Best Seller Secrets

The Million Dollar Author Formula

• Rob Kosberg • Season 2 • Episode 1

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Gone are the days when we had to rely solely on traditional publishing routes to get our books out there. As modern authors, we have more control and opportunities to connect with readers and profit from our writing.

  • That's why I'm pumped to share the Million Dollar Author Formula with you. This fantastic blueprint can help you tackle common obstacles in the writing process and achieve incredible success as an author. As someone who's been in the publishing trenches, I know what works and what doesn't when it comes to creating a successful book, and I'm eager to share that knowledge with you.


With the Million Dollar Author Formula, you'll learn how to tackle those common writing challenges and create a book that truly resonates with readers. You'll discover how to use your work to build your platform, draw in leads, and generate multiple income streams beyond just royalties.

So, get ready to pick up practical tips and strategies to become a successful author in today's dynamic publishing landscape!

IN TODAY’S EPISODE, I DISCUSS: 

  • The Million Dollar Author Formula: A new approach to writing, publishing, and profiting from your book
  • How enhanced ghostwriting can help you capture your voice and tell your story
  • Maximizing revenue and impact beyond your book's release

OTHER LINKS

CONNECT WITH US:
🌐 https://s.mtrbio.com/rkosberg
📞 1 (626) 765-9750

Welcome to the Best Seller Secrets podcast, where experts learn how to crush their business goals with their own best selling book. I'm Rob Kosberg, your host. On today's episode, we're going to talk about how to get unstuck in the writing process by using our million dollar author formula not just get unstuck in writing, but unstuck in promotion of your book and the profiting from your book as well. Look, writing a book is hard. In 2008 or so the New York Times famously did a survey asking adult Americans if they thought they had a book in them. And if they wanted to write a book, and they found that over 80% of adult Americans want to write a book believe they have a book in him, yet, less than 1% ever actually accomplish that. It's hard. But it's probably a lot harder than it needs to be. You see, there's something busted in the model. If you were going to get in your car and drive from wherever you live now to another place across the country, for example, right? When the pandemic hit, I was living in Southern California and had been there on and off for about 15 years. And I own a home on the water in St. Augustine, Florida, which is actually where I happen to live right now. And about two weeks in to the pandemic, of course, my office was closed down in Southern California, we were not considered an essential business. So my wife and I decided, You know what, let's move across the country during this crazy time. And let's live in St. Augustine, let's shelter in place there. We thought, Okay, why not? When we decided to drive because we have two dogs, and we weren't going to fly and put them in the cargo hold. We decided to drive across the country. I wanted to get from Pasadena, San Marino, California, actually, to St. Augustine as quickly as possible. In fact, we did it in two nights. So I knew I had to map out every single hour of my journey, or at least every day, I knew I could get from one place to another and I was happy to drive for 12 1315 hours. We did it in two nights. But that was because it was mapped out. Imagine if we simply got in our vehicle and started driving, hoping that we would get to our destination. Well, look, that's the way a lot of people approach writing a book, they think I'm just gonna sit down and start grinding out 500 words a day, 1000 words a day. And guess what, they never actually accomplish it. I've been the founder of Best Seller publishing for over 11 years now. I have heard all kinds of crazy stories. I remember one time I got a phone appointment with a client who told me that he had had over had written over 1000 pages of content. And he wanted me to help him to create a book from that 1000 pages. What What in the world will we going to do with 1000 pages of his life story there was no way to condense. condense that thank you, it was just a lot simpler to start from scratch to get from where we are right now to the destination that we want to get to the old way of thinking, what I call author 1.0 is probably why you're stuck if you're stuck. If you're not stuck, hey, congratulations. Most people are stuck at one time or another author 1.0 is the idea that you're going to write your book by either a sitting down and grinding out content 500 1000 words a day, or be maybe go away to a cabin in the woods for six months at a time, which by the way didn't work out too well. In the shining. As Jack Nicholson was writing his I believe it was his novel. At any rate, that didn't work for me. And that doesn't work for most people, at least statistically. If that is the kind of individual that you are, you grind out content you love to do that you write on a regular basis, congratulations, more power to you. The average person that we work with does not create content that way, and I found that probably it's in the 98th percentile of people do not create content that way. Whether it be because of perfectionism, procrastination, or because they simply don't have the discipline to do it day in and day out. without actually getting to their destination. We need a new approach. We created what we call the million dollar author formula. It's everything around what we call publish, promote profit publish is everything having to do with the writing, editing and publishing of a book. Promotion is everything having to do with the promotion of the book, making it a best seller really making it successful. And then profit is really where the revenue, the impact and the income is coming from. In fact, it's everything that happens after the writing of the book on through the entire history of your business and the use of the book, hopefully forever. Because if you're staying in the same business you're in right now. And you've written a book for that business. There's no reason why you can't use that same book over and over and over again, to attract clients. So we need a new approach. Let's walk through what that approach could look like in each of these particular areas. If you're stuck in the writing process right now, because you haven't been able to grind it out. And maybe even like me, you tried working with a traditional ghostwriter. And you found that in traditional ghost writing, the hardest part is actually capturing the voice of the author. You see, when I decided to write my first book back in 2008, for my financial services company, I thought I felt that there were two paths that I could go down. One path was this path of grinding out 500 to 1000 words a day. And I didn't think that path was for me. The other path I felt like was traditional ghost writing, the traditional ghost writing path was the only other one that I knew. So even though I was on the cusp of a massive real estate business failure in 2008, because I had been in real estate on and off for 20 years at that time, and you remember what happened around 2007 and 2008? If you're like me, it's indelibly etched on your soul. I felt like okay, I need to take what little money I have left after the difficulties. And the challenge that I went through in real estate, and invested in a traditional ghostwriter. I did that very thing. The way traditional ghost writing typically works is there's a lot of question and answer, you come up with what your table of contents is what you think the flow of your contents going to be. And then the ghost writer is going to ask you questions about those things, you go back and forth. I did that with a ghostwriter over a period of about six months. And honestly, I felt like it was going great. Because I can answer questions about my content, I can give information. What I found, though, when she finally got back to me, with the 186 or so pages of my book is that it wasn't in my voice at all. In fact, as I began reading it, by the time I got to the first or second chapter, I realized that I was going to have to start from scratch. It's not that it was poorly written, it was written beautifully. It's that it didn't sound anything like me. It had content, it didn't have context. So we need a process to create both content and context. Without doing this daily grind. We call that enhanced ghost writing, and in fact, even trademarked it because it is our proprietary process. I'll dive more into details in coming trainings. But the basic is this, we want to start with really mapping out just like driving from Pasadena to St. Augustine, we really want to map out who the audience is, we want to map out a great hook for the book, the title, the subtitle, the table of contents, we want to make sure that we have a great flow within the book before we ever get started with the writing process. In fact, we want to make sure that every single chapter is built out with a great story with the hero's journey, meaning that there's there's points of conflict and difficulty, there are open loops, we then want to make sure that the points that we're teaching are awesome and accurate, and connect directly with the context of the story. And then we want to conclude it powerfully and give next steps. So when you map out a chapter like that, and again, I'll talk more deep in more detail about what this is going to look like in future trainings. But when you map out things like that in advance, then guess what you can simply get in front of a camera and do a training, you can get on a zoom call, you can create a 15 or 20 minute kind of mini TED Talk. And that becomes your chapter. You tell your story, you leave the dramatic points and open loops, you teach your content, you conclude the story, you give next steps, and you're done. What a simple and powerful way to create content. In fact, you can write blog posts this way, you can write social media posts this way. And it's both interesting and intriguing because their story that gives context gives your voice and you create fantastic content very, very quickly. Now, look, spoken word is different than the written word. In fact, I've probably been speaking in one long run on sentence at this point. But truth be told, you can do that and then go back and edit later, take long run on sentences and create short punchy sentences, real introductions, real conclusions, bullet points, etc. That's what our enhanced ghost writing team does, at best sell republishing. And this is something that you can do for yourself. But oftentimes, it's that getting the content out of you initially, and having a great workflow that really stops people. So if you map things out beautifully in what we call author, 2.0, right, get away from the grind, get away from the traditional manner of ghost writing, and instead, use this enhanced formula to map out everything your hook, your title, your subtitle, your table of contents, and then every single chapter mapped out in a way that you can speak it effortlessly with story and content, and you will capture the interest of people. Now, this model doesn't stop at just the writing process. Fantastic. You have a book now, you've created something that has your voice, both context and content. But guess what? The average nonfiction book sells about 250 copies in its lifetime. Can you imagine working so hard to develop great content to have something that has your voice, and then only a couple of 100 people are interested in it in its entire lifetime. And by the way, probably of those couple 100 Most are family, friends, current clients, acquaintances, that kind of thing. That's not what we want. We want something a book that is going to attract people that do not know who we are, get them to fall in love with us or not, right? Magnets attract, but magnets also repel, that's okay. You want to attract the right people, you want to repel the wrong people. We want to book that's doing that in our audience and getting people ready to work with us maybe in bigger and better ways. So the 1.0 version of this is thinking that to promote your book, you already need an audience in place. In fact, if you talk to a traditional publisher, what a traditional publisher will tell you is that Hey, Rob, we would love to work with you, we see that you have found the cure for cancer, congratulations. But tell me how many people are on your email list, Rob? Or Rob? How many people do you have following you on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook? And guess what? If the answer is none, or very few? Sorry, I know you have the cure for cancer. And it's amazing. But we're just not the right company to work with. Look, I'm not down on traditional publishers, the truth be told is they're making an investment in you, because they believe that you can sell books. If you can't sell books, if you don't already have a platform in place, why should they invest their hard earned money in you, and in your idea, okay, so we understand their business people. But here's the thing, you don't actually need a built in platform to begin selling your book. In fact, the author 2.0 way, our model is you can actually use your book to build your platform. Currently, I have hundreds of 1000s of social media followers, I have over 100,000 people on my email list. And all of these people came to me, because of my book, I used my book to attract them, I used my book to get media, PR speaking engagements, and I sell my book and attract people to build my audience, you can actually flip the script and say, I don't need you traditional publisher, because they use my book to build my audience, myself. And the coolest thing is, once you build that audience, you can launch Book Two, Book Three, book four, I'm currently launching my next book in about two or three months. And guess what, I'm going to be of course, launching it to my list to my social media following etc. Is it going to be successful? You know, I believe so. And I believe so because I already have hundreds of 1000s of people that are following me and interested in me. So flip the script, author 2.0, the million dollar author formula is all about using your book to build your platform, rather than thinking I need to have a platform in place. Now, the coolest thing is, it doesn't end there. It really never ends. Because the profit what we call the profit phase of the million dollar author formula is what you're going to be doing from the time your book is done and launched to best seller all the way through the life of your business and the life of use of your book. Now, if you change careers, or you build a an entirely different business than perhaps that book won't be as focused perhaps that book won't be on topic for you any longer. You know, the very first book I wrote was for my financial services company, that book still sells that book is still on Amazon. But I don't try to actively sell that book. I don't focus on that book at all, because I sold my financial services company, when I built best seller publishing back in 2011, and 2012. Fine. Now I have my other Wall Street Journal and USA Today, best sellers. And I'm building the business on that. So the profit phase though, the 1.0 version of the profit phase is thinking that your book is going to sell and earn you royalties. It's the royalties, where you're really going to make the money, the the impact and the income with your best selling book, I hate to tell you, but that is very, very small thinking that's not going to be the place where you make the biggest splash with your book. Now, will your books sell? Will you make royalties? Certainly I've had months where I've done 2500 or $3,000 in royalties, and that's not bad. On average, maybe five $700 per month, hey, that's a nice meal out for my wife and myself, maybe a really, really nice meal out for my wife and myself. But that's not supportive of my business. That doesn't allow me to live in the home that I have drive the vehicles that I drive and have the staff and the team to support all of our clients. So what then is author 2.0? When it comes to profiting, we focus on three things. The three areas that we focus on, are using your book to generate leads and there are 100 ways to use your book to generate leads. Number two, using your book to generate PR and media. I have been on TV all over the country from the number two market in the United States and Los Angeles KTLA to smaller markets in Wisconsin and Michigan and Vermont, and Florida and other places me I've been on TV. I mean, do I have a face for TV. I know that I'm not trying to be on TV, but it gives me an opportunity to get my message out. And to show people that perhaps are attracted to my company, using my company, it shows them that hey, like we're legit, we're credible. Look, their founders been on TV, all over the country, as well as blogs, podcasts, magazines, etc. Use your book for PR and media. That's number two. And then number three, if you're interested. And I think you should be use your book to attract speaking engagements. I remember when we started working with Amy Dix, who was a dear friend and a client of ours, we did two books for Amy. And when Amy sold her branding company, her desire was to begin a speaking business. And she had never before earned a single fee as a paid speaker. When she started using your book and a very simple process that we teach, she went from never having been paid for speaking engagement to earning over a million dollars in speaker fees in an 18 month period. She booked herself on over 98 paid engagements, ranging from $5,000 to as much as $12,000 for single engagement. And this was going from nothing from never having earned a fee. By the way she started small. Her first speaking fee was $250. So you have to start somewhere, and you push it but guess what, when you're trying to be a speaker, or maybe when you're speaking like I do to attract clients in your business, then understand that you have to learn the process, you have to compete with others that are also speaking or potentially speaking, your best selling book and your media, TV Radio appearances are going to be the very thing that helps you to stand out above the crowd. So this is our author 2.0 our million dollar author formula, it is not grinding it out. But instead using a model that works to complete your book. It's not thinking the traditional publishing way of book promotion where you already need to have a platform in place. Instead use your book to build your platform. And then finally not thinking that royalties are really where we're going to make our income and impact but instead using the book in all kinds of ways to generate leads for your business to generate speaking engagements and to generate PR and media. This is the million dollar author formula. And this is a formula that you can use with your book to be wildly successful with it.