Amazon Publishing

Looking for 20 beta-testers to pay an unthinkable amount for my new book

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I’m looking for 20 beta-testers for a pre-publication “email draft” of my new book.

The background:

Yesterday, I made my plans for this coming month. My goal #1 in October is to finish writing my new book, titled The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Hypnotists, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Propagandists, and Stage Magicians.

I already have the first 3 commandments/chapters of this new book largely done.

Still, getting the remaining 7 written by the end of this month is ambitious, considering I’ve been working on this book for more than a year now.

In my favor, most of that time has gone to research and outlining. I’ve only been writing for the past few months, on and off. But still — I realized yesterday there’s a good chance that I won’t make it by the end of this month, not unless I change my approach.

I got to thankin’…

I’m good at writing emails, much better than at writing book chapters. Maybe there’s an opportunity there?

And so I thought up a new offer to 1) help me get this book done on time, and 2) entertain and maybe reward a small number of dedicated readers of this newsletter.

So here’s my offer to you:

If you like, you can join a small group of beta-testers for my new book. The price to get inside this exclusive and elite club is an unthinkable $10. That $10 will get you:

1. An extra email with extra content from me, each day this month, starting this Sunday, October 6, and ending Wednesday, October 30, with content that’s intended for the new book.

2. A chance to influence the final content in the book. I hope you you will hit reply when I send you these content emails and share your thoughts. If all goes well, I will have more content at the end of this month than I will need for the book. I will decide what to keep and what to toss based on your feedback.

3. An acknowledgement in the book when I do publish it, because you were there at the start, and because you helped me get it done.

4. A free paperback copy once I publish the book. My current 10 Commandments book sells for $9.99, plus shipping. This new 10 Commandments book will also be priced at $9.99, plus shipping. But join me for this beta tester group, I’ll send you a paperback copy for free when it’s published, and I’ll also cover the shipping.

If you’d like to join, you can do so at the link below. But before you do, a few caveats:

I encourage you to only join if you’re a dedicated reader of these emails… if you’re already interested in getting my new book when it comes out… and if you will have the time to read yet another email over the coming month, and maybe even to hit reply to tell me what you think of what I wrote.

Again, these “new book” emails will start this Sunday. The deadline to sign up for them is this Friday at 8:31pm CET (I want a couple days buffer), though there’s a fair chance I will turn off this offer sooner than that, maybe as soon as tomorrow morning.

If you know you want in right now, here’s where to go:

​https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments​

Agency clients who don’t stay

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Last week, I was talking to the COO at a health clinic.

The CEO of that clinic — the doctor who heads the clinic — has written a good book, with lots of top endorsements and lots of 5-star reviews on Amazon.

But the book is hardly a best seller. I’m guessing it maybe makes a few dozen sales a month.

“You know,” I said in the voice of a precocious 9-year-old child, “you can run ads on Amazon to promote the book.” I’m smart like that, and I know lots of stuff, so I like to show it off.

“Oh yeah we tried that,” the COO said. “We hired an agency a while back to run ads on Amazon for us. But it didn’t drive that many more sales, and we were paying the agency $1k a month just to keep it going. So we stopped.”

Now, here are a few random facts, which I hope to snap together for you like nuclei colliding and fusing to release a tremendous amount of energy:

1. The core offer for this health clinic is a program that costs $50k a year

2. Rich, successful people tend to read books

3. People who read a book all the way through are prime prospects for an upsell, even a ridiculously elastic one ($5 => $50k)

You see where I’m going with this?

It’s quite feasible that, for this particular business, one good extra client a year, attracted via the help of this Amazon ads agency, would pay for the entire year’s services of the ads agency, and then some.

That would be great for the health clinic, for the Amazon ads agency, and presumably, for the patient who had decided to invest in that expensive year-long program.

And yet, it wasn’t happening.

I’m bringing this up because over the past few weeks, along with talking to health clinic COOs, I’ve also been talking to people who offer services and run agencies of different stripes.

I’ve heard a few of them complaining:

“We can’t make clients see the unique value of our services”

“The clients are never permanent, and I seem like a Chinese acrobat juggling many plates at once”

“Clients are comparing my work to much cheaper freelancers”

A part of this really can come down to having bum clients. Not much to do there, except find better clients.

But what if you have — or have had — clients like the health clinic I wrote about above? Somebody with a solid business… a good product… decent marketing… and still they couldn’t see the value in continuing to pay for your services, which should be plugging up a real gap in their business?

Well, in that case, write me and tell me about it.

I’m curious to hear your story.

And maybe we can figure out a way to prevent this from happening again… and even to profit from those clients who already got away.

My list-building plans from under a large oak tree

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5pm today. Forsyth park. Savannah, Georgia.

I found a large oak tree. Rolled up my jacket. Put it on the ground. Lay down on it in the shade under the tree.

It’s been two-plus weeks of non-stop travel. Changing five cities along the way. Over 5k miles traveled. And more talking with people in real life than I have done in the past six months combined.

I’m tired. I had a chance to lay down today. Under a tree. So I took it.

Tomorrow, I head back from Savannah to New York. After an afternoon layover at JFK, I will have an overnight and most likely sleepless flight back to Barcelona, to the safety of my cave, the comfort of my own bed, the routine of my regular work day.

All that’s really just to prepare you for yet another Q&A email, the third this week. Came a question in reply to last night’s milk-themed email:

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I bought SME a few weeks ago. I’d love to hear more about how you grow your list or “add cream”. I’ve started daily emails and unsubscriber rates are up. I’m currently using FB ads. I was relying on SEO, but that’s proven volatile this year.

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After 10+ years of trying to grow various audiences online, I’ve come to believe there’s no magic to it beyond time and persistence.

​​Whatever you do consistently to grow your list will work in time. And almost nothing will work if you jump around too much too quick.

That said, I will tell you one specific cream-getting/list-building strategy I personally plan to focus on. And that’s books, either ones I put on Amazon or that I sell on my own site and drive paid traffic to.

Books in my mind are the highest-quality leads you can possible get.

They create customers right away.

If you tack on some upsells, it’s possible to use them to break even on paid ad spend on day zero or soon after.

Plus books are immensely shareable and influential. People will gladly and actively recommend or hype up your book, much more so than a course or a coaching program or even a community.

If you want to see how this works in action, take a look at my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters.

It took me about a month of on-the-side work to complete this book. It has been driving subscribers to my list ever since.

The only real problem is this is my only book and I should have written more suc books. I’m working on fixing that.

Meanwhile, if you want to see how I organized this book, how I sold my email list within it, and even learn something valuable about copywriting and marketing in the process, the 10 Commandments is only $5 on Amazon.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How to sell 100,000 books with no audience, fame, or endorsements

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Yesterday, I wrote about Andrew Kap’s book 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books.

​​That book talks about the marketing behind Andrew’s law of attraction book, which has sold 100k+ copies since 2019.

One thing Andrew has done to promote his law of attraction book is start a YouTube channel in which he answers reader questions, highlights testimonials, and shares additional stories to illustrate points from his book.

In the chapter of the 3 Words book about that YouTube channel, Andrew says you shouldn’t worry too much about the production value of your YouTube videos. He gives an example:

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A perfect example of not needing high production value if you have high quality content is Alex Hormozi. You look at his content on YouTube, and a lot of his stuff seems like he’s filming inside of a closet. And the funny thing is — that’s because he actually is!

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I don’t agree with Andrew that Alex Hormozi’s inside-the-close videos stand on their high-quality content.

They stand because Hormozi is rich, successful, and now famous.

But that’s actually a good reason to read Andrew Kap’s 3 Words book.

Because Andrew made his law of attraction book a genuine bestseller without any of Alex Hormozi’s advantages.

He sold 100,000 copies of his book on his own — without a previous audience, without fame, without headline-worthy personal success stories, without celebrity endorsements.

And so, this point about Hormozi notwithstanding, it’s well worth reading Andrew’s 3 Words book about how he made his law of attraction book such a success.

By the way, YouTube is only one of the things Andrew is doing. So if you object to going on YouTube to promote yourself or your book — and if you do, I’m right there with you — then you’ll find lots of other strategies Andrew has used to promote his book and sell many metric tons of it.

I encourage you to read Andrew Kap’s book. In fact, I’m offering two free bonuses if you get it by tomorrow and write me:

Free Bonus #1: How Andrew Kap Wrote His Last Law Of Attraction Book in 60 Days

This is an interview I did with Andrew this past week.

His 3 Words book talks about book marketing: titles, covers, reviews, etc.

It doesn’t talk much about his writing process. But Andrew wrote his 200-page Last Law book in two months. And again, it has a 4.6 rating.

So I sat down with Andrew for an hour, grilled him on how he writes, how he prepares, researches, organizes his writing, the tools he uses, etc.

I also chimed in with my own thoughts and experiences. You might wonder why. I checked just now. I haven’t sold 100,000 books. But adding up all the books I have published on Amazon, I have sold 69,500 books.

Free Bonus #2: 4 Proven Hooks To Sell More Books

This is a short presentation I recorded a few days ago. It will give you the hooks, three examples for each, and how-to advice for coming up with each of the hooks for the book project you are working on.

These hooks are what I reach for when I’m thinking of writing a new book. They are also what I advised someone recently after he came to me and asked for help with writing his book. ​​​​

Hear me now:

​​You can get Andrew Kap’s book any time. But if you’d like to also get the free bonuses above, the deadline for that is tomorrow, Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET.

​​Here’s what to do:

1. Buy Andrew Kap’s 3 Words book on Amazon. You can get it in Kindle, audiobook, paperback, hardback, used, new, or collectible versions — your choice. The link to the book is at the end of this email.

2. Forward me the receipt email that Amazon sends you, and do it by the deadline (tomorrow, Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET).

3. I will then send you the free bonuses, the interview I did with Andrew, and the 4 Proven Hooks presentation.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/3words

My book recommendation for book marketing

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Today, I have book to recommend to you. It’s called, 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books.

I came across this book because I saw it hovering in the Amazon direct response bestsellers above my 10 Commandments book.

I looked up the author. His name is Andrew Kap. He’s the author of The Last Law Of Attraction Book You’ll Ever Need To Read. Facts about this book:

* Publication date: Nov 24, 2019

* Amazon rank as of today: 17,819, which means it’s selling around 220 copies per month, almost 5 years after its publication

* Number of reviews: 3,898, of which 79% are 5-star

I got curious. I bought Andrew’s 3 Words book. I started to read. I finished. And now I’m recommending it to you.

Actually, before recommending, a few disclaimers.

First, the “3 words.” They are not magic. They are not last, not law, not attraction. They are not words you can put in your title or anywhere in your text and automatically sell 100k copies.

Second, the book is written in a kind of sales copy style.

​​The first few chapters, which build up to the reveal of the three words, might sound like a video sales letter teasing you about the three health foods in your fridge you should never eat if you hope to lose weight.

Except Kap doesn’t keep teasing you for an hour and then tell you to buy something else. Instead, he reveals the three words, and pretty soon into the book.

He then unpacks the three words throughout the rest of the book, and tells you all the tactical and strategic things he did to sell and keep selling his Last Law of Attraction Book to 100k copies and beyond.

So get Kap’s book. Read it. Apply it. Or apply a part of it.

Because as you will see, Andrew Kap is rather obsessive in his determination to get his Law of Attraction book into as many hands as belong to humans that could benefit from the ideas he has to share.

But even if you don’t implement all of what Kap has to tell you, and even if you apply only 10% of it, you’re still likely to outsell 99% of self-published authors, and I imagine the majority of traditionally published authors as well.

Final disclaimer:

​​I wrote to Andrew and told him I want to recommend his book to my readers. I also asked if he would be willing to do the same with my 10 Commandments book to his readers. He agreed.

So not only am I telling you about this book, but I am actively promoting it. For that, I’ve got two free bonuses in case you get Andrew Kap’s 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books:

Free Bonus #1: How Andrew Kap Wrote His Last Law Of Attraction Book in 60 Days

This is an interview I did with Andrew this past week.

His 3 Words book talks about book marketing: titles, covers, reviews, etc.

It doesn’t talk much about his writing process. But Andrew wrote his 200-page Last Law book in two months. And again, it has a 4.6 rating.

So I sat down with Andrew for an hour, grilled him on how he writes, how he prepares, researches, organizes his writing, the tools he uses, etc.

I also chimed in with my own thoughts and experiences. You might wonder why. I checked just now. I haven’t sold 100,000 books. But adding up all the books I have published on Amazon, I have sold 69,500 books.

Free Bonus #2: 4 Proven Hooks To Sell More Books

This is a short presentation I recorded a few days ago. It will give you the hooks, three examples for each, and how-to advice for coming up with each of the hooks for the book project you are working on.

These hooks are what I reach for when I’m thinking of writing a new book. They are also what I advised someone recently after he came to me and asked for help with writing his book. ​​​​

Hear me now.

​​You can get Andrew Kap’s book any time. But if you’d like to also get the free bonuses above, the deadline for that is this coming Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET.

​​Here’s what to do:

1. Buy Andrew Kap’s 3 Words book on Amazon. You can get it in Kindle, audiobook, paperback, hardback, used, new, or collectible versions — your choice. The link to the book is at the end of this email.

2. Forward me the receipt email that Amazon sends you, and do it by the deadline (Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET).

3. I will then send you the free bonuses, the interview I did with Andrew, and the 4 Proven Hooks presentation.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/3words

Write 10 books instead of one

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A few months back, I made an offer to help people on my list write a book — if they already had a catalogue of content such as daily emails, blog posts, or secret diary entries.

Some people who expressed interest had too little such content.

Not good. That means too much writing for me personally, and I’m not interested in becoming a full-time ghostwriter.

But some people had too much good content. A million words written or more, across thousands of emails.

Where do you possibly start with that? Or where do I?

I don’t have a great answer. But I will claim one thing:

It’s often easier to write a series of ten books than to write a single, one-off book.

Hear me out.

First off, it’s important to remember that the definition of what makes up a book in today’s world has changed.

A collection of words no longer has to be as much of a blunt weapon as Gone With The Wind in order to count as a book.

My own 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters book, which has brought me hundreds of high-quality readers and tens of thousands of dollars in new sales, runs all of 12,266 words.

Ben Settle’s first Villains book, the book I believe has done the most for his positioning, has 118 tiny pages, and that’s with a giant font and US-national-debt-sized margins.

And yet, I never had nobody complain that my book is too short. I doubt Ben has either.

Today, in books as in sales letters, it’s not really length that makes the difference either way. Rather, it’s the concept, the headline or title, the “big idea”.

That’s why I say it’s easier to write, or at least honestly commit to write, 10 books rather than one.

Writing 10 rather than one forces you to be more specific, concrete.

It forces you pump out more decent ideas, rather than trying to come up with a single brilliant breakthrough.

And of course, it forces you to keep each of your ten books, including that crucial first one, short and manageable, rather than trying to squeeze in too much out of some subconscious guilt or worry.

Anyways, something to keep in mind if you want more influence via book publishing.

It definitely helps to have a big catalogue of previous writing, which you can then shape into a new book, or perhaps more easily, into five or ten.

In other news about influence:

Tomorrow, inshallah, I will make available my Influential Emails training. That training reveals some of the tricks I use to make my emails more interesting and influential than the average email writing bear.

It’s how I’ve produced content that could easily fill 10 tiny but effective Kindle books.

If you’re interested in Influential Emails, you will want to get on my email list first. Click here to do so.

Maybe I can help you publish a book fast

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Yesterday, I got on a call with Rob Marsh and Kira Hug of The Copywriter Club to record a new episode for their podcast.

To kick off the interview, I repeated my Peter Parker origin story, of getting bitten by a radioactive spider and becoming imbued with incredible copywriting powers, and then squeezing into a tight red and black spandex outfit, and renaming myself Spider-Bejako.

What’s that? I hear you groaning?

Fine. What I actually told Rob and Kira was my origin story, but it looked more like the following:

1. Nine years ago, I quit my IT job to write content on the cheap as a no-contract freelancer for The Motley Fool.

2. Things were going smoothly for the first two months, at which point they suddenly got rough. From one day to the next, the work disappeared forever due to changes inside the MF business.

3. I sighed and said, “Well that sucks, now what.” After making a list of my options to make money now, I decided to start a new career, writing tiny alternative health books and publishing them on Kindle, one or two or three per month, which is what I did for a year.

Whenever I tell this story to other writers, their ears always perk up and they ask me for more on my experiences writing little books and self-publishing them on Amazon.

I always tell them the same, as I told Rob and Kira yesterday:

I managed to sell a lot of books on Amazon, but I couldn’t make it work as a business because I was an idiot.

Back then, I knew nothing about marketing, email, back-end offers, all the stuff I take for granted today. I was selling hundreds of copies of my books each month, but I didn’t build a business out of it.

That’s why I eventually dropped the self-publishing and got into copywriting for direct response clients, which is the path that’s led me to where I am now.

Which brings me to my offer to you today:

I still think self-publishing on Amazon is an incredible opportunity. There’s cachet to having a published book — even self-published — that cannot be replicated by anything you do on your website. Besides, book readers are the highest quality leads you could ever get. Plus Amazon is free traffic — or even traffic that makes you money.

That’s why I have my “10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters” on Amazon, and why I’m putting together a new 10 Commandments book, tentatively titled, “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Spirit Mediums, and Stage Magicians.”

But back to my offer:

Odds are, you knew some or all of this before. You knew it’s good idea to have a book out there… but you still might not have one.

Perhaps you have no time to do it, or you have some other hangup that’s keeping you from creating a book, even though you realize it would be valuable for the authority you’re trying to project, for the product or service you’re trying to sell, for the business you’re trying to grow.

My offer is simply to help you get this all done fast — book, optin, emails. Or even to do it for you — in case you already have good content that could be combined, molded, and repurposed into a book.

I don’t have a formal offer defined yet because I want to first hear if there is any interest in this, and if there is, I want to hear what your situation is.

So if you have a business, or better yet, if you have a business and a bunch of content you’ve created — videos, podcasts, blog posts, emails, courses — then hit reply, and we can start a conversation about where you’re at and and how I might be able to help you.

Would you look at this table of contents and give me your thoughts?

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In my email yesterday, I posed a kind of persuasion riddle based on the movie The Sting. I asked, “Can you identify this persuasion strategy?”

I got a buunch of responses. Some were flat-out wrong. Some were part of the way to the answer I had in mind. But only one or two people got all the way there.

That’s good.

It makes me feel hopeful about the book I’ve been planning.

I talked about it a few times already. The tentative title is “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Spirit Mediums, and Stage Magicians.”

I decided to sit down today and write up a possible table of contents for the book. In case you’re curious, you can find my proposed 10 Commandments below, along with a representative quote to give you a flavor of what each chapter will be about.

Commandment I: Thou shalt mind the event boundaries

“The bathroom is a great place to negotiate.”

Commandment II: Thou shalt flip the script

“I don’t even know you!”

Commandment III: Thou shalt pace and lead

“Give me your hands.”

Commandment IV: Thou shalt push and thou shalt pull

“Get off me, jeez.”

Commandment V: Honor the magical number seven

“This purple telephone was a gift from four graduate students, two of whom were passing their major course and failing their minors, and two of whom were passing their minors and failing their majors. The two who were passing their majors and failing their minors passed all. The two who were passing their minors and failing their majors, passed their majors and failed their minors. In other words, they selected the help I offered.”

Commandment VI: Thou shalt set the frame

“Can 31 Pages Transform Your Financial Destiny? It seems rather remarkable.”

Commandment VII: Thou shalt interrupt your adversary’s pattern

“Every man you’ve ever known, loved, and trusted has lied to you.”

Commandment VIII: Thou shalt take the winding path

“I’ll tell you about that in a second, but first…”

Commandment IX: Thou shalt agree and amplify

“Is this what you want? Bunch of fucking losers. Fucking Rocky is your hero. The whole pride of your city is built around a fuckin guy who doesn’t even exist. You got fuckin Joe Frazier is from here, but he’s black, so you can’t fuckin deal with him, so you make a fucking statue for some 3-ft fuckin Italian you stupid philly cheese-eatin fucking jackasses. I hope the cheese melts your faces off.”

10. Remember that you’re playing a numbers game

“As a marketer you only have one power, and that’s to anticipate what people are going to think.”

I’m trying to anticipate what you might think of this book.

So let me know if any of these chapters sounds too obvious, too obscure, or could be replaced in your opinion by something that’s more interesting or relevant.

Keep in mind my goal is to say something fresh and new — I don’t want to rewrite Cialdini’s Influence. That book is great, but it’s been written, and I don’t need to rewrite it.

And if you found yourself made curious or even excited by my outline for this book, feel free to write in and tell me that also. It’s always good to get a bit of extra motivation for the work ahead.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

I already have one 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

If my second 10 Commandments book above sounds interesting to you… there’s a good chance you will like my first book. Here’s where you can get it, for a rather staggering price:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

I’ve been a bestselling author for years and I didn’t even know it

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A few days ago, I went on Amazon in search of ideas for “pocket change” offers. That’s after I went through a training that Ning Li put on last week about the same.

I don’t think I’m giving away a huge spoiler for Ning’s course by revealing that a part of his research process is going on Amazon and seeing what else is selling in his niche.

So there I was on Amazon, looking at best-selling books.

As I’ve hinted a few times, this year I’ve started a new newsletter in the health space. I was doing research for possible “pocket change” offers I could create to grow that newsletter.

I was stabbing around various categories and following random hunches. I scrolled down in one highly specific but popular category to about rank 40…

… and then I guffawed, snorted, and chuckled.

I saw a familiar book among the bestsellers:

One o’ mine own.

I wrote this particular book about 9 years ago. I hadn’t really seen it or thought about it since. It was part of about a dozen alternative-health how-to books that I wrote at that time under various pseudonyms.

All these books are still up on Amazon, and some continue to rack up reviews and sales. This particular book is the best of the bunch, and is doing well enough to make me a best-selling author in a fairly competitive category, without any effort, without any promotion, and without even being aware of the fact.

But let’s get biblical:

The only book I currently have on Amazon under my own name is the 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

It’s currently only #96 among best-selling Kindle books in the “direct marketing” category.

But there was a brief period last December when my 10 Commandments book was ranked higher among Amazon bestsellers than Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters and Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing.

Maybe, with your help, I can get my book back up in the rankings, to the top of the charts where it belongs. Plus, it’s only 5 bucks. If you’d like to take a look:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

My recipe for writing a book that influences people and sells itself

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I just spent the morning reading statistics about the best-selling books of the 20th century so I could bring you the following curious anecdote or two:

The year 1936 saw the publication of two all-time bestselling books.

The first of these was Gone With The Wind. That’s a novel that clocked in at 1,037 pages. “People may not like it very much,” said one publishing insider, “but nobody can deny that it gives a lot of reading for your money.”

Gone With The Wind was made into a 1939 movie with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, which won a bunch of Oscars. Without the monstrous success of the movie, odds are that few people today would know about the book, even though it sold over 30 million copies in its time.

On the other hand, consider the other all-time bestseller published in 1936.

It has sold even better — an estimated 40 million copies as of 2022.

And unlike Gone With The Wind, this second book continues to sell over 250,000 each year, even today, almost a century after its first publication.

What’s more, this book does it all without any advertising, without the Hollywood hype machine, simply based on its own magic alone.

You might know the book I’m talking about. It’s Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People.

One part of this success is clearly down to the promise in the title. As Carnegie wrote back then, nobody teaches you this stuff in school. And yet, it’s really the fundamental work of what it means to be a human being.

But it can’t be just the title. That’s not reason why the book continues to sell year after year, or why millions of readers say the book changed their lives.

This includes me. I read How To Win Friends for the first time when I was around 18. It definitely changed how I behave.

For example, take Carnegie’s dictum that you cannot ever win an argument.

​​I’m argumentative by nature. But just yesterday, I kept myself from arguing — because Carnegie’s ghost appeared from somewhere and reminded me that I make my own life more difficult every time I aim to prove I’m right.

This kind of influence comes down to what’s inside the covers, and not just on them.

So what’s inside? I’ll tell ya.

Each chapter of Carnegie’s book is exactly the same, once you strip away the meat and look at the skeleton underneath. It goes like this:

1. Anecdote
2. The core idea of the chapter, which is illustrated by the anecdote above, and which is further illustrated by…
3. Anecdote
4. Anecdote
5. Anecdote
6. (optional) Anecdote

The valuable ideas in Carnegie’s book can fit on a single page. But it’s the other 290 pages of illustration that have made the book what it is.

In other words, the recipe for mass influence and continued easy sales is being light on how-to and heavy on case studies and stories, including personal stories and experiences.

Maybe you say that’s obvious. And it should be, if you read daily email newsletters like mine. But maybe you don’t read my newsletter yet. In case you’d like to fix that, so you can more ideas and illustrations on how to influence and even sell people, then I suggest you click here and follow the instructions that appear.