3 Things I Learned From Publishing My First Book

Welcome back to the list building lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets and today I want to share with you an interview that I’ve done on someone else’s podcast about why every author should write a book. Now, most authors think that as soon as they launch their book, they’re going to be rich and famous. The idea that, you know, just putting a book out there alone is good enough. I don’t buy that. I simply don’t. There are tons of authors on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, who sell less than 10 books a year. On average, to be a successful self-help author, you’re looking at selling about 100 books a year. Now, for me, that’s not good enough for me, if you want to have your book, spread your message. If you want to have a true impact, you probably want to be selling 1000s of books per year, not hundreds of them, and definitely not dozens of them. And for me, my list, and email marketing have been instrumental when it comes to selling more books. Now on one hand, of course, the list has been helping the book, but also the book has been helping the list, so they sort of feed on each other. But what’s important is that the list provided the initial launch bed for my book to make it into an instant bestseller. In this interview, I touched upon why every author should have an email list, and preferably why every author who hasn’t published a book yet should start building your list right now before they even started writing their book, because as soon as they’re ready to send their message into the world, having a launch pad like a list will be extremely beneficial. That’s how you make your book into an instant bestseller. I became an overnight best seller in three Amazon categories, simply thanks to announcing my book to my list. My buddy Mike Martin, just the other day, was sharing with me how he sold 3000 copies of his book, just by having his audience’s list support him during the book launch. There’s very few things that are better than having an email list when you decide to become an author. And whether you are an author right now, whether you’re planning to become one, or whether you’re not planning to become one, I think what you will find is this episode will open your eyes just to how big of an impact having an email list can have on your entire business, whether you’ve got a product or a service, whether you’re an affiliate marketer, or whether you’re launching a content piece, like a book, a blog, or a podcast. So with that said, now you know what this episode is going to be about. Now you know whether you want to listen to it. And if so it’s time to take it away. Enjoy.

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I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the list building lifestyle. The podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process. This podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my bestselling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 Bonus packages includes my best capture page templates, email, swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

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Igor, welcome to the show. Well, great to be here. I appreciate you hosting me and I look forward to our chat. Yeah. So what I found really interesting about your book, because authors who sometimes get immersed in this idea of their book as their journey, they forget that the most important part of writing a book is the person on the other end, which is building an audience. And I thought your book did a really great job of kind of unpacking your journey of being an entrepreneur, creating a lifestyle around building an email list. And I really want to talk about it because I really think this conversation about email not being dead still needs to happen in particular, for authors. So let’s just give them a peek into your book. I hope they read it. Well listen, the show notes. But why did you choose this topic as a way to kind of focus your attention now? Well, there’s two reasons. The first reason being is that email changed my life. I mean by making pretty much all of my money in email marketing, and they still do to this day, and I don’t feel that at least my bank account isn’t showing any signs of email stopping because the company that I run has been growing usually every couple of years, right. So usually we see an increase in revenue, like a substantial one every two years or so. Now, the other reason is very simple. The book while the book is just a very good way to spread an idea because you can put up a YouTube video or you know you can run a pie

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got guests, and that’s great. But when you put an idea into a book, people look at it differently, people take it seriously. And then as a result, of course, they take you seriously because you have, you know, the balls to publish a book. So you know, that kind of opens more doors, it increases your Q factor, and then overall helps you get the message across that is really important to you and your cause. Right. And I think what you said there is that it increases your Q factor, it makes you more authoritative, in the days and days of attention. Anyway, you can make sure that you’re the one that people should pay attention to. So, you know, the world will catch up to what podcasts are, but the truth is, so many people still don’t know what they are blogs, even though we now use the internet widely, still don’t gain the same authority as being an author. A book says, I spend time thinking about this. Here’s my message. And it’s a very traditional concept. So most people find it just comes with authority. Would you agree? I agree. Absolutely. Especially since I started with one of the methods that I tried initially to make money online and to spread my message, which was a message of financial prosperity, because I come from, I was born in Ukraine. And throughout my life, my family went mostly through like just downs and financial downs all the time. And so I’ve used the internet to become prosperous, to make money to become wealthy, to help my friends become wealthy to improve the lives of the people around me. And, you know, I started out as one of the ways to spread this message, I chose blogging, and I blogged for eight months nonstop. And the amount of content I wrote to be honest with you probably could fill 10 books, because every day, I’m not kidding, every single day, I wrote at least 700 to 1000 words, an average book is about 32,000 words. So if you multiply 1000, by 30 days, by eight months, I mean, you can say I wrote eight books or so, however, I haven’t had a single inch of impact. With my work the most I’ve had, as far as impact is concerned, I made a few sales, you know, with some affiliate marketing, but you know, my message didn’t hurt. And my ideas did not spread. So eventually, at some point, I started putting my ideas into paid products on websites like Clickbank and other websites where you could sell information products. And that helps, right, I use paid advertising to help more. But all throughout the years there was one media, which, you know, I personally always admired, right, and people who kind of participated in the media, were always on a pedestal. For me personally, it was books, right. So when I think of authors, I think of people like, say, Tim Ferris, and Tony Robbins, and Brian Tracy, and you know, a bunch of people who are recognizable, and are considered to be gurus or authorities in their space. So eventually, if you’re considering to write a book, if you’ve been failing to launch your book, up until this point, I think a very good thing to remember is that none of the authors that you now admire and respect and want to be more like, and have started out as authorities, most of them became authorities as a result of publishing their books. But most of us think that it’s the other way around, but you have to accomplish something before you can write a book. In my opinion, you would typically accomplish something as a result of writing a book. Right? So let’s talk a little about some of your early missteps in entrepreneurship. And we’ll talk about how that also can relate to early missteps in writing a book or sharing a message. Sure, you know, the thing you just mentioned, asking for permission, or waiting for permission to write a book or publish any kind of content, I think it’s one of the most common reason for failure in the especially online where, you know, we want to become thought leaders and just in general leaders to try and we just wait for something to happen as if there’s a rites of passage of some kind, that’s supposed to make us into authorities and alliances, give us permission to go charge people for the help and want to provide them or go just publish an interesting piece of information and make an impact that information or, you know, whatever. I mean, for example, you have a TED talk, right? So some people would look at your TED talk and think, oh, wow, so he’s an authority, because, you know, he’s now, you know, has a TED talk. And it’s awesome. And for example, my friend, Dr. Sean Stephenson, who also has a TED talk, and as well as a bunch of other viral videos that I think collected over 25 million views, you know, that helps it become the authority, but you don’t you really don’t make any impact, until and unless you put yourself out there like that. As far as I know, I’ve had three and a half years’ worth of failures where I think I became an expert at my craft, as a result of just trying everything that does not work. Right. Let’s talk about a little bit about this notion, as we’re into marketing, because so many authors, they really want their message to be shared, but then they cringe at the word marketer or marketing and

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And they sell, selling oh my gosh, they’re just no, no, if it’s good, they’ll sell like, that’s a wonderful dream. But it’s not true. So you gotta shake that loose. If you’re listening and you’re an author, you think I’ll write a good book and it’ll sell if it’s good. No bestselling books are the best sold books, Miss marketed books and people know about them. They don’t necessarily have to be the best written books. And that’s really hard sometimes for people to hear who literary critics are. But what I want people to hear is, as you’re doing this, because you’re writing this book, you’re sharing this book to the world. It’s a topic you know about email marketing. So obviously that’s the context. But what would you say to the author who says, I just don’t want to do it anymore? Well, I’d remind them the story behind Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad, pretty sure pretty much everybody who wants to be an author is familiar with Robert Kiyosaki and his, you know, just enormous success. Well, in his book that he co-authored with Donald Trump, he tells the story of how he self-published it, because he got rejected by 24 different publishers. And that, you know, when he self-published it, it wasn’t not a best seller, not by any means. However, what happened was that his book was picked up by I think, if I’m correct, I think it’s my way, or one of their leaders or something like that. So it’s an MLM or organization. And it just spread throughout the organization. And as a result, somehow, it ends up on Oprah’s desk. And then, you know, Robert was at the time on vacation in some distant location, no phone, nothing. When he comes back, there’s like a message from old press people. He goes on Oprah, they talk about the book, the lights go off, the camera shuts down, Oprah turns around, you know, on this couch that usually sits on she turns to Robert, and she says, you’re welcome. I just sold a million copies of your book. So you can, you know, here’s this great book that changed many, many lives, my own including, and the whole process of becoming a best seller had a lot to do with the way it was sold and promoted, rather than with it being a good book, because publishers couldn’t really recognize it. And there’s another great, great, great forgotten story, where you had two different authors come to publishing houses back in the 1930s, with the same book, okay, same exact book, different title in different author, okay, and basically was one author with two different names. So they just mailed the book in, and the contents of the book were exactly the same. There was no difference in the table of contents in the words written, just the title was different, slightly, and the author was different. So one book got rejected every single time the other got accepted in every single publishing house. And the reason is, because the one that got accepted was, you know, was written, supposedly, by this famous author, that this guy was actually a famous author, and the other one was just a created pen name that no one knew. So this tells you that the book can be published just because it’s been published by somebody famous, for example, if you know Donald Trump, right, so he’s a controversial guy. So imagine he’s publishing another book that is going to be accepted. If Tim Ferris says, Okay, I’m going to write a book about gardening, trust me, someone’s going to want to publish it. So marketing has a lot to do with how your book is going to sell. And you know, if marketing had nothing to do with it, then most published authors would probably be selling 1000s upon 1000s of copies on Amazon, which they did not do wonderfully. So let’s talk about that. So how did you choose your niche for your book? Well, for me it was simple. I have a huge advantage over most authors because I had a market going in. So I became, you know, I was profitable with my business way before I decided to write a book because then to be quite honest with you, the very reason why I procrastinated about writing a book for so many years is because I didn’t feel I was qualified. Like, why would anyone listen to me? Right, which is this imposter syndrome? That’s a part of all of us. I think I have never met anyone who doesn’t have that. So when it comes to books, I felt you have to be like the Chosen One, to write a book until I started hanging out with some authors. And I realized, oh, wait a second. They’re just as dysfunctional as I am.

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Qualification maybe.

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Yeah. So going in, I knew who my market was. Because I’ve been in this business of helping people make money online, helping people build email lists, helping people promote their online businesses, services, information, products, etc. for such a long time. So I had my ideal customer avatar down to a tee. And you know, the amount of time is spent on just fine tuning this avatar. Well, a lot, just a lot of time. So by the time I sat down to write a book, it wasn’t a challenge. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I knew exactly who I was talking to. And I knew exactly the you know how to deliver the message because of I had many, many years of experience delivering that message to different

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crowds, what I can suggest to you is, you probably have a much easier time writing your book, if you sit down, come up with your, you know, ideal customer avatar, and then pretend you’re talking to them on the phone, literally, as they just called you up and asked you that big question that that’s on their mind. And so, and let’s pretend you spend the next 60 minutes on the phone with them, giving them all the details or telling them your story, whatever that is. So if you pretend that’s what you’re doing, but only in writing, or you can just record yourself do it and then just transcribe it, that’s like 80% of your book, the rest of you just got to format it, clean it up a little bit, maybe enhance some stories over here, reduce some clutter over there, cut the water from cut the fat, and that’s your book. From there, now you have to, you know, publish it, get the cover going, you know, maybe submit it somewhere, maybe someone wants to print it, and so on and so forth. So it’s the who that’s most important, in my opinion, that you need to start with, if you’re still uncertain about what to write about, or you know, whether anyone will actually want to get it. One of the things that you said is really helpful is to spend so much time knowing who your ideal reader is, who you’re trying to attract, so that the title and conversation of the book alone will get them to say, Oh, that’s my pain or problem. I need this help. So let’s talk about what you did to get this book out of you. Did you transcribe it? Did you have someone write it for you? Did you? What was the method that you did to get this book out of you? And did you publish traditionally self-published? What was your means of getting this book to the world? Sure. So I’ve had three attempts. Three goals of this book. The first one was, I just decided to, you know, hire someone who will get it out of me. And then they would sort of put it in the book. So this person, I won’t mention any names, I’m still frustrated with them. But this person came recommended. And they said, Okay, so I got this system, we have 10 interviews, we will figure out the outline of your book first. And we do the 10 interviews, you know, for 10 chapters, then when we’re done, I’m going to take it to my editor, they’re going to polish it up, we’re going to come up with it with an E cover, or a cover. And we’re going to publish it through Amazon’s self-publishing platform, which I think it’s called KDP. Right? Right. So I’m like, Okay, and so I pay this guy 10 grants, and it takes them eight months to conduct all the interviews with me.

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Know the story, though. So eight months to conduct all the interviews with me. And then they come back two weeks later, giving me literally word for word, the transcript of what we’ve talked about, on the interviews, no editing, no structure, nothing, just literally just me blabbing for 10 hours on paper, I was so frustrated with them, I just cut that relationship immediately. And then I said, you know what, I’m going to write that book myself. And I sit down. And for the next month and a half, I devote about 90 minutes every single day from about 532 or six or so in the morning. They don’t tell till about seven or 730. I sit down and I commit to writing 1000 words a day, I really wanted to get that book out. And I write 33,000 words. And this becomes this comprehensive guide on how to start and grow your email marketing business, promoting either your own or other people’s products. So I’m really proud that this piece really invested a lot. And you know, the quality of the content was amazing. The only thing that I didn’t consider is that it kind of turned out to be this guide, this technical guide, rather than a book. Because at that moment, I realized that all the great books that started me out on the journey and the relationship with authors, at least the relationships that I have with these authors, weren’t really technical, where they, they usually just rolled around one big idea. And then it was sprinkled with maybe three to five other ideas in the book. But there was never a very specific way to do this. Don’t do that implementation stuff. And those books because that’s not really entertaining. So what I do is I turn this piece that I wrote for so long into a product into like a product I sell to like a premium report and I just sell it, but not as a book. Right? I just sell it to my audience and they use it to generate new leads. And then I leave the whole idea of the book on the backburner for about a year. I really appreciate that. You talked about that. Will you write more books? Was this a book that you enjoyed? Or was this like? Well, I crossed that off my bucket list. Oh, I enjoyed it very much. In fact, I’m very proud of releasing it. I’m still unsatisfied with what it is, meaning that I feel it’s gonna be richer. It couldn’t be bigger. It could be more entertaining. It could be more educational at the same time. But I had to commit to a deadline, like not because I had to in terms of like, oh, I had a publisher who made me that because I know that

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Uh, if you don’t set a deadline, nothing gets done. So I committed to version 1.0. This is something that I learned a long time ago when I got into the information marketing space. And that is, you can’t really create a great product unless you commit to a crappy version 1.0. And, you know, people like Bill Gates proved that you can be famous and make a lot of money, even if your product sucks, right, because we had to endure like a good decade and a half of crappy Windows operating systems before it became anything decent and worthy of using. So as far as I’m concerned, this is my Windows 95. And so from here, I’m either going to expand on it and maybe just release an expanded version. Or I may just write a different Italian book with a different title. But this time, I know where the mistakes are that I’ve made in the first one, I know what the end result is supposed to look like now, and it will be a completely different quality product, for sure. And when am I going to do it probably sometime later this year. Because right now we are producing a bunch of new programs. So my time goes there. But as far as the book itself, it’s the first one out of many, I’m sure, right. And you also have a podcast, I want to make sure we talk about that too. Because it’s another way to build an audience to pay attention to who knows, likes and trusts you, tell us a little bit about your podcast, why you created it, and how it kind of parlays into the methods that you have in your book. Yeah, sure. So the podcast is called the list building lifestyle show, right? It’s kind of like the book. The book is the list building lifestyle book. And the podcast is the list building lifestyle show. And it was created a couple of years before the release of the book. Now originally, the podcast wasn’t created to get new customers, but rather to communicate with existing customers because we already had a large customer base. And what we’ve noticed is that the people that we do best with the people who are like the best customers buy the most, you know, behave well. And enjoy our products are typically podcast listeners. And that’s why it was originally created. And so I went on for a while just being me on the podcast, every episode was just pure Igor. But then I started inviting people that were like authorities and celebrities within our space, as well as some really famous authors. For example, I’ve hosted Robert Kiyosaki on the show, I’ve hosted Chris Voss and have never split the difference, like a bunch of people really over the course of a few years. If you want to, you can go to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. And see on the right hand side, there’s a toolbar that kind of shows you a bunch of different names, including Mark Manson, and Jeff Hoffman and a bunch of people. So that sort of became the theme where I started inviting these, like, superstars to do my podcast. And what ended up happening is that I almost accidentally started getting more credibility in the marketplace as a result of just hanging out and having media with all of these superstars. And so that was like the other added benefit to it. I’m really grateful that you you’re here on the show, what are their final words, you have somebody who wants to get over this imposter syndrome we talked about and just get going, as far as the people listening who are concerned to write a book or wrote their manuscript and still haven’t had published or haven’t send it off to their publisher. If you’re dealing with impostor syndrome, the bad news is that it never goes away. I mean, I can honestly tell you that even today, having made millions of dollars online, having published a book, and having accomplished a bunch of things in my life that most people don’t accomplish in their lifetime. It doesn’t go away. Now. So that’s the sad part. The good part is it’s the kind of thing that is just an illusion, in our perception of the way the world works, and the way that people are. But the reality is, if you hit publish, even if you’ve got a crappy book, there’s going to be a whole bunch of people who are going to love it. Chances are when you publish your book, you are personally going to hate it, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks about it. But to sum up, look, there’s no way of overcoming it unless and until you hit the publish button. So if you have a message and you publish it, regardless of whether you think it’s a great message, a crappy message, a repetitive message or not, it’s not about that it’s about you making an impact for someone else who was waiting to read your book.

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Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email, swipe files and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.