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You've heard the book publishing podcasts that give you tips for selling a lot of books and the ones that only interview world-famous authors. Now it's time for a book publishing show that reveals what actually goes on behind the cover.
Hosted by New York Times bestselling author Anna David, Behind the Book Cover features interviews with traditionally published authors, independently published entrepreneurs who have used their books too seven figures to their bottom line to build their businesses and more.
Anna David has had books published by HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster and is the founder of Legacy Launch Pad, David is the founder of Legacy Launch Pad Publishing, a leading hybrid book publisher for entrepreneurs. In other words, she knows both sides—and isn't afraid to share it.
Come find out what traditional publishers don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 0:00
Welcome to the show where writers fill
Unknown Speaker 0:07
the tea process and their therapy.
Speaker 2 0:11
Let's talk about the money. Hi there. Welcome to Behind the book cover. I'm so glad you're here, because that means you and I are simpatico. You are not just a dreamer, you are a doer. So please share this episode with another doer in your life. If what you hear in it resonates. I know this one resonated with me. This was a fun one. We get we get spicy. Ah god, I just embarrassed myself and think I should start again, but I'm not going to. This is an interview with my friend Daniel D Piazza, and he and I are so aligned with what we think about book publishing. We met years ago. We get into this in the interview, but we had an extremely interesting way that we came back together, so we get into that. But let me tell you about him. He's a longtime writer. He's an entrepreneur, and he's the founder of New Wave press, which is a company much like legacy Launchpad, that helps entrepreneurs write and publish books that build authority. He's been around building the personal brand before the personal brand was a personal brand thing. He landed a traditional book deal. We have a little bit of a fight about if anybody should be doing traditional publishing or not, and so much more. So with that, I give you. Daniel D Piazza, hello, hi. I was thinking, thank you for being here. And thinking about you coming on. I thought about how interesting it was that you did something that people don't rarely do, which is you reached out to me and you said, I'm starting a company does the same thing as yours. Let's talk. That's kind of what you said, right?
Unknown Speaker 1:58
Yeah. And I thought that was super cool. You too,
Speaker 2 2:04
because I think most people look at people who do what they do as competitors, and I think you and I look at them as collaborators.
Speaker 3 2:14
Yeah, you're crushing it. I super respect what you are doing. I always have thought that you have a really unique voice. There's a lot of crap out there, and your voice rings really true. It's perfectly fitting that you would have a publishing company. You share a lot of the same sentiments as me, with just the industry in general, and just, you know, the disillusionment of it. And so there's enough work out there for everyone. There's enough, enough projects out there to fill both of our cups, and probably more if we work together. So that's just how I feel.
Speaker 2 2:50
Yeah, I loved it. And let's talk, let's talk about your publishing journey. When I met you, you had just gotten your book deal, I believe I remember. Do you remember how we met?
Speaker 3 3:02
I was, I was probably, it was either at James's party or it was at Craig Clements, I don't know.
Speaker 2 3:08
No, it was a, it was so interesting, because it was almost like, I always think that there are no real there's not that many entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, which is kind kind of true. I mean, Craig and all of them, but, but it was this gathering. I had never been to anything like it, and it was this gathering up an apartment up second floor, and I think it was at James's, and it was just a group of people, and it was my first exposure to a sort of mastermind. But it was, I don't know if it was one time meeting or I was only invited once, but we just sat around and talked about what we did, yeah, and there was a whiteboard. I remember a whiteboard.
Unknown Speaker 3:43
There was a whiteboard. Yeah, there's a whiteboard.
Speaker 2 3:45
And I remember you just being so memorable and so generous. And you got up in front of the group and you said, I write for Ink Magazine. I think it was ink. Does anyone else want to write for ink? Because I'd love to introduce you to my editor. And I was like, who does that? Dude?
Speaker 3 4:00
I might have short term memory, or, I guess long term now, as long term is so bad that people can just tell me whole stories about me. And I'm like, that sounds like an awesome person. That sounds great. I'm glad you had that experience.
Speaker 2 4:10
I just had this. I just had this the other day because I have, like, the memory of a steel trap. Somebody said to me, remember when we had breakfast with Natasha Leone? And I'm like, I would remember that they're absolutely positive it happened, and I have zero memory. I'm like, oh, it's starting. It's starting.
Speaker 3 4:30
I think with the meditation I've taken the stay in the present thing too, literally, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 4:37
However that I'm flattered. You do remember meeting me at this occasion. I do. I do and and you. I found your journey really interesting. You, you, you understood, let's just say marketing and gathering an audience quite early. You were quite young. Tell Tell us about your journey. I'll give you the abbreviated version.
Speaker 3 4:57
I started writing online in 19. 98 I was one of the first recipients of a poetry.com award for a Christmas poem called Christmas of joy, sweet little baby Jesus, who knew back when the family was Catholic, and I was always fascinated with online writing. I was one of the first bloggers that I ever knew, which was such a cool way of expressing ourselves at that time. And I just want to note that the internet, the flavor of the internet, was so different back in the 90s, and it felt so warm and welcoming and open and cool and fun and trendy and hip. And now I hate the internet. I mean, I just deal with it because it's just part of our environment. It's like saying I hate the roadway. I hate the highway. Well, you got to go on it, yeah, but the internet was so cool and you can unplug from it. So I started blogging as early as 2006 and like, this is like, I don't know if you remember Zenga and MySpace and all these, like, micro blog sites. And I was so resistant to even having a MySpace for a while that my friends made me one. And, like, put my pictures up in there for me, and in a story that I'm not going to tell, that MySpace, that random abandoned MySpace, led to my dad, who I hadn't met, who had ever met, connecting with me again at 19, and then marrying my mom. But that's a different story. What? That's a different story. Didn't know. Okay, okay, that's the next book, something like that. And so I started blogging before I knew that was a thing that was a thing that you could do as a career, because you really couldn't. I originally wanted to be a, like, a public speaker, so, like the Les browns, you know, and just that whole, like, that whole era Brian Tracy, like, I really liked that swag. But I was leaving high school in the early 2000s and we were just about to go into the internet age, just about to go social media, but we weren't quite there yet. So there wasn't a clear path to be able to like, speak and do your thing creatively publicly. Yet it was just forming. There was just going from that Tony Robbins personal power on DVD and VHS era, not even DVD, CD, cassette, VHS era, to moving fully digital, because YouTube got really big, 2000 567, yeah. So I started just posting online. I was originally blogging on Facebook when you had to have a university account to get on Facebook, yep. And then I think it was one of the first people to have my own domain. So danieldpi.com and I was just looking at the way back machine, where you can look at your old stuff, and it's lovely to see that, isn't it really scary, so bad, but it's history. And so I started blogging, and what ended up happening was I was one of the first people in a space that was growing. So that's really important, and I had a lot to say, which is important, and then some of my opinions were divisive sometimes, and it was also just feeding into this growing feeling that my generation didn't want to do the corporate ladder thing. And so I was speaking about that and blogging about my journey from maybe 2010 1011 where to get my first main writer role. I just emailed Arianna Huffington directly and said, Can I do this? And she's like, sure. Like, that's how early days it was. And I just started clawing my way up. And then after about 1000 entries, eventually, one day, one of them exploded. And then, you know how it goes, you'll only need one or two big splashes in the pond before you can start to leverage that. And then I was able to grow social from there and just, you know, kind of like, position myself. But I didn't really even know I was building a brand. I just thought I just thought I was I didn't know what I was doing, yeah, so just, you know,
Speaker 2 8:26
that's so interesting. When you said, oh, you know how it is I you were talking to someone who has never gone viral, despite putting hundreds of 1000s of things on the
Unknown Speaker 8:34
internet, viral is relative. What do you mean
Unknown Speaker 8:36
viral? I'm the slow, steady your scribe.
Speaker 3 8:39
Post alone is viral. That do have viral moments.
Speaker 2 8:43
Okay, that was semi viral. However, back to you.
Speaker 3 8:46
So no, also, you have a rant on YouTube about the publishing industry that's also going viral,
Speaker 2 8:51
yes, but I hate how I look because of the love.
Speaker 3 8:54
Oh, come on. It's great. Info
Unknown Speaker 8:58
heavier, so I never share it. I
Unknown Speaker 9:00
know you really
Unknown Speaker 9:03
point great clip.
Speaker 2 9:06
I gotta make it audio. That's what I gotta do. That's what I'm gonna do. Vanity Trumps.
Speaker 3 9:10
Women have the extra layer. The women have the extra layer of having to feel like they have to worry about that shit. Yeah, and men do too, but not as much. I just
Speaker 2 9:18
didn't know when I went to do that interview in some like Random House in Pasadena. What a big YouTube show that was that London real? No, it's called film courage. I don't know. Great. I've been on Good Morning America today's show dozens of times. No one's seen as many clips as that. Yeah, I have an amazing gift for making it about me. So let's go back to you. I did that so you think so. So you what really in my perception, what you did that was the most valuable is you understood the newsletter list. You gathered a huge list. I think you, I remember you like hundreds
Speaker 3 9:58
of 1000s. So it was 170 at one point. It's smaller now.
Speaker 2 10:03
And and you really built a brand around something that, and I'm putting words in your mouth, I think you outgrew for sure. So, so your brand was basically called Rich 20 something, yeah.
Speaker 3 10:15
Where's that book? Where's that book that set me up?
Speaker 2 10:19
So, so all these dudes, I'm assuming it was mostly men, mostly men, 60, 4060, okay, that's actually more women than I would think. Looked at you and said, Okay, this guy knows how to get rich as a 20 something. There we go. Yes. What's an interesting thing about your book cover is that the subtitles more noticeable than the title?
Speaker 3 10:45
Do we want to have the cover conversation, or do you want to go somewhere else?
Speaker 2 10:48
Okay, okay, so, so what we are really here to talk about is the future of publishing, so I can have that combo with you. Okay, how pissed were you about that cover?
Speaker 3 10:58
Well, I just, I just thought, I just, I just thought, I just thought that they would give me some creative input. I just thought, and they thought this was so cool, because, like, this was a way that you could this looked like an Instagram post at the time. And I'm like, Guys, you don't want to take it literally. Like, let's, let's think about this. And also, it's ironic, because I live in New York now, but I lived in LA at the time. I'm like, I don't care about New York. I don't need the Chrysler or the Empire State, the Empire State. I'm like, this isn't my brand, really. So they just kind of took complete control, and I didn't in my next contract. If I ever do one patricianal, which I won't actually never mind, there won't be a next contract, but if I did have one, yeah, I would say I have to have creative control.
Speaker 2 11:32
Last say, on the cover, whatever. So how did your book deal come about? This is a really
Speaker 3 11:37
interesting story. I'll try to condense it again. But I always think of the Kevin Bacon, Kevin Bacon, Kevin Bacon effect. I always think about, like, who do you know to introduce you to? Who do you know? That's like, for some reason that's always so fascinating to me that, and I don't remember if you know, if you remember this movie by Ashton Kutcher, like, 20 years ago, the butterfly effect, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, we go back to change his past, but or change his future by changing one detail in his past.
Speaker 2 12:00
Yeah. I mean, it was based on the book The Butterfly Effect, right? Okay, well, I thought you were a publisher. Go on.
Speaker 3 12:05
I didn't read them. I didn't know you didn't look I just like the movie. Go on, go on. I really like to think about how I made certain connections, made certain advancements, and the steps it took that seem small at the time, but ended up being huge in the long run. And this book came about because I, when I, before I moved to LA, I was living in Atlanta because I was working as an actor, naturally, as one does and and when I got out to LA, I knew nobody. I only knew one person, and it was this guy who I met on a on a website, through a chat bubble. This is like 2011 or 12, and this is a website called The Art of Charm. We're all the same. We're all swimming in the same pool, aren't we? Yeah, called Art of Charm. And the guy who was made in the chat bubble's name was Jordan Harbinger, yep, yep. And this is a time when they, for them, their early media was podcast. I mean, they were podcasting before there was podcasting, you know, like it was they got in deep early and so I was talking to Jordan, and he was probably just trying to prospect me to see if I joined one of their programs, which is true, and but he was only person I knew when I got out to LA. And so when I got out to LA, I was like, How can I leverage my pizzazz to, like, get a meeting with this guy? And I'd been writing at that time for a website called under 30 CEO. And I connected the owner of the under 30 website with Jordan. I said, Hey, you guys should do some content together. I think this would help Jordan for your audience, and this will help you for your credibility. Matt, and they liked that. I thought that was cool. So I kind of, like wedged myself into getting a meeting with Jordan to get some sushi to, like, talk about things. Yeah, so we had a meeting in Hollywood, had some sushi. And I always, at that time was like, you know, asking, Who else can I this is really great meeting. Who else can I meet that you might want to introduce me to. I always have the social architecture thing, and he introduced me to his friend, Gabe. And Gabe had just gotten a TV slot for a streaming media company called the lip TV, which was this cool spot outside of Beverly Hills, right before, right from Beverly Hills goes from like gritty dogwood to nice in the site, there's the sign like, like johini, I guess so it was right by, what's that garlic restaurant that's right on Beverly Hills?
Speaker 2 14:27
Yeah, I think it's gone, but yeah, and it's right by foga to chow. And yes, right on La Cienega, where all the motels used to be, go on exactly.
Speaker 3 14:36
And yeah, and then, and the studio was right after the Beverly Hills sign right on La Cienega. And there's little little cave studio, but it was this really cool setup, come to learn later, that was funded by Mel Gibson at the time when Mel Gibson was not hot. He's coming back into vogue now, but he was not hot at that time. You know, all this different shit he was going on. Yeah. So they had this crazy setup. It was the first time I ever saw a tri caster, which was like me. Multiple, like, you know, TV, click, click, click. And they had like, this crazy video background set up. And was, they were doing long form YouTube, and I thought, I said, Gabe, this is amazing, you know, I didn't know there was, like, streaming television like this. And so we were talking about it. And I was like, All right, now that I'm here, as I'm saying this out loud, I'm thinking I was kind of, I was really willing and dealing. But I was like, Okay, now that I'm in LA I'm like, how am I gonna get my face on the map? What am I gonna do? So I started looking on Amazon, and I was like, which celebrities have books coming out right now that I could write it out on my Huffington Post slot, which I just directly emailed for? Like, how could I cross the road? And I saw that Laurie Grenier from Shark Tank had a book that was coming out was called invent it, sell it, bank it. And I was living out of my shit Redondo Beach apartment, which was more expensive than anything I had in Georgia. And muscle, it's nice, yeah? And I'm like, I need to figure out how to interview this lady for her book. So I went on to this PR site called who represents which, if you spell it slowly, call is whore. I was thinking, whore presents. Yeah, I know to say whore presents. Yeah. I don't know if it's still up, but it was a good site back in the day, yeah, database. And so I actually had a paid membership. No, I was, I think it was jumping off my friends. I was just, I was stealing his but I logged into horror presents, and I saw that Lori's manager, or one of her publicists, whose name was Penny, was based in Hollywood. I'm like, I'm gonna call this lady up and say I'm with the Huffington Post. It's kind of tech. It's not really true technically, but I'm a contributor. And yeah, yes, I am. Why not Arian gave me the stamp? I'm doing it? Sure. So I basically called them up, and I was like, actually, no. First I called Laurie's publisher, and I said, I'm with Huffington Post. I want an advanced copy. So they sent me an advanced copy. Then I called her public then I called her publicist, and I was like, I just got an advanced copy from Penguin. I want to play them on each other. And it totally worked. And Lori was in town the next week, and I swung by an Uber Black. She was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, picked her up in an Uber, took her a mile down the street to the studio. She was with her husband, Dan, at the time, they just still married, I guess. But Dan, I remember his name, and we did this crazy interview at the studio that Gabe had just shown me, because I basically finagled it. I'm like, Gabe, let me come in and do some shooting. Like, yeah, this would be good content for you guys, and it shouldn't be a problem. And the whole crew actually stayed on until like, maybe 10 or 11 o'clock at night just to film this thing I did with Laurie. They didn't know me, nothing, yeah. So I came in there, shot this thing with Laurie. It was cool. It was honestly, really great production. And the next day, the owner of the studio said, called me. Said, I saw you. Recorded this spot at my studio. What fuck was that about? So we went out to lunch. This guy, his name is Michael, man. You think you can talk a lot? This guy talks a lot. I mean, yours, there's really no, like, you can't just set the topic in the beginning instead and forget it, you know. But at the end of that conversation, he's like, Oh, also, by the way, do you want to just have a slot on the network? And I'm like, absolutely. So I started doing these interviews with these different celebrities and people from like, movie stars to porn stars, which my girlfriend, at the time did not like, because she's like, how would you know who these porn stars are if you're not looking at them? But that's a different conversation. There's too much logic in that conversation. I can't have that conversation. But eventually I got to interview this man named Stephen key. Stephen Key wrote this book called one simple idea. It's all about making products and licensing into bigger companies, and I interviewed him. He loved the interview. Was tickled by it, and he interviewed he introduced me to his editors at entrepreneur and Inc, which got me in there. And then a couple months later, he's like, You need to meet my literary agent, Kirsten, and that's who became my agent, only after I pursued her still for another almost, almost two years, almost two
Unknown Speaker 18:44
years, two years from that conversation, from that
Speaker 3 18:47
company, yeah, two years from each I mean, because she's like, I like your concept, because this is just when I was just growing the rich 20 brand. It was like, maybe 2012 13, yeah. And she's like, grow your newsletter. So what ended up happening was, I grew the newsletter, and at the same time, Instagram was taking off so but in between conversations with her, I'd be like, Hey, I'm at 10,000 followers. Hey, am I 50,000 Hey, about 90,000 she's like, Oh, Hello, nice to hear you. Yeah. And then that's and then in late 2015 is when the book
Unknown Speaker 19:15
deal was signed. Yeah. And I
Speaker 2 19:17
think you know a lot of people, I'm sure you encounter them say I have this book idea. It is so amazing, and maybe it is sure, but and now it's changed even for the worse. But I would say in the last 10 years, if you didn't have a newsletter list or a following, it didn't matter how good your idea is today. I don't even think if you have the following and the track record, it matters. I don't know. No one I know is selling books these days to traditional publishers. Huge writers are not getting book deals. Yeah, well,
Speaker 3 19:53
let's see. What are the pluses to working with, but with a major publisher, let's go through that exercise.
Speaker 2 19:58
I don't see. See any? But there is a misconception in the world that there, that there are benefits. Do you see any?
Speaker 3 20:08
Let me ask you this. I'm sure you're like a member of Publishers Marketplace, all this crap.
Speaker 2 20:14
I am actually not. That's how, how little I care. I do not pay for a subscription.
Speaker 3 20:20
It's okay, fair. I just like to see, I like to see what's going on with these people. I might log in one day. I'll give it to you. Why? Why would Mel Robbins keep selling traditional
Speaker 2 20:31
Well, Mel Robbins is in a different position. If Mel Robbins, I think, understood that she doesn't need them that she could easily. She should
Speaker 3 20:42
understand that She's smart. She's done a few books now she gets it. What is keeping her there? The advance can't be as good as she could get for herself.
Speaker 2 20:49
I believe that if you are at a certain level of fame or influence, traditional publishing can be useful. I would say point, oh, 1% of the population, if that is in that position. I mean, don't forget, I've been around this for 25 years, sure. So I have seen it. That might be an exaggeration. That's an exaggeration, but not much. And I have, you know, I know, as many people who have not done traditional as have, you know, I probably have, you know, 100 friends who've done traditional book deals. I have about 99 friends who are absolutely devastated by the experience.
Unknown Speaker 21:37
You tell me what you see as the advantage?
Speaker 3 21:41
Well, what I will say is, most, pretty much everyone who says, fuck traditional publishing. I don't know if I can curse on the show. I'm assuming I can. Yeah, my perspective is anyone who says they don't want traditional publishing is also saying that because they they've gotten the point where they've already done it and realized it wasn't for them. So it's always like, you know, hindsight is 2020, type thing. Every Les Brown says everyone wants to know. Everyone says being rich will make you happy, but they want to find out for themselves type thing. So I think the benefits are definitely ego. It feels good to win, and when you feel chosen, that is a powerful signal to your subconscious that you're worthy of doing the work, we'd have to choose yourself, as James ulter would say, it's harder, because you have to be the one that believes in the project. If a publisher chooses you, you at least believe that they're going to put some they're putting some money behind you. And there's supposedly a team that's debatable. We can talk about that, but it's like, Oh, I've been, I've been drafted into the NFL. I don't have to play by myself. I'm with the big dogs. There's value to that, and I and it also gives you something to measure your success after or upon afterwards. Financially, there's not much of a benefit, and we can talk about that too well.
Speaker 2 22:53
You are the only person I know personally who, like me, read the 100 the 1000 page lunatics. Sitting over there, the lawsuit between Simon and Schuster and PRH, yeah, and what they admitted freely in court was that they have no idea what's going to be successful. To a degree they know Mel Robbins and are going to be successful, and they only support those. They admitted that. So it is an entirely different experience. You know, I had somebody, a friend of mine, said, Jennifer, she had said it on my podcast. Jennifer Keisha Armstrong said, you know, when she had a book that hit the New York She says her third book hit the New York Times list the first week they said, her publisher said, let's have a marketing meeting. And she goes, What are you talking about? We've been having you talking about? We've been having marketing meetings. And they said, No, we're gonna have a real marketing meeting now. And so she got to taste what it was like before they valued her, and after what, I think like this chosen thing, I think we people don't understand. A publisher just gave you 100 grand. Of course, they support you. You, they don't You don't know that they consider you a loss leader. Certainly, if it's under 100 grand and that they're gonna make their nut so far, what they lose on you and 99% of their other deals will be so made up by Mel Robbins that they don't care. All they
Speaker 3 24:18
need is Mel Robbins and Twilight for a decade. Yeah, literally.
Speaker 2 24:22
So my theory about it, by the way, is that the reason books are so they either succeed or fail, and when they succeed, they succeed in the hugest way is that most people don't read. And so the
Speaker 3 24:39
sorry, you know I don't it just hurts me.
Speaker 2 24:43
Yeah, I'm aware, true. So, so when a book starts to succeed, what you have to do is shame non readers into and so what happens is people go to parties and they say, have you read? Let them. And the person says, says, No, I have never, I don't read books. They say that to themselves, and then they go home and buy it. And by the way, I don't even think they read it. But the only way to have a book really hit is when non readers are going to be shamed into reading.
Speaker 3 25:13
I love that perspective. And I'll I want to just add a couple points, just quick little T's to your dot, your I's and cross your t's on this one, traditional publishing is, traditional publishing is just like VC it's just like VC money, yeah. So if you can deal with that type of ecosystem, you'll you'll love traditional publishing. And that VC takes everything, expects you to give everything you have, and only rewards you when you quadruple extra money, quintuple extra money. There's that, um, there's also just, yeah, talking about people don't read, and shaming them into reading. I don't know Mel Robbins personally, and I haven't read any of her books, so I'm the least informed person to have this opinion, but I have watched a good amount of her content, and I guess I'm not the target, because it just doesn't resonate. It feels so vanilla. And I just got to say, I there's a certain part of me that I think, because I look on the publisher stats, I'm like, this is selling millions of copies, and I guess it's good, but we're not really. Is this helping people? And maybe it is, maybe. But you know, it's certainly, it's certainly, there's the machine that's pumping out that. And you can look at the charts, and it's like something like hundreds of 1000s of copies a week. And you think so there is a marketing
Speaker 2 26:31
machine here. I'm just not part of it, yeah, and you know, I'm in the same position. I've never read anything by her. I actually hear she's an absolutely lovely person and getting, you know, crazy backlash, who knows, but? But it doesn't speak to me. I think so. So this is coming from a totally uninformed perspective. When I say bland sells. People love bland. The masses love bland. Oh, my God. I mean, I think I just bullshit. I'm spinning, but I believe it like, I think what happens like when a Glennon Doyle, who, to me is is giving a sort of, you know, very basic, you know, very basic, you know, I'm an activist, I'm in recovery, I'm a lesbian, but, and that's interesting. I'm not saying that's not interesting, but it's a very basic portrayal of that people can project themselves onto. It comes down to narcissism when you're really an interesting person. And perhaps, you know, I say this to comfort myself, it's really harder to to project yourself onto that, you know, I think you know it for the Kardashians, or something like that. For all that they, you know, have this aspirational because of their wealth, there's not a lot of there, there, and people are very attracted to not a lot of there.
Unknown Speaker 27:51
How do you explain Kanye West? Well, first of all,
Speaker 2 27:57
that, dude, yeah, just, you know, the stopped clock is right twice a day, or whatever. You know, this
Speaker 3 28:04
prince, the princes of the world, the weirdos, the kravitses that I mean, these, Back Jack these,
Speaker 2 28:09
there are 1,000% exceptions to any rule, you know. So I would just say it's not the norm.
Speaker 3 28:17
I think you're right. I would, I would almost word it less as bland and boring, which I do find to be true, but also formulaic,
Speaker 2 28:24
yeah, yeah. Don't. Don't hide that sultry voice behind your hand. By the way, we just lost some sound. Didn't lose it, yeah? So okay, so since we're talking about the future of publishing, what do you see as the future of book publishing?
Speaker 3 28:39
Oh, man, I have so much to say about this. Well, first of all, we know that just looking at the stats, things are moving digitally, but they're still strong. There's still strong buying power in hardcover. People still buy hardcover. This is what we see from the stats. From my own sales inside of our company, we saw that more than half was audiobook and digital sales over the past year, which doesn't surprise me, Spotify and well, Audible has been there, but Spotify is now really picking up steam as a place where people will listen to books. It also depends on the genre as well. So for instance, fiction really does well with ebook. Nonfiction doesn't do as well with ebook I know because I got into listening, into reading and listening to a lot of erotica over the past two years, which is great, via via audiobook, and I would feel embarrassed bringing it to the beach, though. So same thing, like we, you know, we published a book by James, who was a mutual friend, and this book is all on quitting drinking, which you have also talked about a lot. And some people are embarrassed to read that in public, but they're happy to listen to it. So, format? Yeah, formats a thing, but I think in terms of the future, I see two I see two paths, and maybe we'll tread both at the same time. The first is, I'll really like a reversion to the classics. And I say this because as technology becomes more pervasive. Decisive, and we see that there are book bannings in certain states, and then AI is taking over a lot. I think there will be a select group of people who really embrace analog, which is embracing not only the paper format, but also just returning to the classics. Because I think as we get more abstract with AI, people are going to want less of that and want to go back to the things they know are truly human. If you just use a lot of AI, you realize this is not creating anything new, and what it is creating kind of sucks. And if all of our voices are going to sound like this, I don't want to be in this creative environment. It's really bad. Even when Claude is doing its best, it's like what I can write. It might take me five times as long, but it's a million times better. And I think people are going to connect with that more, that human voice as AI becomes more prevalent, because it's going to be really obvious what's human and what's not, even though, like on some day to day stuff, we're going to be using AI, I think with the creative stuff, people are going to want to know that it came from a human. They're going to appreciate it more when it does, and they're going to have an intuitive sense of it. That's one element. The second element, and it could happen with a different segment of people, is that we go all digital, so everything is created via AI. Our favorite new authors are AI. Things are algorithmically, algorithmically created. So it's like, essentially, there's like an agentic wheel where people read, and then the feedback reports what they're reading and what they like, and then it produces new stuff that they might like. And so there's that whole flywheel that probably will happen for a certain segment as well. I don't think there's much of a middle ground, though.
Speaker 2 31:25
So interesting. Don't you think, personally, you'll stay middle ground?
Speaker 3 31:29
I think I will. I have to, because of my position in the market, yeah, but as a casual reader, I think I enjoy. I mean, look, I'm reading East of Eden right now for the first time, and it's like blowing my mind, like it's bringing me to tears. It's like eating the best meal so slowly, and there's just, you just can't tell AI can't do this, bro, it can't do this. When it can, I'll come back. I mean, you know, I have Carl Jung's the Red Book over here. What is AI gonna do for this? Nothing. So I think I'm more on the M log side, but I have to observe digital because we're moving into a digital world, and I'm trying to get paid.
Unknown Speaker 32:05
Yeah, yeah. So
Speaker 2 32:09
you and I, when we, when I said, I think we need to collaborate more, and it really hasn't happened, but we've taken steps into it. You've done all the work. That's kind of true. We started, you know, we were talking about how the, you know, the revenue model is clearly not book sales, it's Authority building. How did your book help with your authority? I mean, I know it's a different authority than you are now embracing, but tell me about that.
Speaker 3 32:38
Well, first of all, you, you, I think, shared a post a couple weeks ago, and I was like, Oh, I fucking love this. That you shared this, what really pisses me off? It really pisses me off when I hear authors whining and complaining about their book sales and not taking any responsibility for learning the mechanisms of marketing. I'm sorry. I don't feel bad for you. I understand it's different from genre to genre, but especially if you're doing like nonfiction expert, doing like nonfiction, expert driven nonfiction, yeah, you have no excuse, and this book's gonna take at least a year launch, so get your shit together. Yeah, the so you know, what was question?
Unknown Speaker 33:16
Yes, how did, how did your book?
Speaker 3 33:19
Oh, yeah, authority. Well, yes, all that to say it wasn't an accident, that that thing helped build credibility, I was just adding to something that was already creating momentum. So that's an important thing to think about. When you're launching a book, if you launch it from a dead stop, it's really hard to make anything happen unless it's the book. And even when it's the book, a lot of times people overlook it. Ask JK Rowling, I'm sure she was overlooked for many years. I know she was so with with the authority building piece of a book. It really comes down to solidifying your expertise into a teachable framework or into a recognizable model that people can associate with you. We all associate expertise with essentially consolidation around an idea and branding of an idea. A lot of the things that we talked about as experts, whether you know, for instance, on on our roster of authors, we have doctors, we have, like, business owners. We have consultants. We have we have philanthropists. We have, you know, people in different expert areas of their career, and those types of careers, especially when they're facing require you to teach, train, support, inform, direct, codify, organize. These are all ways of like organizing information, and even if you're organizing information that's already existed, not creating anything new, people attach the organization to a person, and they attach that consolidation of the information to a person, especially if you can add mnemonics to it and acronyms and phrases and frameworks, people start to appreciate that, because it helps them to digest all the information. And then when you look and you realize that most of us are now. And there are the majority of information from who would be thought leaders. We can call them thought leaders. People would rather go to Eric Huberman than their doctor to ask about health advice. People would rather there's another Do you know Eric? It sounds familiar? Okay, he's another guy. He's a guy. I know he's a guy, Andrew. They'd rather go to Andrew for health and fitness advice. They'd rather go to Ben Greenfield for health and fitness advice. They'd rather go to James to learn about quitting drinking because they're a high performance, you know, executive, and they don't want to go to a and so people are assuming these like old traditional knowledge sources for personal brands and individuals who have an answer to their specific problem, and books can help to craft that message in a way where people associate the solution to a problem with you personally, and then it's really easy for them to I mean, if we're just talking business here, we can talk about the inspirational element of a book, but from a business perspective, it increases conversion because it lowers the time to sale. It improves your position in the market. So you can raise your prices. There's a reason why the word author is in authority. There's a reason why they have expert witnesses that come to testify, and a lot of times they have books out in court. People view those as high social ranking, high social status, and so it it improves your price point, and it also decreases your customer acquisition cost. If people have spent 20 hours with you, if you're a slow reader, 10 hours with you reading your book, that's a one on one conversation at scale. This the book is the only place where you're really having this psychic connection with someone directly from your brain to theirs. There's podcasting too, but books are a laser focus, razor sharp edge of your consciousness, and it's really old, too. And books get in there, and we can all identify books that have changed our lives. There was a before this book and after this book for me, for some people, it's the Bible, you know, but there's a before and after for certain books, and if you can be one of those before and after for people by just reading their book. There's nothing that you know within reason that you can't get offer them, that they won't at least give it, give it, give a thought. And so you get people on the calls if they've already read your book, it's a done deal. You know, that's all it's selling for you.
Speaker 2 37:13
That was articulated better than I've ever heard it articulated that thanks. It really was. I was trying to explain my business to my mother yesterday, and I wish I could have, you know, recorded that, memorized it. I try to explain it, and it ends up sounding crass, because it ends up sounding like it's all about money. I get it, which is ironic, because it starts with, don't try to make money from book sales,
Speaker 3 37:42
that's why. So we could talk about the inspirational element in the fascination of the book and the creativity. That's a separate thing, but from a purely
Speaker 2 37:49
business perspective, yeah, and I love this, this idea that they associate you with the solution to the problem. So, so would you say, so for your book, your traditionally published book, the solution was, I'm broke, I want to be wealthy. Was that? Was that
Speaker 3 38:04
it, yeah, and I think there's a there's a meta to it as well. So at that time, I was selling courses on freelancing, because I'd learned how to freelance via web design and copywriting. Then I was blogging about that, and then the book was an extension of that, and people would buy those courses from me, video courses. But I think really what, what ended up happening was the expertise and the authority became more meta as I kind of outgrew that model of my business anyway, and that model of my personality, and then we're like, Daniel knows how to write really well. We've seen him publish multiple books. We understand that he understands marketing and can solve problems in business. And so I was able to kind of transfer some of that expertise, because people appreciated the movement as much as they did the actual information.
Speaker 2 38:43
Yeah, yeah. Now, sorry, some weird notification just came up, so let's talk about now. I would assume that a problem with a book like that is that your audience doesn't have a lot of money if they're going to solve the money problem. And it is, I would say, and I think you'll agree, is a lot harder to sell an inexpensive product to a lot of people than it is to sell an expensive product to fewer people.
Speaker 3 39:15
I would say that's generally true, or at least it's just much more frustrating. Yeah.
Speaker 2 39:21
I mean, in my experience, when I was selling low, low ticket items, I was dealing with people who were often quite dissatisfied. Where, when I sell a high ticket item, I'm dealing with people who are often thriving, who have a very expensive mentality. Who, you know, I was getting, you know, I saw, it's all about money with you, isn't it? It's all about money with you. It's all about money. I would sell $30 courses, and have, you know, people say it was overpriced. And now I sell $100,000
Unknown Speaker 39:55
packages, and people say, what a good deal.
Speaker 3 39:57
I know. It's weird. It's i. Yeah, I just had one of our clients also who paid us $100,000 to do her book. And she we just submitted a first draft to her, and she was overjoyed. And I'm like, Wow, that feels good. Yeah, you know. And how many $100 sales? Well, I could do the 10,000 you know, all these $100 sales to make the same amount of money, or $1,000 $100 but anyway, um, yeah, it's just the economics don't make sense for me. For me, that's what I like. And I've done, I've done high ticket. I've done low ticket as well. Yeah.
Speaker 2 40:27
I mean, so, yeah. So if you are looking at authoring as a way to build authority, try to make sure your your clients aren't broke.
Speaker 3 40:37
Well, that. And also, I, I'm not going to go into, like, what in an alternate reality, what I would have done differently with that brand and that book, but you're talking to broke young people. So and I'm also going to age out of my 20s, and I was 29 when that book was published. So, you know, there, I just wish this is another thing about traditional publishing. I think we could talk about, you're not going to get any guidance from your agent or your publisher, really, unless, I mean, unless you've already proven that you can make it. They're not, they're not really there to help you understand your career. Yeah, so, and it's not their job, but it would be nice to have a little bit of input. And so looking back on that, I would have had a clear plan to like leverage to the rich 30 thing, or I would have made some. I would I would have understood that now I have to expand this ecosystem. Otherwise, you know, you're just creating a hole to die in. But luckily, I was able to escape it by other means. But you can pigeonhole yourself with a book, and you have to be aware of that so that you kind of already have your next couple moves planned.
Speaker 2 41:40
Yeah, I think that people will think, and I'll even talk to people who hesitate to do a book because they say, I don't know that. I want to make this my life's mission. You and I are testaments to the fact that you can switch it. It's not easy. You're not starting from zero. I would say you're starting from 30.
Speaker 3 42:01
Well, what I've learned to Jonathan Goodman, you know Jonathan Goodman? Yeah. I mean, I know him from online. Yeah. He made a great he made a great post. And he's like, when I'm because he's coming from the personal training world, and now he's getting more seriously into writing, and he keeps doing these traditional books. I want to slap him. I'm like, why you keep doing this? But anyway, it's a different conversation. But he's like, your expertise doesn't transfer from domain. Because I couldn't get people to respect me in the business space that really respect when there was tons of people who respect me in fitness. And I find that to be true after my like, foray into the publishing world the first time a traditional book, maybe five years later, well, no, about seven years later, I went to go do something else in another space that was all B to see completely different industry. And I would show up to these meetings with customers. I'm like, thinking in my head, like, Do you know who I am? Like in that other space, people would be like, they would literally pay to get on a sales call with me, like we're filtering you and you have to. And now I'm like, you're late to this call. I'm Daniel fucking dpi. Have you looked at me online? Do you know they don't care? The domain, expertise does not transfer. And then if you leave the domain and you come back, oh, the YouTube numbers are just taking a while to get back.
Speaker 2 43:08
Yeah, yeah. I mean, big podcast that you stopped.
Speaker 3 43:12
Oh, man, I was just talking to my friend Corey about this other day. I was podcasting back in 2015 and on the same week, I think I had like, you know, freaking Andy facella and Tom bill you, and all these guys on there. And I'm looking Gerard, I'm looking all these, these people now. I'm like, Oh, they have huge shows. I remember Steve Bartlett texted me or DM me in 2018 to do some collaboration. I was just feeling depressed. I'm like, I can't respond to you right now. Now he's the biggest podcast in the world. I want to come circle back, spin the block, and be like, Hey, bro, yeah, I missed this 10 years later.
Speaker 2 43:43
Yeah, oh God, do I know? You know I had Lewis Howes on my podcast early on. And, you know, yeah, it is, it is crazy as you look at the long view, I think that's another thing, is that people think about what am I doing tomorrow. They don't think about what am I doing in five years and and in my experience, a book can help get you to where, where you want. There are very few people, entrepreneurs, coaches, all of those people who whose careers will not benefit greatly from a book.
Speaker 3 44:26
Well, I think that you're what you're doing is you're creating an asset. So if you're into stocks, this is just something that this is an asset you're buying for yourself, that the value will go up over time, as long as you continue to nurture it and you think enough ahead where whatever you're teaching in there, even if it isn't the thing you're going to be teaching in five or 10 years, there's enough of a personal tie to your thoughts, beliefs and convictions that people will become a fan of you and follow you throughout your career.
Speaker 2 44:53
Yeah, yeah. So anything else about the future of publishing? I mean, I. Loved what you said about us dividing into two. But what do you see? Anything else? Do you see traditional publishing diminishing its influence even more well?
Speaker 3 45:12
You know, I've had to do a lot of research in this, and I find that one traditional publishing is they're in an interesting spot, right? Because they're this legacy industry, and they're one of the last, if not the last, legacy media industry that doesn't have any first party visibility on their customers. So when you think about it like this, the publisher's customer is not the end reader, and it's not even their authors. It's the retailer. And the retailers really were talking about Amazon as most of it, so they have to cater to Amazon, do the song and dance so that Amazon will buy their books, rank their books, promote their books, and they don't have much control over anything besides that, so they don't have first party data. And that's what's been stopping them from being able to truly go direct to consumer now, is that they'd have to change their business model to be able to adapt to current times, and what they're probably going to end up doing is just like the oil and gas industry, they're going to ride this thing all the way to the bottom until they can't get those big hits like they used to, or the ROI isn't there, or they're having to spend too much money to acquire books, and they're not seeing the balance sheet pay off. But I think that so there's two things that they're doing right now. So big publishers are trying to acquire trying to acquire their way out of this, but the PRH suit is kind of putting a stopper on that they're not gonna be able to acquire their way out of the declining growth. And there was a recent law passed by California federal judge. I don't know if you saw this. With this, with this, this case with with Claude, with anthropic. Did you about this? Oh yeah, right. So anthropic was getting sued because they uploaded 1000s or millions of pirated books, which is, like, hilarious, if you think about the context of all this, like they're pirating books. It's just like NAFTA back in the day, if you really think about it. So anthropic is not wanting to pay the publisher for all these books. And the court ruling came back and said, Well, we're going to find anthropic for stealing the books. But the ruling we're going to pass down is that you can legally upload any book that you want that's traditionally published to an LLM, which is a large language model like call or GPT, as long as you buy one legitimate copy, which still and this is a federal court ruling, maybe it will get overturned, but it's completely erodes the idea of copyright off the bat, off the bat, and because what's being said is that it's creating original enough work that it's okay if they upload this material. And I personally don't care if my stuff is in there, but what I know is going to happen is that people who would normally buy books to solve the problems are going to go to GPT from now on, because that's what we've been trained to do, and they're going to find those answers. And a circumstance those people won't buy books or GPT, which is now putting ads in there, will link to books that they want them to buy. But this will erode the publisher's back list revenue, which is their main source. It's about 65% of Publisher revenue over time, 1% a year going to GPT instead of buying a book, adds up over time. So it will erode the back catalog. And they're kind of blocked on acquisitions right now. So they're they're stuck. They're in a dying model, even though reader growth is growing. So more people are are buying books, whether it's via pressure or tactics or not. The book industry is growing. It was about, I believe, was 150 billion in 2025 it's looking to be 240 billion by the end of 2035 so it's growing about 4.1% compounded annual growth, but the companies themselves have an old model to shrinking and dying model. So what they're going to need to do is they're going to need to adapt to a direct to consumer model over the years, and this is going to be painful. So my prediction is that they're going to look to acquire a company that can handle that thing for them, because they're not tech companies and they're not logistics companies, and I think that from a publishing perspective, that's where you and I should be focused.
Speaker 2 48:47
Yeah, I love that. And what I was going to say about how agents and publishers are not concerned you know that their customer is the is the bookstore or Amazon or whatever it is, they would be savvy to to serve the writer more, because that even if that book didn't sell, well, I always say I'd rather sell 100 copies to the right customer than 10,000 to people who wouldn't, who would Forget those customers become sales people, so then they get to be associated with people who have influence. And it's not because it's only you know, the world is divided, gross overstatement. The world is kind of divided into those who want to go work for somebody and those who want to employ people. And if you are one of those who wants to go work for people you're not really training to think outside the box. You're sort of schooled in this old school way of doing things, so they don't even know how to think about it like that.
Speaker 3 49:52
If I was PRH, I'd be looking at our top five authors and saying, Guys, we're going to give you everything we have, and we want to collaborate. We're. Few they should be siphoning off Mel Robbins audience so fucking hard. But they should be giving her so much value. They should be calling up their friends on whatever media networks they have, getting her on MTV before they cancel that network too. They cancel it actually, they should be doing everything. I mean, I share an agent with Trevor Noah, and I couldn't even get a fucking interview with the guy. You know. They should be doing everything they can do. And I think if they did that, that would go a long way to helping their customer information problem, which we saw, which we read in the trial, the 1000 page book, they don't know who the customers are. This is the big problem, but they're not really that incentivized to fix it, because the people who own like PRH, doesn't even own PRH. It's Bertelsmann in Germany. And so they just, they're just, it's just daddy's legacy business. It's a billion dollar portfolio. They're not interested in innovation. They're like, we run, we do books. Yeah, they're not a tech company. And that is where I feel like, from a publishing perspective, independently, there's an opportunity to get in there, not only to sell more books in a more targeted way, but also to potentially be acquired, if we have the systems to help them.
Speaker 2 51:01
Interesting, interesting. Well, I'm unsurprised to announce that this has been a riveting
Unknown Speaker 51:09
conversation. I'm not okay. Thank you.
Speaker 2 51:13
You know, because you really speak my language in a really articulate way and and I think that the rest of the world just needs to catch up to us. I can't wait to clip some of this out and share some this out and share some. Yeah, yeah. So Daniel, thank you so much. If people want to find out more about your company, about what you're doing, where should they go? Oh, you
Speaker 3 51:31
just go to New Wave press.co, that's the business stuff. But really you should search by name on YouTube. This is the only app that I'm contributing to for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 2 51:40
Interesting, your name is not super easy to spell. So will you be in
Speaker 3 51:44
the show notes? D, i, p, i, a, z, z, a,
Speaker 2 51:47
i, what if they're driving? All right. Listener, aren't you driving? And you don't not looking at the show notes? Um, but I, but I go look at the show notes.
Speaker 3 51:56
You will. You'll even if you miss, even if you spell Daniel de pizza, you'll find it. There's no one else that looks or sounds like me. You don't
Speaker 2 52:04
mind well. Thank you so much for being here and y'all. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening to behind the book cover. If you loved it, I hope you'll consider liking and subscribing, because it helps more people find the show and look. You can like and subscribe even if you only liked and didn't love it, but if you hated it, you can skip the review. Or who am I kidding? I'll take one from you too.
Speaker 1 52:25
Research rabbit hole behind the book cover. Let's skip we're asking the questions that you've always been.
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