So I really liked that he's just super clear on here is the selfish reason why I'm putting all this content out. And so.

Nathan: He’s basically saying I want to help you build a great business so that when you either want to double down and grow it further, or you want to exit, I'll be the first person you call.

Tim: Right. Yep. So now he's getting first right of refusal on hundreds and hundreds of companies. So he's going to crush his competition because of that. Now he could also start trying to sell cryptocurrency at some point. So who knows? But so far, he's like sticking to that.

So when I think about what I'm doing, I think there are people that are truly being altruistic and just like they want to teach kids physics. So they put videos up, and they're a physics teacher, and they have no back end to their business. But if you do have a back end, I think it's better to just tell the truth.

So I just made the video and I'm like look, here's how we make money. Our goal is to build a publishing house that publishes the greatest fiction ever written. Turns out, that's really fucking hard to do. So when we tried to go about like taking manuscripts like other publishers that wasn't working.

So we realized we need writers that can do two things. One is write really well, but that's kind of a given. The other is let us kick the shit out of them when they do it wrong. They just keep coming back for more. Because that's what I did. We've been doing the podcast, we stopped doing the podcast, but we did it starting in 2015. There was over 200 episodes. It's just Shawn kicking the shit out of me and my writing. That's what we need is we need writers that will like stick with it.

So we started a writing program. That's a three year program that builds from how to write a great sentence because it is not subjective. It is objective. How to write a great sentence all the way up to writing a full book over the span of three years. I'm trying to put every creative writing MFA program out of business because our training is so much better.

It's all built on one feedback. So every week you turn in your work, and you get one on one feedback, and you have to go try it again. So okay, so now we have a great training for writers. So at the end, they're writing books that hopefully they'll let us publish. All right, great.

How do I get people to join a three year program? Because people aren't just going to come off the streets. They've never heard of us. Or maybe they've read one of our books, and they're like well, how do I know you're not full of shit because you're expensive, and it's three years?

Okay, well, we're going to start a six week workshop. All right, so this way, people can get a little taste. They can come in, and I can guarantee them I can make them a better writer by the end of six weeks. That is the guarantee. If they feel like they haven't, they can get their money back. So far 100% of students have said that they have. So it's a six week workshop. But it's also expensive. It’s $1,200 right now to do a six week workshop because, again, they're getting one on one feedback every week.

So how do I get people into that? That's why I do YouTube. So I put out YouTube videos twice a week teaching all the different aspects of writing based on Shawn's research. It's all coming from Shawn. He's the genius. I feel like I get to work with Einstein while he's coming up with the theory of relativity. So Shawn has built an entire narrative theory from the ground up. I just teach aspects of it on YouTube.

That's the way I bring people in to get them on sales calls so that they'll do the six week workshops so that they'll do the three year program so that they'll publish books with us. Like you said, the flywheel, what I get out of it is teaching the workshops and teaching the training. I don't do most of the teaching. I do some of it. I extract where people are struggling and the ideas they find most interesting, and that feeds into the topics that I put up on YouTube.

Nathan: What I like about that is well, there's this idea called the theory of constraints, which comes from a really great book called The Goal.

Tim: Which I'm reading right now because you recommended it to me.

Nathan: Look at that. That book came out 45 years ago, 50. It’s from the 70s, I think, maybe the 80s.

Tim: Oh, is it the 70s? Oh, wow, geez.

Nathan: It's not a recent book.

Tim: It's also a novel.

Nathan: It is, which is fascinating.

Tim: It's a fiction book.

Nathan: There's also, I don't know if I have it on the shelf. I don't know. There's also a graphic novel version of it that the author's son came out with 25 years later or something. But in The Goal, they talk about the theory of constraints.

At a very high level, they're talking about in manufacturing, but it applies in many other areas. You look at the core bottleneck in the business. Basically, if you apply effort anywhere besides the current like most acute bottleneck, not only is that effort wasted, it actually makes the bottleneck worse.

So when I think about what you're talking about, you're like we're going to build a publishing house. Okay, what's our bottleneck? Obviously great books. So if you were to spend time anywhere else, like maybe you're getting cover design absolutely dialed in. You've got printing and distribution, all of this. It just makes everything worse when you don't have great books to publish.

So then you're thinking about okay, what's the bottleneck to great books? You need actually people. You need two key ingredients: people who know how to write books and people who know how to edit books. So I love that you've actually split the program.

You have two separate three year programs on this where you're saying my core bottleneck is actually the humans that know how to do this thing. So I'm going to create a machine that is the best in the world at creating these two types of humans. Then I'm going to stick these two types of humans together, and they together are going to solve my bottleneck, which will then get me a whole collection, right? We're aiming for hundreds of books that will sell for decades.

Tim: Yeah, I mean, that's the idea. Again, looking at Shawn's track record. So let's say I publish every book I publish is two and a half times seems more likely than the typical book from traditional publishing to be successful, to make money.

So that doesn't mean every single book we come out with is going to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. But if every book we come out with is selling 100 copies a month, 500 copies a month, 1,000 copies a month, I mean, that shit adds up. So it's like we believe that, again, the books that stand the test of time are the most well written books. So we're putting all of our effort on helping writers and editors produce the best books possible.

Again, this is not a subjective measure. This is an objective measure. So this is what we're focused on because we feel like if we can do that then the publishing house will be successful because it's publishing much better fiction than the typical.

I mean, I just read a book. I just finished it last night. I was so frustrated. It came from traditional publishing, was heralded as this book. I'm like this book fucking sucks. It's just not good. I'm never going to tell anybody about the book. You know what I mean? It had clear problems that are fixable problems. Anyway. So this is what we're focused on.

Nathan: It’s like I was talking to a friend who's a comedian, and he said that conference talks are the most frustrating experience for him. Because he sits there in the audience, and most great conference speakers tell stories.

Tim: Yeah.

Nathan: So he sits there. He's listening to a story. He's like oh, this is good. Oh, this is good. Then they just go somewhere else, or they land it in the wrong spot, or the timing is off. He was like you were 95% of the way to getting like a great laugh from the audience and keeping everyone engaged and all of that, and you just screwed it up. It's not, like you're saying, it's not subjective. He's like if you made these exact tweaks then you would get these results.

He would do this where he'd help people with conference talks for a while, and he would actually track his metric was laughs per minute of the conference talk. He went helped Dharmesh Shah, the CTO of HubSpot, give his big keynote at the Inbound Conference.

They would have Dharmesh, just like a comedian would, go test material, on a small stage. They would do that, and they would track the laughs that Dharmesh got. Then they would tweak each thing. It was often just a couple words different or a little bit of a timing difference or something else. They’d be like there we go, that landed. I imagine that you do the same thing.

Tim: Well, here's the thing though. This is what's so interesting and is probably the most controversial thing that we talk about at Story Grid. I mean, controversial. It's not like it's politics or something. But what he's applying, what your friend is applying to Dharmesh’s talk can be tracked. Like you could graph it, right.

So we actually will take scenes, we can take scenes, and graph the scenes on an actual line graph and find the boring spots, and say that's where a fix needs to happen. So it's like what he is applying is an objective measure that he is doing intuitively because he's picked it up over years and years of being a professional in what he does. He's applying it intuitively.

This is how it works is he's watching the talk, and he's waiting for air signals to ping the back of his brain. He's going to be like oh, something was off. Now, sometimes he immediately knows. Sometimes he has to think about it, what's off, but he's applying a rubric to the talk. That is a clear rubric.

Now, he's probably never written it down. Or if he has, I just know from experience of working with writers that do have a rubric, it's usually about 50% there. Because so much of it they do intuitively that they don't understand the rubric they're applying. So like Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, these like great writers, they're applying very clear A/B rubrics to their writing. But it's so intuitive, they don't understand them.

What we have done a Story Grid is actually write that rubric down. So when I evaluate a scene, I can immediately tell you what's wrong, where it's wrong, and why it's wrong and how to make it better. It doesn't matter if I like it because it's about the rubric. That's what's so interesting about this stuff is it's like you can take any talk, apply the rubric, and make it better because it is a rubric that applies across the thing. Again, it frees up creativity, right? Like the creativity that he is, is it Dharmesh, you said?

Nathan: Yeah.

Tim: He is experiencing in that talk is greater than just letting him do whatever he wants, right? So that's what I love about this stuff is that if you can learn it, you can like, you understand that by constraining down to a rubric, you actually create creativity that people enjoy. So, again, it's objective.

Nathan: Yeah, there's so much stuff in there that it's really interesting to me. Going back to something earlier, I realized if we're talking about bottlenecks, bottlenecks and flywheels. I think most people actually would misdiagnose the bottleneck in your business, right, or in a publishing house.

Where they would say, the natural thing is to say a publishing house needs to be good at selling and marketing books, right? If we just sell more copies, then this is going to be more successful. So the natural place to go that would be wrong is to say we need to build a publishing house that's the best in the world at marketing books.

I think that's where a lot of businesses go wrong. Where they're saying okay, how do we get our platform bigger so that when an author comes to us, we have the biggest platform to be able to sell as many books as possible.

They're zeroing in on a bottleneck, but I think they're, that would be not understanding the physics of the book industry to realize that you shouldn't focus on that initial spike. You should focus on writing a great book. Then you will ultimately had to build a completely different flywheel then what you would do if you had, if you would believe that the bottleneck to selling copies was platform.

Tim: Yeah, I could go different because you're just tempting me to just shit on the publishing industry. I would love to do that. But I don't think that would be helpful to your listeners. On the business side, I mean, honestly, this is like such a common thing. I've been listening to Alex Hormozi a lot. So he's the one that's most like in my brain, but it's you’ve just got to have a great product. That is where all of the effort should be going at the beginning because it's like the reason.

So I just closed a promotion. Because we're running an MFA program, we only open twice a year because we run two semesters a year. I just closed it, and we just sold three times more spots than we've ever sold before. I actually could have sold more. We just don't have the, that's our current constraint is we only have so many people that can give one on one feedback. That's what I'm working on.

But what we have hyper focused on that is why we're being successful is actually making people better at writing. That is all I care about. I let somebody go recently because they would not get on board with that vision. Right?

I actually went back and looked at my budget from 2022. 82% of our income came from training and seminars only, no feedback. What we've realized is that doesn't make people better writers. They can pass a test about how a good story is structured, but they can't fucking right.

So, we move, again, that fucks up my goal. I need people that can actually write books. So I don't care if you buy a training seminar if that doesn't get you closer to my goal of you writing a book that we can publish. So now my 2024 budget. So over the last two years, I've changed now 81 point something percent of my current plan budget for 2024 is coming from one on one feedback because that is where people get better. I actually think it'll end up being more.

But we've completely flipped the business model because that, and here's what's happening. People are telling other people. So one woman took my six week workshop. Not only did she sign up for the three year program, she went and got two of her friends to take my next workshop, and one of them signed up too.

So now we're talking about because the product is so good, that's all I'm focusing on. I'm pouring tons of money, effort into making the product as good as possible first. Yes, I'm doing YouTube to promote it, but it becomes way easier to promote something that everybody's talking about.

Like one person was like well, I want to talk to you a couple of your students before I sign up. I'm like that's fine. I'll give you the number of all of them if you want, all of them that allow me to give you their number. I don't care. Talk to all of them. Like our churn rate is almost zero. In fact, this semester it was negative because we had two people that had to drop out, one got injured and another had work stuff, come back. So like we brought more people back then we lost this time around.

So it's the product is so good. Therefore, it's easier to sell it, and everything else gets easier. So I think the biggest constraint for most people is like if you want to write a book on habits, can you write a better book than James? Like that's what you should be asking yourself. So that should be the super focus.

I heard this for years, and I didn't take it seriously. But it's like if I could go back to any other time in my life when I was focused on trying to build a business, I would be hyper-focused on just creating the best product that I could possibly create. Whether it's a course or a service, whatever it is, because then everything just gets so much easier. So anyway, yeah. That was the thing that it's just getting so much easier because we have the best product that exists.

Nathan: One thing I'm curious about is how much does the work that you're doing of what you're teaching in the program result, like close the loop in the flywheel to the content that you're putting out? How often do you get the idea for the YouTube video from the day to day students going through in the class?

Tim: I don't teach the three year program. So I don't have a very up close view of them. Most of my stuff comes from two sources. One is my sales calls. So that was a big change I made about six months ago too is I stopped trying to close an email because our products are so expensive. So I just talked to everybody that wants to talk to me. I keep feeling hey, I need to hand this often salespeople, but I'm learning so much about my audience and their struggles from having these conversations.

So a lot of it comes from the sales calls of oh because we have clear solutions to problems, but they're super nerdy. So it's I have to find the path between what people are seeing in their head and what they're struggling with and the solution. Nobody will listen to your solution if they're not convinced you know their problem.

So when I get off the sales calls, I jot down notes or drop in a notion like okay, here's an idea for a YouTube channel is I've got to solve this problem. Then I come up with the Story Grid way to solve that problem. But I lead with the problem. So I come from that. I do teach our six week workshops. I get a lot of ideas from that too of I'm like looking at everybody scenes. I'm like oh, this is where people are struggling. Then I'm like okay, I need to do a YouTube video on that.

The other thing, I don't know how much this applies to everybody. But when we switched to one on one feedback, first of all, as far as I know, we're the only one that has a clear systematic rubric on how to give feedback from a sentence all the way up to a full novel. So our product is now feedback. So what that allows me to do is just teach everything we know for free.

So I'm trying to give away everything we know because what will happen is people will go try to do it, they'll still suck, and they'll need to come pay us to get feedback. Because writing is uniquely hard to do in a vacuum. It's really hard to self-evaluate your writing. You need feedback. Then when you ask your writer friends for feedback, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. So they say a bunch of random stuff that's not helpful.

So when you come to us, we are literally like that's the problem. Here's how to fix it. Go try again. You try again. Okay, well, that's better. Now, this is actually the biggest problem. Fix that, go try again. That like short feedback loop is where people actually get better. So by focusing on that, it's like it is open season. I'm putting everything we teach in the workshops and the three year program. It's all going on YouTube as fast as I can get it up there.

Nathan: That's really interesting. So in the last episode that just recorded it was with our mutual friends, Grant Baldwin and Bryan Harris. They both have inside sales teams for their businesses, which I think most creators are probably wait, what? Hold on. That's, you know. Then you're over here saying yeah, I also do sales calls.

What I think is interesting is the flywheel that comes from that have put content on YouTube in order to get leads, book those leads on the calls, close those into customers, and we're going to use that revenue to drive everything. But especially those conversations, what questions people have, the way they phrase something, like that is giving you just so much ammunition to say like this. Oh, okay. I did that video already. But let me go and redo it to this person and with that mindset. Same content, totally different target audience or mindset, and it's a totally new video.

Tim: Well, the other thing, and this is really hard to keep in mind, is I'm not trying to get a lot of views and subscribers on YouTube. Because let's say there's 10 million people that want to write a book. How many of them are going to pay $30,000 over three years to take our program? Right? Like way less than 1%? I'm just looking for those people.

So I am putting out, you have to understand. So, if you think of signal and noise, right. So it's like I always think of the old like radio dial, like in my dad's old cutlass when I was growing up. It's like you're like hearing the static and then you start to hear the voice, and then you're like trying to like get it right where you hear the voice and no static right?

So YouTube is just static, I mean, as loud as it can possibly be. I'm putting up this little, tiny signal, and I need to make sure the people that hear it are the people that are going to buy my workshops that are $1,200 and my three year program which is $5,000 per six months semester.

So I have to dial my videos in that only people that are serious about learning writing, not people that are doing NaNoWriMo. People that actually want to get better at the craft of writing hear my signal and then they come. So when I put out videos, I'm not trying to get videos that get 100,000 views because those are the wrong people. My goal of the program is 300 members. 300, that's not that many, but they're the right people.

So I have to be careful about chasing the YouTube stats because those are the wrong steps. It's how many calls am I booking and how many of those are leading to workshop sales, and then to the writer mentorship. Boom, it's working. We just 3x’ed our biggest sale ever, and We ran out of space.

So that's the judge is so you have to be careful with these things that you're making sure you're judging it by the right metric. Because if I'm chasing YouTube views, that's a different metric than people signing up for my program. So I had 26 people sign up for my program. That was my 3x. 26. That's it. That's way less than 100,000 views on YouTube. But I made way more money off those 26 people than the 100,000 views on YouTube.

Nathan: Yeah, wow, that's fascinating. Well, then it goes back to just sharing that full master plan, right? Because when someone realizes, when the right person gets all the way through and what's Tim's deal? Why is he doing all of this? Wait a second, our incentives are 100% aligned. You're all the way down here saying look, my goal is to publish a book that sells for decades. As a viewer, I'm like well, hold on. That's my goal. My goal is to write and publish a book that sells for decades.

Tim: Yeah, this is the thing. So the video that went out today was for memoir writers. The first thing I tell people in the video is your story is not interesting enough to be a book. So if I was trying to get hundreds of thousands of memoir writers to love me, telling them their story sucks from the beginning. Your life is not that interesting is the wrong thing to say.

But people that want to get the shit kicked out of them until they're a good writer will be thank God somebody said that to me, right. But that's like one out of 100 or one out of 1,000 people. So I don't care if a thousand people click on the video, and right there I lose 900 of them. It doesn't matter to me. I need that 100 that will watch all the way to the end, and then one of those 100 that will call me and thank me for telling them the truth.

So it's I am purposefully, I don't think I come across as a complete asshole, but I'm combative. I'm like I don't care what you feel. I don't care what you think. This is the truth. So if you like what I'm saying over here, come over here because I only need 300 of you. I only have room for 300 of you.

So I think getting super clear on that kind of stuff is really important in making sure you understand who you're trying to attract in every signal that you're putting out. I know we're going past an hour, but this is really important too.

Nathan: Yeah.

Tim: So at the beginning of last year, our mutual friend Kara told me I needed to start talking to customers more. So I have not stopped. That's why I still do all the sales calls. She's like you have to talk to more people. You do not understand why people like you guys or don't like you guys or whatever.

So I did 50 calls with people that some were customers, some weren't. Some had joined the email list in the last week, some had been around for nine years. It was all in between. Here's what I noticed when I went back and looked at the notes because I asked them all the same questions. Not one person said anything about making money off their books.

Also, I talked to, out of those 50, I think maybe five, I'd have to go back and look, we're under 40 years old. Now if you go to our website, it says learn the skills, write a book, leave a legacy. Everybody, here's my audience. They're getting later in life. They're realizing this dream they have, if they don't start now, is never going to happen. So their kids are getting older or they're about to retire, or like I had one guy that's like his dad died at a young age, and he's like holy shit. I might die 20 years from now. I gotta do this thing.

So nobody's trying to make a bunch of money as a writer in our program. We're very highly focused on fiction, and it's leave a legacy. Right? That's why I wrote my novel. I mean, I hope it sells, but I got a job. I make money. I don't need it to sell. I want to leave something behind that matters. I did not realize that is why our audience loves us is because we do that.

So all of my marketing changed. I don't talk about trying to write a book that'll sell a million copies. I don't talk about the marketing or the launching or anything. It's all about you have a message inside of you that you're trying to put on paper. Every time you try to put it on paper, it sucks. It's not very good. It's not getting on the paper.

It's like I can see a picture in my head, and then I go to paint it, and it looks like a child finger painted. Right? So we're going to teach you the skills so that thing you see in your head, you're actually going to get down on paper. But I didn't know that until I talked to 50 people one on one, asked them all the same questions. That was probably about 70 hours of my time. But that was the beginning seeds of what has turned our company completely around.

Nathan: Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, and I mean, the customer research and just doing it in a hands on when and using the words that people are actually using. It'd be very easy in your headline to end with and make money or and sell books. That switch to leave legacy is, that’s the copywriting that comes from 50 hours of customer calls.

Tim: Yeah. Now I'm putting on a signal that's attracting the right people. Of those 26 people that signed up, not a single one of them were under 40 years old. It's a mix. It's pretty even male, female. We had somebody join that was 70. Here's the real thing. That's what I think too. That's why I write. So, what I realized is like oh, I'm already attracting people that are just like me. I need to lean even harder into it, right?

Because when people are well, nobody's going to make, most of the people that take your program’s not going to make that money back. I'm like fuck you. So everything you do has to have a price tag on it? I go to jujitsu four times a week. I spend thousands of dollars a year on jujitsu. I'm never going to make any money on that. It's like the most useless skill. Unless somebody attacks me that also knows jujitsu, it is a useless skill. Yet, it means something to me, and I'm getting something out of it that's important.

So it's understanding why your people do what they do too. Maybe your audience is they're trying to make money, and that's perfectly fine. My audience is not those people. So I have to lean even harder into that. Then they hear me above all the other noise of all the other people promising them they're going to put their book on Amazon and make $1,000.

Nathan: Yeah, I mean, yeah, just that that audience messaging fit and then ultimately, the product, right. You have to have a product that delivers on that. But I think it's really fascinating to see all of the pieces come together, and to see you play such a long term game. Like I think so many people in this space, whether it's books or podcasts or anything in the creative world, so many people are playing a short term game.

So I love the way, I guess a couple of things. I love the way that you're focused on decades, right? Your time horizon is actually 20, 30, 40 plus years. Yeah. Then you're willing to put the blocks in place to make that happen. I think most people would hit the bottleneck and be like we need great writers and editors, and be like well, that's not possible to do at scale in any meaningful timeline. So never mind, let's go tackle a different problem.

Tim: Well, and it's important to hear. Okay, so the last 14 months, November 2022, I realized something was wrong with the business. Like something major was wrong. We did a promotion I thought it was going to be our biggest promotion. It was one of our worst. Now looking back, I'm like oh, it's because we were relying on training and seminars. We need to switch to one on one feedback. But I didn't fucking know that at the time. I just knew something was wrong.

From November to August was the most suffering I've ever had in my business because I could not figure out what was wrong. It was just slamming my head against the wall over and over. I kept trying to do all the things I've been doing for years and years. I'm 42. I've been in this, whatever this business is that I do, I've been in this business a long time. It just wasn't working. I kept just seeing our revenue go down.

In 2023, I got to take my full paycheck from my company three times. One month, I took a third of my paycheck. So I kept having to work at it. Then it wasn't until August of 2023 that I had the insight of what was wrong. A bunch of shit came together where I could finally see it. Personal stuff. I mean, dude, my marriage was suffering this year. Like this was horrible. I was like is this going to work? This whole thing may unravel on me. Like everything was falling apart.

Then it was like I finally had the insight. I had to push all of my, what chips, the chips that were slowly falling off the table. The ones that were left, I had to push into the middle. So I made the change in the company. We’re no longer selling seminars. We're no longer selling training, which, again, two years ago was 82% of our income.

So I started that in August, and our revenue kept going down. Like it just kept going down as I was pushing all the chips towards January 7, right? I was spinning. I do all the editing, scripting, every shooting of YouTube myself.

I added up one week. I was working roughly like 60 to 80 hours a week. It's like there are no off days. Like I was getting up at 6:00 a.m. on Saturdays, working half the day on Saturday. I was working on Sundays. I was up at 6:00 a.m. every weekday, coming home, working at night, staying. Last night, I was up until 12:30 editing a YouTube video so I could put it up today.

Like the wheels were coming off, right? Literally in October, my partner and I were like I don't know if this is going to work. Like we might end up having to let everybody go. I don't know what's going to happen. He's like hey, should we just do like one more training? I'm like no, this is the right thing. It's the right thing existentially. I can no longer sell products I know aren't making people better.

Then it paid off. So it's like this is hard stuff that like will change you. Like I can't even like express the amount of suffering I've done over the last 14 months. It's 14 months. This was not fast. Like I kept telling my friends, I'm on a treadmill where somebody keeps reaching over and turning up the speed. I'm like this is as fast as I can run. Then they turn it up a little bit more.

So like those 26 sales came in. We're set up for the year. We're going to be just fine. We're probably going to double our revenue this year. I'm actually going to get paid every month this year. Like all those things are wonderful. But in July, I was talking to my wife. I'm like I don't know if this is going to work. You know what I said to her? I said Nathan would probably give me a job. That's actually what I said to her. I said if I called Nathan, he’d probably give me a job. We might have to move to Boise though.

Nathan: Nah, we’re remote.

Tim: But that's so funny. It just popped in my head. But we had that conversation. Then now I'm looking at oh my god, we're going to double, and this is amazing. But it was not great there for, again, a long time.

Nathan: Well, I think, what I hear in that is the author that you were talking about early on in the episode who is doing all the activities that they know will work, and they've got a great product, and they're promoting it nonstop, and sales are going down and down. But they're dead set. Like this is the right approach. They know that intuitively. Then you turn that corner.

That's same thing for ConvertKit. Right? We had that two years in making $2,000 a month in revenue and watching the bank balance just decrease all the time and realizing look, it just takes making a great product and sticking with it for a long period of time.

So seeing that, you always want that inflection point to come before you truly run out of money. You go to all of these different creators. Like many of them have a story like that. Of realizing, being certain on what you're going to deliver as a product and it not like getting there as soon as you would like or it taking this grind to the dip to be able to get there.

Tim: Yeah, and I think the biggest thing that was surprising to me is that I was the problem. Like it wasn't some external thing like oh, I'm not doing the right things to grow the email list or whatever. Really, the truth was, and this is going to be specific to each person. But for me, I was waiting on somebody to come and rescue me. Like I wanted somebody to come and tell me what I was doing wrong and tell me this, and I was like looking around.

Through a series of events realized oh, like I have to like take ownership of this in a way I never have. I have to actually push all my chips onto the table. Like if this had failed, people would have lost their jobs. I would have to call Nathan and ask him for a job. Everything would fail, and it would be my fault that it failed because I put all my chips on the wrong thing. But if I kept trying to like hold my chips back, they were just falling off the table, and I was going to run out of money anyway. But like that was the biggest thing.

Now I did a bunch of external things that turned it around, but it took an internal shift in me and realizing like I have to change as a person, and I have to become more brave, more in all these areas that like honestly had held me back. I'm 42. I've been trying to do this for a long time. I have come to these inflection points and pulled back and gone and tried something else three or four times. This was the first time I pushed all the way through to the other side. So it is not for the faint of heart.

Then even like this is important because it's making money, this is super important. Of course, it doesn't matter. Like fast forward a billion years, anything I do in my life doesn't matter. So I have to do it for some other reason.

So actually, what I was most proud about on Friday and Saturday when I finished closing all the sales and knowing like the business is not only going to be fine, it's going to be like we're going to double this year. I was the most thing I'm proud about is I'm a different person. Like that was like the best part of the whole thing was I overcame this thing that has been haunting me for decades.

So it's like I'm like I can walk right. Now, even if the company fails, at least I'm a different person. That is, for me, the most exciting part. So I think looking at all of these things is not some sort of like success measure other than it will force you to overcome these demons that are like haunting you. That is the most exciting part of the writing process too, of all of these processes where you have to push through these horrendous barriers.

Nathan: There's a couple of things. I talk about entrepreneurship and setting goals as like to set a goal and to go on a journey. Let's see how to put it. I think about entrepreneurship as setting a goal that is big enough that you're going to have to go on a journey that changes you as an individual. You have to become a fundamentally different person.

We don't have time now, but if we get into stories, right? If we read a fiction story and the hero is the same at the beginning and the end, like that's a terrible story. It's garbage. Toss it out. So I think about that of the difference between a lot of these, maybe someone who hits it off with an audience or a viral video or a blog post or whatever and gets to the point of earning a full time living. Versus the ones that push through and build something really substantial.

Really, I think the biggest difference is that personal change and most people are going to hit that pain point. Because they've achieved a level of comfort in their creative business, they're going to back off from that pain point and say never mind. This $100,000, $300,000 a year, $500,000 a year that I'm making comfortably, I'm going to stick with that. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just if you want.

Tim: Isn't there, though? I hate that we say that. There is something wrong with that. I do think there's something wrong with that. Sure, people are allowed to do whatever they want and live their life however they want. That's fine. But I do think there's fundamentally something wrong with that where you need to change, and you back off. There is something unheroic about that. There just is.

Yeah, you can live your life that way. That's totally fine. Nobody's going to come and like tear you down for that. But it's are you going to be okay with that? Are you going to be okay with consistently making the unheroic choice? I'm not.

Nathan: I think I know I have a set of values and desires that I want to put into my own life and business and everything else. I'm probably a little bit careful to not put those on other people. But I definitely, like the number of times that I see someone else, and I'm you have all the ingredients. If you're willing to put in the effort and change, then you can have this major breakthrough.

Tim: Well, from my side of the table, it's like the amount of people that started businesses in the book industry because they wanted to be a writer, and they've never written anything great. But they have a business. This is what I tell Shawn all the time. I was like I will burn our company to the ground before I will stop writing and pushing myself as a writer because that's how I started.

Like this is where like my next book, when I showed it, Shawn had not read it until I had written the third draft of it. I showed it to him. He told me not only is this the best thing you've ever written, it's one of the best things I've ever read. It's like it doesn't matter how much money I've made on Story Grid the business if it doesn't produce what I set out to produce in the first place.

That's what you're describing. It's like people set out on adventure, and then they get halfway there. They like stop off on the side of the road and get comfortable, and then they just stop. It's like why? It's so boring to stop. It's way more painful to keep going, but it's way more exciting.

So it's that is the thing. I mean I tell Shawn this. I tell my wife this. I'm like if I ever stop, just drag me out into the street put me down. Like it's just what's the point if you're just going to stop and coast? It's like I'm here one time as far as I know. So it's like. I mean, I’m halfway done. So it's like.

Nathan: Do something meaningful with it.

Tim: Do something. Of course it's your values. See, this is the thing is I can look at people. Like we've talked about Ryan Holiday. I don't know Ryan Holiday very well. This could be his version of comfort, or it could be his version of pushing constantly past his comfort zone. Only Ryan knows. The same for anybody successful you've seen. You don't know, right? You're the only one that knows my level of success is here, but internally, I know when I'm being heroic and when I'm pulling back. That's why you can't put your values on other people, but when you lay down at night. Am I doing it? Or am I not doing it?

Nathan: That's a good place to wrap up. I like it. Only you know and can apply it to yourself. Where should people go to? Let's say they're in that group of people. If they're just listening and they're like oh whatever. I don't want to become a better writer. Forget it. Don't look up any of Tim’s stuff. But if any of the people are like that resonates, where should they go to learn more about what you're doing?

Tim: Well, check us out on YouTube. Go to storygrid.com If you go to storygrid.com and scroll down, I have like a little like mini blog post there. At the bottom, you can schedule a time to talk with me. So if you want to get me on the phone for 30 minutes, I'm happy to talk to you. But yeah, YouTube, storygrid.com, sign up for my email list, which runs on ConvertKit.

Nathan: Always. Helping me make some more money.

Tim: All of that stuff. That's right. That's right.

Nathan: Good stuff, Tim. Thanks for coming on.

Tim: Thanks, Nathan.

Rachel: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Billion Dollar Creator. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave us a review. We read every single one. If there is a company you want us to profile on Billion Dollar Creator, send us a message on social media and we will consider it. Thank you and we will see you next time.