Nicolas Cole: The Path to Self-Publishing Success

Tim Stoddart: Hey everyone, welcome to the Copy Blogger podcast. My name is Tim Stoddart. Thank you so much for joining me. I guess this week is my good friend, Nicholas Cole, but most of them just call him Cole. Cole, great to have you back, man. Welcome to the podcast.
Nicolas Cole: Thanks. Always, always a pleasure. Happy to jam whenever. Yeah.

Tim Stoddart: All right, I'm going to start at an interesting place. I'm not going to start with a question. I'm going to start with a memory that I have from you. When I first started my podcast, back before Copyblogger, when it was just like the Tim Stodz podcast, it was just a personal thing I was doing. I reached out to you, and you came on the pod. I don't even know if you remember this. This was a while back. And I asked, like, where you get the ability to write so much, to publish so much, to get so much stuff out there. And you said something to me that I actually think of relatively often. You just said, man, 10 years of practice. And you said it like so nonchalantly. And I think it's one of the reasons why you and I stay in touch, because you're one of the people that continues to do it, right? Like your business has expanded. I'm sure you've, you've found yourself in different positions where you're not so much in the dirt every day, but nonetheless, you're still publishing your work every day, practicing what it is that you preach. And it's something that like, I really appreciate about you and something that I really admire about you. So, so before we even get started into the questions, I want to like, put that out there that, that you're one of the real ones, one, one of the real ones. And I appreciate that about you.

Nicolas Cole: Well, thanks for saying that. I appreciate that a lot. It's kind of funny you say that because the other day I had this thought that, because I resonate a lot with that. I equate it to the developer who you start building something in your dorm room or however your startup starts, right? And you love to code and then the startup starts to grow, the company starts to grow, and all of a sudden you elevate, right? You hire developers and you're not really the one doing it anymore. But I really connect to the archetype of person. Some people ascend out of it. Some people go, yeah, now I run the company and I'm not in the code and that's how it's supposed to be. But there is a subset of especially in Silicon Valley, there's a subset of developers who ascend to CTO of these companies, and they're still at night banging around in the code or building little fun side projects just because they can't help themselves. They love the craft of playing with it. Dharmesh, one of the co-founders of HubSpot and CTO of HubSpot for a while, reminds me a lot of him, who's still always just building stuff on his own. Anyway, yeah, I appreciate that because I think no matter what and however big our business gets and no matter what I have going on, I'm never not going to be doing that because I just love writing so much.

Tim Stoddart: It's not a secret, necessarily. It's a sub-stack that I write in every day. I don't promote it, basically. And I've been asked the question a lot, like, why do you bother? You know, like, you have Coffee Blogger, you have your personal blog. You have to publish all of this stuff and you have a team that works for you. So why, why bother? And it's just because somewhere along the lines, I discovered the value of writing every day for the sake of writing every day. And there's nothing else to it. I really believe that good writers are great thinkers. Like you can't separate the two. If you're a good writer, you have to be a good thinker. And so it, it, it keeps me sharp. And, um, yeah, it's, it's a great skill to have. I completely agree. Yup. Alright, let's jump into your work. It's difficult to know where to start with you because you have your hands in so many different projects. There's a whole other side of you, which I think is a little bit less promoted, although I see you promoting it a lot more now, which is publishing and which is self-publishing. I want to start on that for a little bit. We'll get to Ship 30, but I'm seeing more and more and more the interest of people writing books in their spare times and then publishing them. without needing to go through a gatekeeper. So I want to almost open the floor for you because I've thought about this a lot and I'm pretty close to being in a position where I can publish my book, but I don't even know where to start. And I hear this from a lot of people inside the Coffee Blogger Academy as well. Like, where do I start? And so I just want to open it up for you. Tell me about self-publishing. Tell me about how this became in your life in the first place and what the benefits are.

Nicolas Cole: man couldn't be happier to jam on this cuz uh, yeah, you're absolutely right. I It's not something that I mean I've talked about it, but it's it's definitely not been the majority of our business at all but yeah, most people I think don't really realize that the game like the long game that I'm playing is not Hey, let's build an internet business, you know, like I I I am extremely interested in digital-first businesses and business models, and I also think that they are incredibly lucrative relative to the legacy publishing world, for example. But that's not my endgame. My endgame and what drives me every day is James Patterson's worth $800 million, and I think that I can get there on my own. through self-publishing and through a combination of digital-first education businesses in a way that no other writer up to this point in history has been able to do. That's my North Star. If J.K. Rowling can make a billion off of Harry Potter, there's no reason why I can't make a couple hundred million. There's no part of me that doubts that. Let's start at the beginning. Why am I so convicted in this? I am as much I think it's taken a long time for me to admit this to myself, but I am as much an entrepreneur as I am an artist, and I am as much an artist as I am an entrepreneur. One of the benefits that I've seen of building companies and building businesses in the context of being a very creative and artistic person is that it has taught me a lot about the business of publishing and the business of how do you make money with words. Number one takeaway is how predatory the legacy publishing industry is. I'll give you a perfect example. About a year ago, Dickie and I got multiple book deal offers. We had multiple people reach out to us. There's a huge trend of course creators and people getting huge book deals. I took a couple meetings and I looked at the contracts that agents were offering. And in the contract, the standard, the standard is them saying, out the gate, we represent you for life. So the moment you sign, anything you write for the rest of your life, they're going to take 10 to 20% off. Okay? When they sent that to me, I literally laughed in their face and was like, You want me to sign what? And when I pushed them on it, they were like, this is standard. Most writers have no problem with this. Okay. The reason most writers have no problem with it is because they don't know what they're signing. Insanely predatory. Okay. So number one. Number two is most people also don't understand what's happening when you get an advance. Okay. So the average advance people don't realize is not very high. The average advance for a nonfiction book is like, 10 grand, 20 grand, maybe 50 grand, right? And the only way you're getting above 100K six-figure advance is if you have a giant audience on the internet, or you're a celebrity or someone. And the irony is if you have a giant audience on the internet, then you don't need a deal because what they're buying isn't your talent. The publisher isn't buying the fact that you write a great book. The publisher is buying the fact that you have half a million Twitter followers. So you don't realize what they're actually buying from you, okay? And then most people also don't understand that when you get a book deal, what's effectively happening is think of that book as a company. Think of that book as a business. Selling that book is a product and that is your business, right? It's no different than you selling, I have a SaaS platform, I got to go get customers, right? You have a book, you got to go get customers. They give you an advance standard, call it 20 grand. And in exchange, you get paid an 8% to 15% royalty, which effectively means they just bought 85% of your company for 20 grand. And as an entrepreneur, that makes absolutely no fucking sense. So then we push this a step further. I got to finish the logic line. So then whenever I point that out to people, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but the publisher helps me get distribution. All right, so let's just back up. One, that would be the equivalent of you going to a VC firm and saying, I will sell you 85% of my company for 20 grand. And in exchange, the VC firm's like, and we're going to give you some ad spots in a publication or whatever their distribution promises, right? And I guarantee you whatever the distribution promises probably isn't worth the 85% that you gave up for the vast majority of authors. But what happens is everyone points to James Clear, author of Atomic Abbots, or everyone points to Mark Manson, author of Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And it's basically like pointing to someone who wins the lottery and goes, well, it worked for them. So, you go out and you buy lottery tickets because some random person in Idaho won the Powerball, and you think that that's your strategy for making money. And it's so flawed. And then what they don't understand on top of that is they go, but the publisher gets me into bookstores. Okay. Have you ever walked into a bookstore? They don't have every book ever written in the bookstore. They have like the top 25 books that are all on the charts. in the front display, and then they maybe have another 100 or 200 books scattered around the bookstore. And you don't realize that half the reason why the books are there is because it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like the book's already selling, and so we're going to put it in the bookstore, which makes the book sell more. They are not going to take your book and put it in every bookstore in the US or every bookstore around the world. What they're going to do is they're going to take your book This is exactly what's going to happen. They're going to take your book. They're going to put it in a test market, 30 bookstores in specific regions. You're going to be the one to spend your advance marketing the book that you now no longer own, promoting it to your audience, selling the book you no longer own. Then when you drive sales, Guess what? For 99% of authors, you're not going to cross the tipping point where the publisher cares about you. And the publisher's business model is the same as a VC firm, which is we make 100 bets, 90 of them fail, five of them break even. And then maybe the other handful, five, are the giant returns. So when you get a book deal the same time that James Clear got a book deal with Atomic Habits, and he starts outselling you by a thousand to one, your publisher doesn't sit there and go, boy, we really got to work harder to help your book because we took 85% of it. They go, you don't matter anymore. We don't care about you. And now you're left to sell the book that you no longer own. And so it's taken me like 10 years to piece all this together. But now that I see that whole logic line, I'm like, I think there's only three scenarios where someone should take a book deal. One, you're only going to write one book in your life. Yes. If you know that you're only going to write one book and you don't have any interest in building the skills or doing any of the other things that have to do with becoming an author, you just want to write your one book, take the book deal because the economics of the book deal don't matter to you. What you want is the status. What you want is to be like, I got a book deal, right? So do that. The second scenario is if You want to play the, I want to swing for the fences. Like this is either going to be the next atomic habits or it's not. And in order to do that, that means you have to, most people don't realize this. I did a whole study about this in my book, Snow Leopard. We looked at the top bestselling business books of the past 25 years. We reversed engineered them into different categories. If you want to write a massively bestselling book, it has to be in two categories, personal development or personal finance. If you're not writing a personal development or personal finance book, you're not gonna make the New York Times bestseller list. It's not gonna happen, right? And third, if it's not one of those two, it probably is, but if it's not one of those two, and you're like, I wanna write a leadership book or an insights and thinking book or whatever it is, and I'm playing for the, like even forget sales and money, like I'm playing for New York Times bestseller. Okay, get ready to spend a quarter million dollars. get ready to spend your whole marketing, your whole advance, get ready to spend money on your own money from your own pocket, promoting your book. And most people don't, like, why is Tony Robbins a New York Times bestseller seven times over? Well, because he has a hundred million dollar plus business that he can just throw money at and go, here you go. Most of the nonfiction business books that are bestsellers are from people who have a very lucrative business that they pour the money into the promotion of the book to guarantee New York Times bestseller. So if you don't understand all the pieces of that picture, what's happening is you're a little writer who's excited about being an author, and then the agent hands you the contract, you sign away your life, and you have no idea what game you're signing up for. And as a result, there's this whole cliche about writers don't make any money, or authors don't make any money, or there's no money in publishing. And meanwhile, everyone thinks there's no money in publishing, and the big five publishers are doing 12 billion a year. So there is money in publishing, they've just convinced you that there isn't so that you will sell 85% of your startup for 20 grand.

Tim Stoddart: Hey there, it's Tim, and I need to take a moment to tell you about this show's sponsor. It's a product called Hype Fury. When I was able to speak to Yannick, who is the CMO, one of the founding partners of Hype Fury, and he agreed to sponsor the show, I was so thrilled. And the reason is because I have personally used Hypefury for the last three years, and it has allowed me to build my social media following and my personal brand to over 70,000 followers. I could not have done it without Hypefury. And I really, really mean that. I use this product every day and it's added so much to my business and to my life. So Hypefury is a social media scheduling tool. It has three main features that I think separates it from every other tool. One, it allows you to quickly create content and schedule them. So it's a very nuanced feature, but it's so helpful. Basically, I sit down at my desk in the morning and I type out my tweet, I type out my LinkedIn post, and then all I do is I hit enter and Hypefury schedules it at the opportune time on Twitter. And on LinkedIn, I don't have to think about it any more than that. All I have to do is sit down and create my tweets, create my posts, hit enter. And Hypefury does all the work for me. Uh, second Hypefury makes it so that you can easily create threads and threads have been the biggest value add for me in growing my following. So threads really helped me grow my following on Twitter. And those threads format themselves into longer form LinkedIn posts on LinkedIn. It's actually kind of funny. I made a video about this not too long ago about how, yes, like you want to create threads on Twitter. You want to be a thread boy, because I'd say like 80% of my growth on both Twitter and LinkedIn have been from threads and long form posts. And I wouldn't have been able to format any of this. without using Hypefury. And then third, Hypefury is really good for keeping you inspired. So what it does is it, it shows you some of your most popular tweets and your most popular posts. And it basically gives you information. It gives you inspiration as to what your audience is looking for and what they most actively engage in. So you're never sitting at the computer thinking, oh man, like, what am I going to say today? What, you know, what kind of content am I going to create today? It's constantly feeding you new ideas, new inspiration, and it allows you to, to quickly create this content so that you can continuously get yourself out there, continuously build your brand. And most importantly, turn that social media following into newsletter subscribers. So through Hype Fury, I've been able to grow my personal email list. Tim stods.com to over 30,000 followers that's turned into a business within itself. It's really helped me grow the copy blogger newsletter. We're at 110,000 followers right now. A whole lot of that is also because of hype fury. So please, this is a product that I use every single day. I personally vouch for it. You can check it out at hypefury.com. H Y P E F U R Y.com. If you have any problems with it, you can send me a DM on Twitter and I'm sure I can convince you as to why it will add value to your life. So hypefury.com. Thank you so much to hypefury for sponsoring the show and let's get back to the episode. I'm really glad I started with this question because it's fun to see you get hyped up about it.

Nicolas Cole: I just want to clip that whole thing out because that's everything that I've wanted to say about publishing for so long and I've done it in little pieces. I'm going to clip that out and just put it everywhere because it drives me up as an artist and as an entrepreneur, it drives me up a wall. that these two worlds are kept so separate. And as a result, the entrepreneur business world is like, yeah, who gives a shit if it's not a good book? I just want to say I'm a published author. And then the artistic world is like, I love the craft and I have something really meaningful to say, but oh, you want me to sell 85% of my company for 10 grand? Sure. I don't understand why these two worlds are kept separate when in reality, if you want to be a thriving artist, you got to understand the business side. If you want to be someone in business that people take seriously and actually get value from your content, you can't just write a shit book and then just plow 300 grand at it and go, I got a New York Times bestseller badge. Who cares? If I read the book, I don't respect you because you didn't say anything valuable. There are very few topics that get me as hyped as this because I just think it's such a glaring problem. And as a writer, I hate to see other writers get taken advantage of and then live with this mindset of nobody makes a living as a writer. Yeah, they do.

Tim Stoddart: Yeah. OK, I have a reflection and I have a comparison and I'll drop them on you and you can tell me what you think about it. First, the reflection is the New York Times bestseller list is critically flawed and it's almost common knowledge at this point. So it's all the books you see in the airplane or in the airports, right? Isn't that kind of the the back of the mind dream. Like when I go to an airport bookstore, that's like the creme de la creme of all of the published authors. How do I get there? And people don't understand that it's a marketing machine that puts books on those bookstores. And so most of the New York Times bestseller list is marketing machines. And you can see this like, uh, I don't know who published a book recently, I guess Gary Vee is a good example. the whole entire month long promotional aspect of it is designed to get books off the shelves. And so they'll buy like buy 30 books at once. And I'll give you a VIP retreat by 200 books for your whole company. And I'll give you like a one hour long session at the company, you know, so it's I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just saying that you have to understand there's a marketing machine behind it. It's not necessarily the best book wins. It's the best marketing wins. So I think that's important to reflect on. But I want to draw a little bit of a comparison and hear how it bounces off of you because you compared it to VC. And I think that's a great comparison because in my mind, and I think you'll probably agree with me, I've always thought it's such a weird thing where young entrepreneurs get funding from these huge companies, they basically kick any money that they can make down the road for 10 years, right? You basically live off of scraps, you sleep in a small apartment, you pay yourself the smallest salary possible, and that's fine. If you're paying your dues, you're paying your dues, but it's the system of it that actually bothers me. And then it's like one out of every, let's be generous and call it 500, right? Funded companies actually gets to the point where it's a hundred X, a thousand X exit. And then there's this big celebration of, of entrepreneurial culture. And it's like, if I can do it, you can do it. And it's, it's almost this trap that I think companies lay to make it seem like, Hey, just, just take this check. Give me 60% of your company. I'm funding the whole thing. You can't do it without me, right? Whereas the way I've always seen it is like, well, I totally can do it without you. And even more importantly, I can do it without you and I can get paid like right away. And so there's this strange. idea we have where we reject steady cash flow for some reason. We neglect small, incremental, but meaningful gains. It always reminds me of, there's a question with Warren Buffett and somebody said, how come everybody doesn't do this? If you're so successful and it's so obvious that this works, how come everybody doesn't do this? And he said, because nobody wants to get rich slow. And I've never understood that. What's wrong with getting rich slow? What's wrong with publishing 50 books that you own all of the rights to and then having this massive machine of just steady transactions on a book that you published 10 years ago and all of the money gets to you? I guess what I'm asking, how did we get here? How did we get to the point where our thinking is so broken and so skewed?

Nicolas Cole: I'll tell you exactly what it is. It's people want to get paid in status more than they want to get paid in cash. Like at the end of the day, it's the truth, right? Okay, here's the truth. You can't build the next Uber or Airbnb without venture capital. You just can't. There's some companies where you really need a giant war chest in order to make that thing happen. And I understand that, right? But most ideas aren't that. is also the truth. I'm guilty of this too. When I was starting my entrepreneurial career, I thought the name of the game is dream as big as you can and swing for the fences and hope something happens. But over the years, as I've built multiple companies and I've experienced different parts of the journey, it's really started to click for me that The real reason so many people are enamored with entrepreneurship, and in hindsight, the real reason that I was enamored with it, is because, yeah, you have this giant hope of a payday at the end, but really what comes with that payday is an elevated form of status that you do not get building a cashflow company. You just don't. Because even just the word, I exited my company. I could give you no other context and most people on earth would be like, whoa, he sounds like a really successful entrepreneur. Just because I say it that way. Or I say, I took my company public. There's a lot of founders who take their companies public that own nothing of the company that they just spent 10 years building. And they have a good payday. They make a couple, 10, 20, 30 million, but your investors made a billion. You know, and so the same is true with writing. I find for all and how much writers talk about money and how, you know, half the room is like, you can't make money in writing. I want to, but you just can't. And the other half of the room is this weird, has this weird relationship with money where they think the less money they make from their writing, the better they are. Right. And neither one is true. all of these people who take book deals, the thing they really want, and I'll just say it in a super direct way, the thing they really want is acceptance. They want approval. They want the badge. They want to say, I did it. They want to go to their mom and dad and have their parents be like, my son or daughter got a book deal and we're so proud of them. Whereas I sell more books than most people who have book deals and I get none of that. And for years, it bothered the shit out of me, because I was like… A great example, where I graduated from school is… Columbia College, Chicago, liberal arts school. I really enjoyed my experience. I loved studying there. My teachers had a profound impact on me. And after I graduated, I kept getting all these newsletters from the alumni department celebrating people who had graduated from the school and how they had gotten a book deal or how they had gotten a short story published in this little publication that nobody reads. you know, the literary people do. So congratulations, right? And I went back to them and I was like, hey, you know, I've done a lot of really interesting stuff and I've done stuff that nobody from our program has really done. I would love to come back and share the things that I've learned. They had no interest because I'm not playing the game of give me a trophy. I don't care what some person in New York thinks about my writing. What I care about is, am I reaching the readers that I'm reaching, and am I helping them, and am I benefiting? Who cares if, okay, you got a book deal, congratulations, but You're struggling as a writer, which the end result of that, because you can't provide for yourself, means that your writing suffers. I get to spend 10 hours a day writing. because I've engineered a business and a life that allows me to do that. Most writers have to go work a job that they don't enjoy, and then they only get an hour to a day writing. And they think in some way that that's like the pure way of going about it. And I'm like- So are the starving artists. Yeah. Logistically, on paper, that doesn't make any sense. I get to do the thing that I love all day, every day, and you only get to do it one or two hours a day. But you're better at it and it's more pure because some publisher gave you a stamp of approval. I give myself a stamp of approval. And I feel like that mentality is so difficult for people to wrap their heads around because we're so used to entrepreneurship or publishing or pick whatever game. We're so conditioned to being like my value is anchored and framed in someone else deciding whether or not I'm successful or not. And it makes no sense.

Tim Stoddart: Wow. There's so many other things that we could talk about, but I want to stay on this for a little bit because it's more than just the pragmatic side of business. Let's call it the new Then this wasn't possible 20 years ago. Well, maybe a little bit, let's call it 50 years ago. It just wasn't possible because the regular person didn't have the leverage and expansion of the internet. Right? So with that in mind, let's assume that, rightly assume that it's possible for everybody these days. What did it take for you? When you were talking, I was reflecting on my own journey and reflecting on what it took for me to get to the point where I was more and more comfortable. getting the result that actually mattered as opposed to the result that feels good, which is, is status. And I geek out about this stuff sometimes, like for the vast majority of human existence, status was like a much more important thing. It was a much better indicator of like survival. Um, and so I think that there's just like evolutionarily there's, uh, just a button that gets pushed when we elevate our status. It's like, OK, like I'm going to be OK. Right. And so I recognize all of that. And I think of my journey over the last 10 years and the slow steps I had to take emotionally where like I allowed myself to be OK with succeeding in the way that like I actually wanted to succeed. Right. So what was that like? Because everybody feels this way. So many people listening to this are going to say like, wow, I wish I could be at the spot where I was comfortable doing the thing that I love to do. And I wasn't chasing this, this strange imaginary pot of gold at the end of this status rainbow. Right. So, so what did it take for you to go on that journey and figure that out for yourself?

Nicolas Cole: I, there's so many different moments. I mean, like I could go all the way back to after I graduated from college, I moved into this, you know, dumpy apartment in Chicago, no AC. just sweating like crazy all summer. My heater when it was freezing in Chicago is from the 70s. It's like an open flame thing. I could literally turn my desk chair, and if I extended my foot, I could touch all of the objects in my studio apartment. It was you're starting there. Even stuff like that, I remember maybe six months into the working world after graduating college where I'm commuting an hour, hour and a half every day both ways to work. It really started to click for me. If you don't figure this out, this is your life. This is what it's going to be. You got to find a way to drive the result. I didn't want to do anything except writing. I just knew that. To me, the question I was left with was, I got to figure out the truth of this. I got to figure out how this thing actually makes me some money. Otherwise, I better get used to these really hot summers and really cold winters. The real, real moment, the thing that really comes to mind is, the difference between status and just knowing what drives the result. Now I'm like, whatever, I don't even care about the status. Just let me provide the life that I want to provide for myself and let me do the thing that I love. And when that really clicked for me was my first business was a ghostwriting agency for CEOs and founders. It was a very sexy sounding business. And whenever I would tell people what I did, because I built the first ghostwriting agency for that group of people. And so no one had ever heard of that. And so when I would go to a dinner party or a conference or an event or whatever, and people would be like, what do you do? And all I had to do was say, I have a ghostwriting agency where I ghostwrite for startup founders, executives. After two years or so, we had like Olympic athletes, we had Grammy winners. It was all very status-y type of stuff, right? And I would notice immediately, people would give me this sense of approval they would go, wow, that's so cool. You get to talk to all these really… It was almost like their credibility and status rubbed off on me. And I got a lot of validation and approval out of saying, hey, this CEO runs a $20 billion company and they're my client. I could call them right now. And so I noticed the impact that that had on people. Meanwhile, as I'm running the business and we're scaling and at our height, we're doing a couple million in revenue. We had 80 plus concurrent clients. We had 23 full-time employees. And at our height, my co-founder and I were pouring so much back into the business that we were the two lowest paid people in the whole company. So here I'm getting all this status and approval and I'm making 50 grand a year. Like, it made no sense. And then fast forward, you know, two years later, I decided, okay, this isn't the business I want to scale. This isn't the dream that I thought it was. And I start Ship 30 with Dickie, and the complete opposite happens. Ship 30 is 10 times more lucrative than my ghostwriting agency was. And when people now ask me what I do, and I'm like, oh, I have a writing program, they look at me like I just said I teach kindergarten. And I get no status, and I get no approval, and I get no recognition. And it is the weirdest, because I've gotten to experience both of them now, it is the weirdest thing ever. And it has really made me realize that in life, you often get paid in one or the other. And it's your choice, right? And a lot of the people who build startups, who do the, I'm eating ramen, and I'm doing the whole thing, like, yeah, you're playing for the windfall at the end, But what you're really getting paid in is status, and that's what you want to get paid in. And that's okay, but just know that that's the game you're playing. Just like writers who take book deals, they want to get paid in status. I've gone, I've done that. It's not fun. I didn't get out of it what I thought I was going to get out of it. And now I'm completely of the mindset, I'm like, if I have to pick between fame and money, I'm taking the money. I don't care if someone else gets all the approval. I want to provide for myself. There's a really cool tool called, let me look at it on my laptop, called Publisher Rocket. It allows you to pull the sales data of books on Amazon. I bought this tool a couple of years ago. Every once in a while, I use it and I go on Amazon and I look up some of my favorite writers and I look at what their books are doing revenue-wise. Then I remember, That's not what they're making. They're getting paid 10% of that. And I do the math and I'm like, wow, some of my favorite writers who have way, way, way, way, way more status than I do make less off their books than I make off mine. And that is an awesome reminder.

Tim Stoddart: Yeah, well, I've had a couple people, not many, but it's probably from an insecurity of mine, to be honest, that say, you talk about money too much, and I wish more people talked about money.

Nicolas Cole: I really do. Everyone wishes more people would talk about money. I'm convinced, this is going to sound a little conspiracy theory-ish, but the reason I think our society is so ingrained to not talk about money is because it's a way of making sure that more people don't learn about money. Like on the one hand, we're all told you have to go provide for yourself and you have to figure out how to build a life and provide for your family and do all of those things. And on the other hand, you're not allowed to ask any questions about how to do it. And to me, that makes no sense.

Tim Stoddart: There's a funny analogy that I discovered when a lot of the mental health, because you know, the space that I work in, I deal a lot with people that have addictions and a lot with people that have like mental health problems and eating disorders. And it's gnarly, it's gnarly stuff. And one of the things that is always told in these circles is to share, right? Share your experience, because when you find somebody else that has had that experience, it's very, very relatable. And you build these relationships and there's a healing process there. And with that, I've discovered this, like, this I don't want to say it's easy. It's more, there's a lot more lubrication on the internet for people to talk about things that are so sensitive, right? Like sexual trauma, mental health problems, problems with your spouse, with your relationship. And it's easier for people to talk about those things than it is for them to talk about money. And I see it in that real, the real duality between those things and how in the hell Why was it easier for people to talk about some of the worst painful experiences that they've ever had in their lives, but they can't talk about the fact that, you know, they're maybe living like middle, lower class and they wish they knew a little bit more about how to make some sales. And you can't talk about those things because then people think you're a loser. And really, I guess what I'm saying is that stems right back to what you you just been talking about. It's it's really like a secret status game, which I just I find so fascinating.

Nicolas Cole: I think a big reason why that's the case is because money is often a reflection, not always, but money is often a reflection of the relationship you have with yourself in a lot of ways. Money is the reflection of I'm not doing the thing that I want to do, or money is the reflection of I can't get myself to do the thing that I need to do. I actually don't think that it's the money itself that people are hesitant to talk about. It's what it reveals. Like if someone's like, I'm not earning what I want to earn, it's not actually the money. It's what are all the underlying reasons why you're getting in your own way? That's the thing that people are afraid to talk about.

Tim Stoddart: I think that makes so much sense. So, so, okay, let's get to the nuts and bolts then. How did you get out of your own way? How did you publish your first book? Like you've never had a book deal, right? Everything that you've done has been self-published. Okay. Actually, even before I ask that question, that is the question, but let me frame this a little bit. One of the things that I think people don't understand about you is your first book, I think, I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is true. The first book that you published was about being a gamer, it's about being a video gamer, right? And so I guess I'm almost answering the question for me and more just teeing it up for you to get perspective on. But I suppose the answer is get out of your way and write stuff, right? And then like one thing happens and one thing happens and success compounds on itself. Where am I wrong?

Nicolas Cole: Yeah, I mean, so a lot of people, again, don't realize, because I've done all these internet business-y type things, so I get why that's sort of the predominant narrative. I started writing my first book in college. I was studying creative fiction. My degree is in fiction writing. And of course, because I was that kid growing up, I was the one person in the program who was like, yeah, yeah, cool. I want to study fiction for storytelling, but I want to tell a true story. I want to write a memoir. And it drove all my teachers crazy because they were like, you're a fiction student. You need to write fiction stories. And I was like, no, you're not getting it. I just want to learn the skills, but I want to write nonfiction. I want to write a memoir. And fortunately, they all tolerated me and it was fine. But I wanted to write a memoir about my years as a competitive gamer and really not the gaming part. It was really a coming of age story because a lot of what I was studying at the time was fiction and literature, but it was also really amazing memoirs. One of my favorite memoirs I've ever read is called The Glass Castle. And it's all about, it's a memoir and this woman's upbringing, it was really challenging and it's a huge bestseller and it's really, really well-written. And I love these memoirs that are not like, I was the president, let me tell you what it was like being the president, but it's like this weird middle ground between fiction and nonfiction where it's very storytelling driven. And I'm obsessed with that style. I think it's so cool. So because my original aspiration was, look, I'm an artist. I'm a writer. I want to build myself as a writer. I wanted the first book that I wrote to be something really artistic. Even to this day, of all the things that I've done, I still think that's one of the best things I've ever written. It's an amazing story. Anyone who's taken the time to read it is like, oh, Oh, like if you read that you will come to a different conclusion like oh, this isn't just some guy that writes on the internet like that's art and you will know that reading it and I spent four years on that book, and there was a point in that book where I realized that to tell the story that I wanted to tell, it had nothing to do with the writing. It had everything to do with me. I was trying to write about my childhood, and I couldn't get myself to write because I was still holding onto a lot of shit. I was angry, and I was frustrated, and I still resented my parents. I was 22, 23, and I was still feeling all this angst. So I signed myself up for therapy and used my last discretionary income from my minimum wage job to pay for weekly therapy so that I could work through those things so that I could write the book I wanted to write. That's something not a lot of people think to do or are willing to do, but that's how much it mattered to me. I was like, I want to improve myself as a person to write the thing I want to write. It took me four years to write that book. No surprise, didn't become some giant bestseller or anything, but it was something that I really loved. I didn't write The Art and Business of Online Writing for four years later, 2020, and now 2023, The book is selling more than it's ever sold. It's the best-selling book in my library. It's crushing it. And it's 2023, and I started writing my first book in 2011. That's just a lot of patience and a lot of work and a lot of hours and a lot of, I'm doing this because I love it. And I don't think that I'm some like, You know, I was born this great writer and all these, I don't think that at all. I just think that I'm willing to tolerate a lot of these things much longer than most other people. And I think other people would have similar results if they did it as much as I did it.

Tim Stoddart: I agree totally. We'll start wrapping this thing up, man. I'm so happy that we stuck on this topic. But I want to dig into the weeds a little bit more. Before I do, there's a slogan in my company that we repeat to ourselves very often. And that slogan is, you don't get what you deserve, you get what you tolerate. And I think that word tolerate is something that a lot of people can, um, can come back to because it works both ways. Like you get the good things in your life that you're willing to tolerate, but also like you keep the bad things out if you're not willing to tolerate them. So, uh, just wanted to double click on that thing a little bit because it's, it's, it's been an important reminder to me in my life personally and professionally. So with this first book though. Let me just finish up technically a little bit. Okay, so I've spent four years. I'm a writer. I have this dream to be published, self-published. I'm fine with not getting the status. I just want to get my work out there. How does that actually work though? Is it as hysterical as there are like self-publishing publishing companies, right? Where the deal just looks different because you own the rights to your work? Or do you just go to a local printer and you just print the damn thing and start selling it online?

Nicolas Cole: It's even easier than that. This is what's so nuts. All the information's out there. It's just wild that people don't know this, okay? And again, I wasn't born with this knowledge. I was sitting at my job because I hadn't quit my job yet. and I had finished my first book, and I spent hours Googling, educating myself, how does this work? And most people don't understand. Here's what goes into it, okay? And I did all of this when I had no money. you $1,000 or something. And that was of all the things I was like, I want this cover to be really great. Actually, no, I'm making that up. That was for my second book. My very first book, The Gaming Memoir, I literally just found a friend who knew graphic design and I was like, please help me. I don't have any money. Just design the cover for me. So there you go. Second is there's tools that do this for free now, but back in 2016, Go on Upwork or Fiverr. You find someone to format it specifically for Kindle and Amazon. It's not hard. It's like a way of using Microsoft Word. There's some nuances. I didn't want to take the time to do it. I found someone to do it for me for like 150, 200 bucks. There's a cool tool now called reedsy.com They're more of like a marketplace that connects writers with editors But one of the SAS tools that they built was a plug-in your PDF and they'll spit out the Kindle version So you can do that for free I think I maybe hired another editor to just proofread it after I asked a handful of friends, like you do this for me for free, maybe paid them 150, 200 bucks or something to just go through and check for grammar, whatever. There still ended up being a handful of mistakes in there, no shock. And aside, those were all my costs. That was it. And most people don't realize that all you have to do is go to Amazon, the self-publishing side, upload the Kindle file, upload the PDF for the print book, upload the cover, which is I think either the file type, JPEG for web or PDF, and then hit done. And when you go buy, people don't understand this. Dude, when you go buy art and business of online writing on Amazon, Amazon prints it on demand. You don't even print it? I don't print it. I don't touch it. I don't do anything. Amazon prints this on demand and they just extract the printing cost from my royalty. So you're telling me you're going to give 85% of your book to a publisher who's basically going to tell you to use your advance to go market the thing you now no longer own, when I could just spend a couple hundred bucks, or now I invest like five grand into each book. I get it nicely formatted. That's my cost, right? But I invested five grand into my business here. This book is a business. So I invested five grand into my business. This book has made me six figures. What? What? And I don't touch it. I don't, I don't warehouse it. I don't ship it. I don't sign anything.

Tim Stoddart: And I'm going to, you don't have a box of books in your corner in your garage.

Nicolas Cole: Nope. Nope. If you can see up here, I have stacks of books that I've published and I just have them on hand so I can give people and stuff. Then if I want to order copies in Amazon's backend, I could order a box of 50 of these and they will sell it to me at cost. I'm just buying them for $2 a book or whatever it is. So I'm acting as a one-person publisher. Think about that return. I invested five grand into this. This book's made me, I don't know, 100K, 150K, whatever at this point. I am going to do this every year, twice a year, maybe four times a year, however much writing I can do, for the rest of my life. Yeah. And by the end of it, my North Star is if James Patterson can be worth $800 million and he, for many, many, many of his books, he now has leverage, but for many, many of his books, he doesn't own the majority, right? He took the book deals. Okay. What does that look like with someone who has a 60 or 70 year time horizon and has digital education businesses bolted on? Miss me with all the other stuff. I'll see you in 20 years and I'll let you know how it's going.

Tim Stoddart: It's one of those things where after you say it, it's so obvious, but until someone comes around and breaks that cast in your brain, right? Like you have a cast on your wrist. You just, you can't move it. It's stuck there. Like we got, we got casts on our, on our minds sometimes. And you came around and yeah, yeah. you did the bully move where you took the broken arm and you smashed it over the table and you broke the cast. It's very, very insightful. And I think the people listening to this, there's a lot of people that have books that are metaphorically speaking, like tucked away in the back of their closets and they just, they have no way to put it out there. And you don't even have, I always thought you had to go to a printer. You literally take a PDF and you upload it to Amazon. And that doesn't mean that your book is only digital. You can still get it printed and sent to you. Yeah. Wow. This is great, man. Cool. We didn't even talk about like ghostwriting and category pirates and Ship 30. You got so much cool stuff going on, but I'm really, really happy that we focused on this selfishly because it's something that I always wanted to learn. And you just, you really educated me today. I appreciate it.

Nicolas Cole: Awesome. Yeah, me too. I mean, the reality is All of the things that I do in the writing world, Ship 30 has its own mission. Why am I so passionate about Ship 30? Because I firmly believe that I can see it in my own life. Everything good that's come out of my life has come from writing on the internet. I believe more people should write on the internet. Mission of Ship 30, right? PGA, our premium ghostwriting academy. Ghostwriting literally changed my life. I was living in a really shitty studio apartment in Chicago. I discovered ghostwriting. I started applying my talents, monetizing them through a service. Ghostwriting changed my life. I believe that that is the most lucrative vehicle for other writers who want to monetize their talents in the short term. It's a way of renting your pen and getting paid to practice. right? But publishing has its own mission, which is what we talked about today, which is I am so passionate about the fact that there's all these writers that grow up in a world thinking there's no money in publishing, and there's only no money in publishing for you because you just gave it away to the big five that are doing billions. I think I hope that's something that comes through and I hope that's something that a lot of other people understand about me is I am not doing this through a lens of I'm succeeding and you're not. Everything I do is I'm succeeding, now let me tell you the blueprint for how I did it because I genuinely want you to succeed too. I hope that that's people's takeaway.

Tim Stoddart: It definitely comes through as somebody that, I mean, we're friends. You're not my best friend by any means, right? And so I have a little bit of a, uh, just some distance and I can say it absolutely comes through. Um, the line right there. Writing on the internet completely changed my life. It's like the best thing I ever did in my life. And all I ever wanted to be my whole life was a writer. And I thought that meant I had to be Michael Crichton, because that was the dude where I was like, man, Michael Crichton, these books fucking rock. Like I can read every book. Yeah, exactly. And then I discovered I don't have to be Michael Crichton. I can write articles and newsletters on the internet and I can write books and I can publish it onto Amazon. And so I agree, writing online changed my life and I know it'll change other people's. All right, so all of the companies that we just ran through, or the brands, I should say, Premium, Ghostwriting, Academy, Ship 30 for 30, Category Pirates, they will all be linked in the show notes of this podcast. To check out the show notes, to check out the full video of our conversation, go to copybloggerpod.com. You are NicholasCole77 on Twitter. We'll also be linked in the show notes. Man, Cole, thank you so much. Anything else you want to say before we sign off?

Nicolas Cole: No, just this is awesome. I don't think I've ever gotten a jam on this topic. Usually it's an anecdote or a side story, or I'm like, hey, Tangent, you should know this thing. But it is something that A, I'm glad that we got to dig into, so thanks for asking the question. B, I want to talk a lot more about it. And C, this next year, I'm really excited because two of the big projects that are on my radar, one, I want to do a whole a mini masterclass around how to build your one-person publishing empire. Most people don't know what I just explained to you. So I want to walk through, how do you structure this? How do you do this? How do you upload it to Amazon? How do you find a cover designer? All of the things that I've done over the past 10 years. And then second is this next year, I'm going to start experimenting with fiction. because I'm working on a cool book right now. I'm hoping it'll be done by the end of the year called Writer Career Paths, where I basically reverse engineer and go, okay, you want to be a writer? These are the nine paths that you need to consider. These are the similarities. These are the differences. These are the different earning potentials. This is how you measure success. Some pay you in status. Others pay you more in cash. I've never seen someone write a book like this. I think if I had had this, 10 years ago when I graduated college, it would have been so helpful for me to understand which path is going to lead to which outcome. And one of the coolest realizations of researching and writing this book is that of all the writer career paths, the one with the highest earning potential is actually genre fiction. The only writers who get up to hundreds of millions of dollars are genre fiction storytellers. Yeah. Pulitzer Prize winning literary writers don't get there. Nonfiction authors, Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene, Mark Manson, James Cullen, they're not going to get there. Seth Godin, no. You're going to tap out in the tens of millions, which is amazing, but just know the difference. There's a very clear 10x difference. And then all the other career paths have more to do with services and monetizing in other ways. So to me, as someone who is very multifaceted, I have a lot of different skill sets with writing. If I ask myself, which game has the highest earning potential over the next 50 years of my career, and how can I place different bets in different vehicles, and the fact that I studied fiction and I love it, I'm going to start playing the genre fiction game because I'm like, oh, that has a way higher ceiling than a lot of the other stuff. So that'll be really cool too.

Tim Stoddart: I'll save that for the next podcast. People don't realize that fiction is a a hundred times more volume than nonfiction. Way, way, way more. Way more. Yeah. Insanely more. Wow. Okay. So we got our topic for the next episode. Thanks again for coming on last minute. Thanks for saving my ass, Cole. Really appreciate it. Thanks everybody for listening and we'll talk to you next time.