Lessons - How One Book About Naval Ravikant Built a Publishing Empire | Eric Jorgenson - Author & Angel Investor

In this lessons episode, learn how best-selling authors refine massive bodies of work into timeless, useful books by focusing only on what truly resonates. Learn how audience feedback from tweets to beta readers helps shape what stays and what gets cut and learn why the best books solve real problems quickly, making them worthy of your time and attention. What do you think when you look at all the different ideas that you brought into this book? How did you select the universally applicable ones and maybe just some wisdom for other authors that are trying to figure out what to put in their body of work versus what to leave out so that it has the highest chance of commercial success? Yeah, so I think my process is weird because I'm starting with a huge body of work, but I started, my napkin math is like there were well over a million words of source material that I worked from. Everything that I've all had ever shared publicly went into the pot and I just tried to cook it all down and cook it all down and the final book is like 40, maybe 50,000 words and it just is like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle and so it's trying to like pick up every idea, understand it, figure out which idea is it connects to, how to create a thread through them, and you know, my first draft, it's like funny in retrospect, my first draft was like 150,000 words, it was like a massive thing and I sent it to my friends and I was like tell me what you think of the book and they're like they're all of them were like I really liked what I read, but I did not shit. That was like okay, thank you. Which parts did you jump to? What did you skip? Like where, you know, where were you excited to flip to? And it was just a process of like cutting out anything that didn't really vibe with people and that was heartbreaking because there's a bunch of stuff in there that I thought was really interesting that I loved that I wanted people to know and Tucker has got great lines that I've now adopted on this which is like nobody gives a shit what you want them to know, like they want what serves them, like who are you, you're not prescribing, you're not lecturing, like nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a lecture, deliver things that the reader wants and so much of so many of all's ideas really speak to like universal desires as you said and so it was really a process of like getting rid of niche things, getting rid of anything contemporary and making sure that it was I truly think we got this book to a point where any human being on earth can pick it up and take away at least one useful idea from it that can that if applied can change their life. Truly like no matter what your circumstances are, this book can do something for you. Did you have a process for testing which ideas resonated with an audience that again somebody, again, so someone like me, I have a huge body of work, I don't know what to put into a book, I have my own thoughts, I have, you know, I could do some tools of Titan type stuff like Tim Ferris did, pretty easy to do that, but is there a framework or a process or even like a focus group, I don't know if people still do those but maybe a focus group or just hit up your friends and texted them and we're like, hey, does this idea hit awesome, I'm going to include it. Yeah, I mean, I think this is the the open secret of like so many of the greatest authors of this sort of decade like James Clear was a blogger. He spent years writing that book tweeting, seeing the responses of different tweets, putting things in newsletters, talking to people, doing talks, seeing what resonated in different blog posts and he was so methodical about that book itself. This is also Morgan Housel story. This is also Tim Ferris' story. In a way, this is Nevolse, right? Like the internet had already made Nevol popular for these ideas and I wasn't systematic in like I'm going to make sure all of the most liked tweets are in this book. That's not how I approached it. It was much more curatorial of like what's the most useful thing? How do they all fit together? And then just removing things that people found boring. And so I think process wise, to your point, like you have a lot of data, you have a lot of information already just based on historical behavior, what people have found interesting. You could look at replays on the YouTube, on your YouTube like they, you could look at what clips are performing, you could look at your open rates, you could look at on different subject lines, you could look at you can export your whole tweet history and look at the likes and retweets on those things. There's so much data available to you as a creator who's like gone through this for years and years and years. And then once you're in book form, I really, I've become a believer in the like the you know, beta readers. And so I get to some point in the manuscript where I'm like, I don't know how I'm good. I'm reaching my crossroads of like I'm not, I don't have high conviction in the decisions I'm about to make, but I think this is getting good, but I feel like I'm slowing down on it. So I'm going to take a snapshot version of this manuscript, I'm going to stop working on it. I'm going to send it to 25 people. They're all going to read the same version of the manuscript. I'm going to have a call with each of them. I'm going to ask them all the same questions. And I'm going to see what they recall. I'm going to see what they're excited to talk about. I'm going to see what parts they skipped. I'm going to, and then you know, you can't overweight on any one person and you want them all to read the same thing. And then you just use your judgment to process all of that and try to get it, you know, diverse group of people. So you got a different set of opinions. And I found that to be a really, really good way. And then just frankly having the balls to edit and edit and edit and keep cutting and remember that nothing's wasted, you know, maybe, maybe you're writing two books at once and your scrap goes into the start of the next book. Maybe it goes into the blog, maybe it goes into marketing, but it really helps to know that you're not just, you know, lighting that work on fire when you pull it out of the manuscript, but you're doing a favor to the core book and you're building something, you're getting another asset out of the sawdust basically. How do you launch a book that's self-published? Take it to market, sell it, all of that. It's pretty simple. I mean, it's the same things you do if it's, if it's traditionally published, the difference is just that you own the whole upside. You know, it is a process of like gathering your people around you, preparing them for this book that's coming, asking for what you need, being organized. There's some things that you do that are like, it depends a lot on the book and the goal. And now, you know, in my role at scribe, I've gotten to take, you know, more and more authors through this. And it's always a process of trying to understand what each individual author is trying to achieve with their book. And the tactics, the specific tactics are changing, sometimes like year to year or quarter to quarter. But it's a really, you know, you get listed on a few distribution platforms. You sort of inventory your assets, where your audience is, come up with compelling offers, come up with messaging. And you try to orchestrate a big launch, but then the real game is like, do you just keep marching and keep driving impressions on this book for weeks and months and years down the line? I think a lot of authors main mistake is like over and next on the launch. And then you never talk about their book again after, you know, a month after they launch it. It's like, how many times do you have to hear about a book before you actually buy it? Let alone a lot. A lot. A lot. Yeah. A lot. And like, I mean, like, atomic habits has been around for forever. But now like people after hearing about it on 10 podcasts, like, finally, they'll go and get it. So I mean, it takes a lot to convince, because you're, you're, it's somebody's time and energy, right? And, and that's really what you're tapping into. It's not the 25 bucks or the 30 bucks. It's like a week of somebody's life, for a month of somebody's life. Or, you know, the, the, the, the parameter I used for, for me, whether or not I wanted to assume a book is like, okay, is it worth me downloading this unaudible for like my five hour flight? Is that worth it to me? Is this what I want to spend my flight doing? And there's a lot of options. There's a lot of options out there. So you, again, it's going to take a lot to convince somebody to actually consume that content. Was there any, you're going to take something or no? Oh, I can't if you want me to. I think that goes back exactly. Go for it. Go for it. Go for it. Yeah. Dude, that comes back exactly to like, what is the reader's benefit? Like, nobody's going to sit down and spend six hours reading a book that you think they should read. They're going to send six hours. They're going to choose the book that they think makes their life the most better, the soonest, right? Like, what problem are you trying to solve? If this book is going to help me solve that problem, I'm going to pick that up right now and take it into my flight. And I'm going to listen to this thing. And hopefully I got new ideas for how to solve this problem and improve my life by the time I land. Like, if that's how your book feels to people and you've trimmed out all the other bullshit, like, it'll go. You know, I, I think, you know, you ask how to launch a book and I ultimately like, I don't know how to sell books. Like, I only know how to write books that people sell to each other. Like, when you read a book, it's rarely because you saw an advertisement for the book or were just randomly scrolling and saw one impression on it. It's because your friend who read it said, this book is fucking awesome. It talks about solving exactly the problems that we were just talking about last week. I just read it. You should read it. Here it is. Like, so in that way, like, being doing the work to start the flywheel of word of mouth and start people talking about your book, recommending it, you know, getting it as an author invited on a podcast or newsletters and it just, that's the flywheel that has to get started and you just have to keep pushing to get that thing started no matter how hard it is. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.