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From Podcast to Published Book with Jared Maher · If I'm Being Honest: Straight Talk About Book Publishing & Promotion

• 0:11
  Joel: Hey everybody, my name is Joel Pitney, and I am the host of If I'm Being Honest, Straight Talk about Book Publishing and Promotion.
• 0:18
  Joel: And today I am really psyched to have uh one of the authors that my company helped publish, Jared Mayer or Maher.
• 0:27
  Joel: Jared Maher.
• 0:28
  Joel: Jared Maher.
• 0:30
  Joel: Yeah.
• 0:30
  Joel: He is the lead producer at The Lever, which is a media company.
• 0:34
  Joel: And he's also co-author of the book The Master Plan, which is a book that my company launched.
• 0:40
  Joel: My book helped him produce and publish.
• 0:42
  Joel: So welcome, Jared.
• 0:44
  Joel: Hey, Joel.
• 0:45
  Joel: Thanks for having me.
• 0:46
  Joel: Yeah.
• 0:47
  Joel: And uh, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot that I want to talk about with you today, Jared.
• 0:52
  Joel: I think one of the reasons I wanted to bring you on the broadcast is um uh you're an example of an author who came into this um with an existing audience.
• 1:01
  Joel: You'd already built an audience through the lever, which is a media company that publishes um really amazing long-form journal journalism, investigative journalism.
• 1:09
  Joel: And then also had uh published a podcast called The Master Plan.
• 1:13
  Joel: And uh so you kind of you and and your company came in and wanted to publish a book that you could sell direct to that audience.
• 1:20
  Joel: Um and so I think that's really interesting.
• 1:23
  Joel: It's a really interesting case study for people who are who are thinking about how to go about publishing their book.
• 1:28
  Joel: Um, so that's one thing I wanted to talk about.
• 1:30
  Joel: And then the other thing I wanted to talk about today is is just talk a little bit about the book itself, because it's a really interesting story.
• 1:36
  Joel: So um, why don't we start there?
• 1:38
  Joel: Why don't we start with uh what is the master plan, um, the book and and and the podcast it's based on?
• 1:46
  Jared: So the book version of Master Plan, which came out last fall, is about the history of corruption and money in politics in America.
• 1:56
  Jared: So the way I explain it to people is uh if you've ever wondered how it is that in the United States we got to the point where there's billions and billions of dollars in the political system, super PACs, seemingly like uh money and corruption everywhere.
• 2:14
  Jared: Uh, how did we get to this place?
• 2:16
  Jared: And so what the Master Plan podcast and then the book does is really takes a look at the 50-year history of how we got to this place, and that it didn't just happen by accident.
• 2:28
  Jared: It was a concerted effort by a very specific small group of people who had an agenda to create the system that we currently live in today, and it follows everything from Supreme Court rulings, uh the federal judiciary, to other things like um uh corruption scandals starting in Watergate through the 90s and how each one of those created the system in which we now live in.
• 3:01
  Joel: That's it's so cool.
• 3:02
  Joel: And you know, for anybody out there, I highly recommend both the book and the podcast.
• 3:06
  Joel: I actually listened to the podcast before we started working with you on the book.
• 3:10
  Joel: Yeah, and there's a lot of really cool stories, right?
• 3:13
  Joel: So it's not just wonky at all, right?
• 3:15
  Joel: It's there's all kinds of cool behind the behind the scenes stories about the milk lobby bringing suitcases of cash uh to representatives from the Nixon administration, and it's it's really, really, really interesting.
• 3:29
  Joel: Yeah.
• 3:30
  Jared: And we tried not, and and that was the whole point of the project when we approach it.
• 3:34
  Jared: We didn't want it to be an academic textbook because there's lots of those that people can read.
• 3:38
  Jared: We really want it to be accessible and almost feel like a true crime story.
• 3:44
  Jared: So very narrative-based.
• 3:45
  Jared: We have characters, uh, the and the both the podcast explores certain aspects, and the book is able to explore other aspects of it.
• 3:54
  Joel: That's totally yeah, true crime is definitely how it uh feels.
• 3:57
  Joel: It feels like true crime, and then also you get you get that kind of edutainment thing, which I love, where you feel like you're being you're being entertained with this really cool story, but also you're learning about, you know, something that we take for granted today, honestly, the way corruption sort of just sort of woven into our political system, and we don't even question it, honestly.
• 4:17
  Jared: Yeah, and hopefully that's you know, that's what we're going for.
• 4:20
  Jared: Have those uh head slapping moments where listeners and then readers can be like, I cannot believe that uh this is the actual story behind uh some of these events that I sort of know, but we really flesh them out and really expose a lot of new information that we picked up uh during the years of research and reporting on it.
• 4:42
  Joel: That's awesome.
• 4:43
  Joel: Well, so so I want to shift a little bit to um to uh the publishing side.
• 4:50
  Joel: So y'all had done this awesome limited series, The Master Plan, which season two is is we're in the middle of the year.
• 4:56
  Jared: Season two is releasing right now, so people can check that out.
• 5:00
  Joel: Um and you decided that you wanted to turn it into books.
• 5:04
  Joel: So how did that how did that decision-making process go for you?
• 5:08
  Jared: Well, as we were working on the podcast episodes, and there's 11 episodes in the series, um, it kind of grew as we went along, but it um, you know, the this is like 11 hours of audio content.
• 5:22
  Jared: And even with that, there was thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of words in the scripts that just got totally cut out.
• 5:31
  Jared: We didn't have room for them, they didn't fit.
• 5:33
  Jared: Uh, entire rabbit holes that I had um and and other producers had had run down, interviews that we just wouldn't didn't work in the in the series.
• 5:42
  Jared: And so in the back of our minds, we, you know, maybe the uh just to tell ourselves that, anyone who's done a creative project, you're kind of like, oh, well, I'll save it for something.
• 5:51
  Jared: I don't have to kill it now.
• 5:52
  Jared: But we had all of that left over on the tiger floor.
• 5:56
  Jared: And when we ended the series, and it was it was very successful, um, got to the top of the podcast charts, won us a bunch of awards, um, won a uh an audio award from the National Press Club.
• 6:09
  Jared: So we knew that there was um a demand for the topic.
• 6:15
  Jared: And secondarily, we were trying to think of well, how can we do um a derivative project coming out of all the content that we have that would both extend the life of this but also fit into our business strategy that we have at the lever as a small um reader-supported news outlet.
• 6:37
  Jared: So at that point, we were, you know, looking at the project, looking at the options.
• 6:42
  Jared: I was kind of ended up being the one that was going to write it all and put it all together.
• 6:47
  Jared: And um and then from there, we it was just a lot of research, figuring out costs, different directions we wanted to go.
• 6:55
  Jared: Um, and that's how eventually we found ourselves talking with uh you guys there at Launch My Book about, you know, how we could do this ourselves without having to go to a traditional publisher.
• 7:08
  Joel: Yeah, and I think that's really interesting.
• 7:10
  Joel: Um, one of the things that I love, I I actually use the lever as a case study often when I'm talking to people because my whole thing, you know, the name of the podcast is let's be uh if I'm being honest.
• 7:21
  Joel: And I like to be really honest with people about the financial side of publishing, right?
• 7:25
  Joel: Because whether you're doing a traditional deal or self-publishing, um, it's very difficult to make a profit uh with a book unless you have one of two things.
• 7:34
  Joel: On the, on the if you're fiction, you need to have multiple books, right?
• 7:38
  Joel: So you have to have a book that people read and then they'll buy the next book and they'll buy the next book because you're getting a customer that you can then make more money on if we're just speaking profit and loss, right?
• 7:48
  Joel: And then on the on the fiction side, um, or sorry, on the nonfiction side, the way that you have to do it is you need a way to monetize beyond just the sale of that book, right?
• 7:59
  Joel: Or you need to have a a big in-baked audience.
• 8:03
  Joel: And so the cool thing about y'all at uh at the lever is you had both.
• 8:07
  Joel: Um, not only did you have a big audience that already was listening to your show, you could sell the product to, um, but you also had a way to monetize because you want subscribers to the podcast and also suppri subscribers to the lever itself, right?
• 8:22
  Joel: Which is a which is a monetization strategy.
• 8:25
  Joel: And so that was a way that the book could generate enough profit to offset the cost of producing it.
• 8:31
  Jared: Yeah, and I remember when we were first exploring which direction we were gonna go with uh another project out of this, because there we we didn't have to do a book, right?
• 8:40
  Jared: Um we could have gone a video documentary, we could have um done events or something else like that.
• 8:48
  Jared: But the way that we went with the book is we did look at those aspects of it and the cost, and and part of the legs of the stool, if you will, that needed to be in place was the fact that we did have that big an audience, right?
• 9:02
  Jared: Both people that listen to us, follow us, but we're a reader and subscriber supported.
• 9:08
  Jared: So we have members, right?
• 9:09
  Jared: You can be a free member of the lever or you can be a paid subscriber.
• 9:13
  Jared: So really the the company is supported.
• 9:15
  Jared: Um our foundation financially is by paid subscribers, which is kind of the name of the game in all media, right?
• 9:23
  Jared: How do you get um people, uh companies built on Substacks, New York Times, whatever it is, how do you get people to sort of pay you um on a uh monthly recurring basis?
• 9:37
  Jared: So it needed to kind of match all those needs.
• 9:41
  Jared: Any project that we do has to be something that is going to get us or be an incentive to get more subscribers.
• 9:48
  Jared: That was one way the book fit in.
• 9:50
  Jared: And also, because we immediately have that uh, you know, a large newsletter list, um, large social media presence, we could immediately have uh a way to reach out to people directly and not have to go through only the kind of publishing marketing world or Amazon exclusively.
• 10:11
  Jared: Because as we know, unless you already have a big platform or a big game, it's like shouting into the abyss when you come out with a book or or a podcast, uh for that matter.
• 10:22
  Jared: I mean, in that way, um, the two the two fields are are a lot alike, like kind of have to um starting from somewhere is is a really important thing.
• 10:35
  Joel: So when you did, you know, I know I know that one consideration for y'all was which publishing path would it take?
• 10:43
  Joel: Because you were in the a fortunate position because of the size of the audience, and also because your co-author, David Sorota, is a pretty well-known figure in certain circles.
• 10:53
  Joel: You probably could have gotten a traditional publisher on board to publish the book for you.
• 10:58
  Joel: Um yeah, and and we easily could have.
• 11:00
  Jared: I mean, David's uh David Sorota, he's written two or three books.
• 11:04
  Jared: Um, you know, I've worked in publishing, I worked on other book publishing projects back in the day.
• 11:10
  Jared: So we knew that well, well, my my wife works in book publishing.
• 11:15
  Jared: And I think from our perspective, since we're already a media company, we already have a lot of the you know, financial and creative resources in-house.
• 11:28
  Jared: Um, we didn't have we didn't know anything about book publishing, we hadn't done that yet.
• 11:32
  Jared: But it just made a lot more sense to try to put the project together ourselves and release it um through the outlets that are available to uh to authors rather than going through another publishing company.
• 11:50
  Jared: I think when we I think we didn't even explore talking to a few agents, but since we are a media company ourselves, like any advance that we would get from it, and then after the fact, having to then split that revenue with a publisher really didn't make it work at the end of this.
• 12:09
  Jared: It probably would have helped with a lot of things like uh the marketing, the publishing, the sort of access to bookstores and and that route.
• 12:18
  Jared: That would have made things a lot easier.
• 12:20
  Jared: Um, but it wouldn't in the end have paid off for us in the way that we wanted.
• 12:28
  Jared: And and it would have gotten complicated too when we wanted to sell directly to our own subscribers, right?
• 12:34
  Jared: Trying to work with a traditional publisher.
• 12:36
  Joel: Right.
• 12:37
  Joel: Right.
• 12:37
  Joel: Because you would have uh my guess is the lion's share of your sales, had you gone through a traditional publisher, still would have come from your own audience and come from your own marketing muscle.
• 12:48
  Joel: And so you would have the only thing, the only benefit you the cost of production would have been covered for you through a traditional publisher, and you probably would have got a little bit more distribution, like maybe some bookstore distribution, but that doesn't end up being a huge volume, probably compared to what you'd sell on your own.
• 13:07
  Joel: Yep, exactly.
• 13:08
  Jared: And I think from a from any publisher's perspective, if we wanted to say, hey, look, we want to be able to sell directly to our own audience, well, that's what a publisher counts on anyway, right?
• 13:20
  Jared: When they look at an author, right?
• 13:21
  Jared: Like they're analyzing how much any given author has their own audience and how right out of the gate they can um sell to that audience.
• 13:28
  Jared: Well, if we're taking that off the table, the math isn't really working for them on their end either.
• 13:35
  Jared: Now, you know, I think right now, maybe, I mean, they're now that we've done one, maybe there is a relationship with uh some kind of publisher um, you know, that would like to have uh something in their catalog that you know, maybe that would be something exploring, but for for you know, a first-run publishing thing, it just didn't seem to add up.
• 13:57
  Joel: That makes sense.
• 13:58
  Joel: So when it comes to your to your you know your launch, um what did you do?
• 14:06
  Joel: How did you sell books?
• 14:08
  Jared: Well, once we once we finally got the the the manuscript edit together out out of all of these uh audio podcast scripts, uh which was a lot of work, but we finally made it through and and got you know the proofs and and ready to set it all up.
• 14:28
  Jared: I think one of the complicating things that we had that if I was to do it over again, we would have figured out a lot better, was we knew that we wanted to do pre-sales um to our own audience, right?
• 14:40
  Jared: This being like um I almost thought of it in the way that you might do a Kickstarter or something like that, but to kind of bake in those sales uh during the summer before we were gonna launch, just so that we could, you know, lock those people in and know that we had those.
• 14:57
  Jared: It got difficult in terms of like how we were gonna take the money working with the uh printer Ingram Spark.
• 15:08
  Jared: And uh I won't go into details, but it just got really complicated.
• 15:13
  Joel: It is, it's very, it's very complicated.
• 15:14
  Joel: Yep.
• 15:15
  Joel: When you're doing it on your own, especially.
• 15:17
  Joel: Yeah.
• 15:17
  Jared: Yeah, and and I think that uh we did manage to make it work, but if we were to do it again, I think there's we would have figured out how to make it at least a lot more smooth in order to take that those pre-sales.
• 15:29
  Jared: Because that did really help when I look back on on the total sales.
• 15:32
  Jared: I think we got, you know, maybe uh 600 people had signed up for pre-sales of the paperback and the ebook.
• 15:41
  Jared: So rolling into the pub date, that was really nice to have.
• 15:45
  Jared: Um and then going toward the launch, the way we were setting it up was Ingram Spark was our uh both our printer and distributor, but then we also wanted to do direct sales through our website, um, and figuring out how we were gonna that whole e-commerce exchange was gonna work, um, you know, required some new thinking.
• 16:11
  Jared: Because of course, if we went through a publisher or the traditional distribution system of book publishers, like you don't even really have to think about that.
• 16:16
  Jared: That's all integrated.
• 16:18
  Jared: Yeah, it's true.
• 16:19
  Jared: And um we were able to launch it with uh with the whole launch pad.
• 16:27
  Jared: We actually hired a book publicist to handle all the publicity and um you know doing all of that marketing.
• 16:34
  Jared: And we still wanted it to be available widely on Amazon through bookstores and everything else, but really we wanted to as much as possible steer anyone who heard about it to a landing page on our website so that they could either, if they're especially if they're buying the ebook, um, they could click on a link and buy it through our Shopify account and just have it sent to them, right?
• 16:59
  Jared: In a in an EPUB file format or even a PDF.
• 17:03
  Jared: That was really great because that's the way that we make basically all the money, right?
• 17:08
  Jared: There's like very little overhead with an ebook, right?
• 17:11
  Jared: Because the file is already created.
• 17:12
  Jared: And then secondarily, if they wanted to do a print book, which it uh uh an amazing number of people still wanted the print copy, right?
• 17:21
  Jared: That was the main driver.
• 17:22
  Jared: It felt uh, you know, it looked really good.
• 17:25
  Jared: You guys did a great job with the design and the layout, and it we wanted it to feel substantial.
• 17:30
  Jared: So when people uh could order it through our website, then it cuts through um Ingram Spark, um ends up at their house.
• 17:38
  Jared: We even got a lot of orders overseas, so we had to figure out on the fly how to do that because people in Canada or Australia or um uh in Europe wanted copies of the book.
• 17:50
  Jared: Um, but we were able to kind of flex into that as we as we saw that demand.
• 17:55
  Jared: And then on top of that, we just had you know also available through all the other ways through um Amazon, through their KDP platform being made it available there and other bookstores through Ingram Spark.
• 18:12
  Jared: So that's great.
• 18:13
  Jared: It it was really a a lot of puzzle pieces to kind of get to the point where we could make it amazing.
• 18:20
  Joel: Well, and we really had fun doing that puzzle with you, as challenging as it was, because um when you're when you're trying to figure out how you're gonna do your self-publishing distribution, you kind of have a choice.
• 18:31
  Joel: You can either go through other online booksellers like Ingram Spark will get your book everywhere, but then you can also go directly through Amazon.
• 18:39
  Joel: And that is really easy because it allows you to, you don't have to do any of the fulfillment yourself.
• 18:45
  Joel: You just, but you have to give up 40% of the profit because they're the bookseller.
• 18:51
  Joel: And for a lot of people, that's that actually is worth it because setting up their own e-commerce and fulfillment system is too complicated.
• 18:59
  Joel: But y'all already had that set up through your company, right?
• 19:03
  Joel: And so it was a little easier for you to also be have a big, you know, obviously the ebook files are easiest, but even the print files, you could do a large order and then fulfill those those sales, and it was worth it for you to get that extra 40%.
• 19:20
  Jared: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:20
  Jared: And I do think that if I was an individual author, probably the ease of working through something like Amazon and and Ingram Spark on both ends, I mean, that's definitely uh the way to go, and you just spend all of your focus on trying to make that, um, trying to market it and trying to get in front of people.
• 19:40
  Jared: Uh but you know, they find a way to get you with uh fair cut, right?
• 19:47
  Jared: So the print costs and also the um you know the revenue that they take out of it right out of the top is is uh you have to sell a lot, basically, to sort of make your money back and then you know continue to make money off of that, especially if you're not like a like a huge name.
• 20:08
  Joel: Right.
• 20:08
  Joel: Yeah.
• 20:09
  Joel: No, it's amazing.
• 20:10
  Joel: It's amazing how the system is sort of set up for everybody the author but the author to make a lot of money.
• 20:17
  Jared: Yeah, it it it really does feel like that.
• 20:19
  Jared: And it and I mean for for somebody who you know, my background is in in writing and journalism and books, uh print writing, feature writing, things like that, and then pivoted uh years and years ago into multimedia, into video and audio, and then you know, working within that working within those fields, and then kind of coming back into the print publishing world and being this hands-on with it, I was really surprised at how on one hand it it does feel like the future, right?
• 20:56
  Jared: It does feel like now in terms of how things are set up, and then in other ways, the entire industry still is so rooted in you know, the pre-internet ways of doing things, yeah.
• 21:06
  Jared: Um, that it really was a a a learning curve.
• 21:12
  Jared: And there was no one way anymore, right?
• 21:15
  Jared: There was so many different pathways to sort of get to the same outcome of getting the book into people's hands.
• 21:22
  Joel: Yeah.
• 21:23
  Joel: Yeah.
• 21:24
  Joel: No, it is amazing.
• 21:25
  Joel: And I always talk to everybody, you know, anytime we're working with someone, uh, everybody's got to figure out your own calculus for it, right?
• 21:33
  Joel: And, you know, uh every every person's situation is gonna be different.
• 21:38
  Joel: And because there are so many options, you can figure that out, although you do have to wade through a lot of complexity to figure out what's actually gonna work for you.
• 21:47
  Jared: Yeah, absolutely.
• 21:49
  Jared: And um, I don't really know.
• 21:50
  Jared: I'm actually curious how this type of project compares to the typical author that you all are are working with.
• 21:58
  Jared: And um You know, if the most successful projects that you've worked on, did it have some aspect where they were doing direct sales?
• 22:08
  Jared: Did it just like lightning in the bottle where they just, you know, hit uh the jackpot in terms of the topic and uh name recognition and sold a lot.
• 22:18
  Jared: Um, what were the most successful ways that you see people make money off this?
• 22:24
  Joel: It's it's kind of what we I I started off the the call with, and this is one of the reasons I I always talk about y'all is you're one of the more successful books we worked on.
• 22:32
  Joel: And uh because for a nonfiction book, right, uh having that baked-in audience already, you just guarantee you're gonna get a certain number of sales.
• 22:41
  Joel: And so you can really take advantage of the profits you get from uh from self-publishing, even if you are splitting it with the bookseller, right?
• 22:52
  Joel: Because if you're traditionally publishing, you're gonna get 10 to 12% of the royalties, right?
• 22:57
  Joel: So when you're self-publishing, even if you're giving up 40% to Amazon, you're still doing a lot better.
• 23:02
  Joel: And if you already have a big audience and you know you can get 600 pre-sales, like you just talked about, um, and then a lot more sales after launch, you know that you're gonna be able to make a decent amount of money.
• 23:12
  Joel: Um, and that of course that that only continues, right?
• 23:15
  Joel: And so you're one of the more successful nonfiction authors that we've worked with.
• 23:20
  Joel: And any other nonfiction author that's succeeded has been in a similar situation to you.
• 23:24
  Joel: Not exactly, but they've they've had a baked-in audience or an or another way to monetize.
• 23:30
  Joel: That's how it's worked.
• 23:31
  Joel: And then on the fiction side, it's a totally different calculus, it's all about volume.
• 23:35
  Joel: So um, the most successful fiction authors that we've worked with have six or seven books, right?
• 23:42
  Joel: And so uh you lose money on your first book, but you gain it back because you're hoping that people love the first book so much that they buy two, three, four, five, six without you having to spend a dime on marketing or promotion or anything like that to get them in.
• 23:58
  Jared: Yeah, and uh it's funny that you say that because I'm starting to notice that effect now that we're in the second season of our podcast, and it really drives home how much the different mediums that you can deliver content in have all started to merge together.
• 24:17
  Jared: So we have this audio series podcast that launched, it became a book, and people that listen to the podcast also wanted to get the book.
• 24:27
  Jared: But then people who learned about the book, we noticed when it launched that drove downloads on the first series.
• 24:34
  Jared: Now that we're going into our second season, um, which is about presidential power in America, uh, we noticed two things.
• 24:44
  Jared: One that people learn about the new series, the new season, and they go down and listen to the first season.
• 24:52
  Jared: So the downloads on the first season went up.
• 24:54
  Jared: And then also by that effect, because we've kind of networked everything together, as far as like when people click on one thing, they see an ad for the book, or there's uh you know, audio ads within the podcast about the book.
• 25:07
  Jared: We're starting to see new purchases of the master plan book.
• 25:12
  Jared: And as we go into the next season, just by virtue of having this product um to kind of pull people in deeper, uh it's strategically exactly where we want our small media company to be, right?
• 25:29
  Jared: If people we want to do really, really high quality content, especially in the age of AI slop.
• 25:35
  Jared: And what we want to do is that when we do any sort of marketing or get any media hit, um, you know, uh David appears on a TV show or we do uh get a write-up about the new season of Master Plan, and that new person kind of comes into our ecosystem.
• 25:53
  Jared: What we want is for them to listen to the thing that they like that's high quality, find another thing that they like that's that's high quality, become subscribers to the lever, get on our newsletter, get really, really high quality journalism to their inbox, become members, and then also buy the uh, you know, purchase a copy of the book.
• 26:12
  Jared: So it's kind of the only way if you're gonna try to do high-quality human-produced stuff nowadays, is to try to think three-dimensionally in in in that way about the things that that you're doing.
• 26:30
  Jared: And you can't do everything, right?
• 26:32
  Jared: But um if you think about it as kind of like pulling people in a little bit deeper each time because they really, really like what you're doing.
• 26:42
  Jared: And it doesn't matter if you're like, you know, you're doing content about fly fishing or quilting or um sports or something like that.
• 26:51
  Jared: I I think just that the way I see it working for um independent small media companies or just individual creators, that all kind of follows that same playbook.
• 27:03
  Joel: That's really it's really cool.
• 27:05
  Joel: And I love I love how you're talking about that kind of multidimensional approach because you know, I I've been working in the thought leader space now for 20 years, right?
• 27:17
  Joel: And I still see a lot of thought leaders using that very one-dimensional approach with their funnel, like, you know, kind of worked back in 2009, where everything is very fixed.
• 27:31
  Joel: You've got you the first thing you need to do is download the, you know, watch the TikTok video, then download the free ebook, and then get on the email list, and then upsell to this, and then upsell to this.
• 27:41
  Joel: And I'm sure that still works, but what I'm hearing from what you're talking about is your funnels work in lots of different ways, right?
• 27:49
  Joel: You've got someone can engage with you first through season two of a podcast, or season one of a podcast, or the book, or a media appearance, and there's a lot of different ways for people to plug in and you don't feel like you're in this narrow funnel.
• 28:02
  Joel: You kind of you can kind of go at your own pace, and you you all figured out a way to kind of monetize and grow having that approach.
• 28:11
  Jared: Yeah, and I I think it just comes back to the idea that everything is merging together, right?
• 28:18
  Jared: Um, authors now, it's like you can't just be a good author and be really good at writing and write whatever your book is.
• 28:26
  Jared: You also have to have some ability to go out and uh get in front of people through videos or vertical video or other social media.
• 28:39
  Jared: You know, there's limits to that.
• 28:40
  Jared: Um, but you kind of can't do one without the other.
• 28:43
  Jared: What I like about how we did the book and the podcast is like it's not like I feel the book was just this extra little derivative thing um from the podcast, right?
• 28:58
  Jared: It's not just like, oh, we're and we could have done it like that.
• 29:01
  Jared: And we could have just said, like, here's our podcast, and we could have just basically just taken the transcripts from the podcast and put it in a PDF.
• 29:08
  Jared: That was actually one option that we kind of interesting, yeah, right.
• 29:11
  Jared: Um, that would have been really easy and really straightforward, but the but the sort of ongoing hit that we would have got from that would have been very temporary, right?
• 29:19
  Jared: It would have been just like a one-off thing about people who just and we did get them a lot.
• 29:24
  Jared: People being like, I don't want to listen to this.
• 29:27
  Jared: Where are the transcripts?
• 29:28
  Jared: And we could have just done that.
• 29:30
  Jared: But the decision then to take all of that and really make it uh I mean, hundreds and hundreds of hours, Joel.
• 29:38
  Jared: Yeah.
• 29:39
  Jared: Putting this book together.
• 29:40
  Jared: Sure.
• 29:40
  Jared: It was a lot of work.
• 29:41
  Jared: There was like four, I'm not exaggerating.
• 29:44
  Jared: Because of the way that we had to put this together, there are so many contributors.
• 29:47
  Jared: There was uh 14,000 footnotes and endnotes once I merged all the scripts together because go through and such intense fact checking, which sounded like the smart thing to do, but I think I probably spent at least a month of my life trying to uh edit and figure out all of those footnotes and endnotes.
• 30:10
  Jared: Uh and we wanted to include uh images of documents that we had gotten.
• 30:16
  Jared: We included a different uh, you know, an afterward and a foreword and whole new whole new chapters that weren't even in the podcast.
• 30:26
  Jared: Um and while the whole time I was sitting there thinking it's like, oh man, there has to be an easier way to do this.
• 30:33
  Jared: And are we going, am I spending too much time uh devoted to this project?
• 30:38
  Jared: The thinking behind that is we really wanted to create something that felt like it was high quality, right?
• 30:46
  Jared: Like people feeling like so much of what they encounter nowadays on the internet or otherwise just doesn't feel like it's high quality.
• 30:55
  Jared: Um, so putting that human time and effort into it, I think really did pay off when we saw the reaction from people that really wanted to buy the book, told their friends about it.
• 31:10
  Jared: We had a big um event release that got uh a party, a book release party that got hundreds of people to show up and they watching them open it up and it felt significant.
• 31:21
  Jared: And there's even a lot of people who encounter the book, don't even really realize that it's a podcast, and then are emailing mailing me saying, like, is there gonna be an audiobook version of this book?
• 31:34
  Jared: As a matter of fact, yeah, as a matter of fact, there's like an 11-hour podcast with sound design and interviews and everything.
• 31:45
  Jared: You can you can listen to it.
• 31:46
  Jared: It's called MasterClan.
• 31:47
  Jared: They're like, oh, okay, thanks.
• 31:49
  Joel: I love that.
• 31:50
  Joel: I mean, you know, I don't know you weren't meaning to be on the soapbox, but I was getting that, I was getting this kind of an inspiring vibe in an in our era of AI slop, as you talked about, where you know, we're people are just sort of um we're subcontracting out thinking to these bots that we think are going to be able to do as good a job.
• 32:11
  Joel: But to hear the the the effort that you all are making to make sure that everything you're doing, from the journalism to the to the to the development of a real manuscript to the high-end production quality of a podcast has an impact.
• 32:26
  Joel: And it it actually gets better results, right?
• 32:29
  Joel: Yeah, it takes more work than just you know throwing it into Claude.
• 32:34
  Joel: But um it sounds like you're getting much longer, kind of more sustainable results from making that extra effort.
• 32:43
  Jared: Yeah, and and you know, one way that people can kind of think about it is it's not just quality for quality's sake.
• 32:49
  Jared: I mean, I want to do high quality work, but um if you want to look at it from like a financial perspective, what I'm looking at now, this book released last fall, and uh the the vast majority, so let's say 60% of all of our book sales so far happened within the first two months, two or three months, which is typical for any given book.
• 33:12
  Jared: But still to this day, when I checked without any additional promotion, we're still, you know, selling a couple hundred copies um of the print book and the ebook every single month, just as an ongoing basis.
• 33:26
  Jared: And the real the real value for us is that we use it as an incentive for people to become members so they get a discount, right?
• 33:34
  Jared: It's like the it's like the um kind of like the NPR tote bag effect.
• 33:38
  Jared: Become a member and you get a 20% discount on the book.
• 33:43
  Jared: We also do like uh uh special offers where for this weekend get the book for free or or something like that.
• 33:51
  Jared: Just having those like products that then we can use to drive uh memberships is is the real way when when I look at it.
• 34:02
  Jared: It's not even like the revenue so much from book sales, it's like that uh the the way that it converts people to become paid members is an important tool for us.
• 34:14
  Jared: And so anyone that's running kind of a membership-based content company or is working with one, that's one way to think about the value of having a a a really well-done book in your catalog.
• 34:26
  Joel: Right.
• 34:27
  Joel: Well, and that's that's the thing.
• 34:29
  Joel: You know, we'd talk about this with a lot of people, but the the number one way that a book succeeds is being a good book because it's gonna, it's gotta compel some further action, whether it's buying another book or subscribing to something or just telling their friends about how great the book was, which my guess is happens a lot for the master plan.
• 34:48
  Joel: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:49
  Joel: We definitely hear from people saying that that's that's how they heard about it.
• 34:52
  Joel: Yeah.
• 34:53
  Joel: And you have a very sophisticated audience, right?
• 34:55
  Joel: So it's a it's a pretty high bar to clear.
• 34:58
  Jared: Yeah, I think it's people that are uh interested in uh what's going on in the world, in politics, in media, uh, and deeply frustrated with what's happening in the world.
• 35:10
  Jared: So we have a we have a specific audience, we have a niche, and uh pulling those people into our world and giving them more of what they want, right, is kind of what we look at every single day.
• 35:26
  Jared: And I think uh whether or not we'll do another book, I mean, that's people have proposed, brought that up to me.
• 35:32
  Jared: He's gonna do another book for your latest season of the podcast.
• 35:36
  Jared: We we still haven't figured that out.
• 35:38
  Jared: We'll have to kind of go through it after we're done with this season.
• 35:40
  Jared: Yeah, but you know, looking at the numbers, I do think that it would make sense from just a pure business perspective for drawing more people into the project.
• 35:53
  Jared: And also since we've already done so much of the research and the work and the marketing and the branding and all of that kind of stuff with the podcast, it kind of like uh it allows us not to start from scratch with a new book project.
• 36:08
  Joel: I love it.
• 36:09
  Joel: Well, Jared, this has been awesome.
• 36:12
  Joel: And I and I think I think a lot of people are gonna really benefit from hearing your perspective and be inspired by this project.
• 36:18
  Joel: Um, where what would you like to plug?
• 36:22
  Joel: Where should people go to find out more about you and the lever and master plan and everything?
• 36:28
  Joel: What's the best place to start?
• 36:30
  Jared: Well, our website for the podcast is called masterplanpodcast.com.
• 36:34
  Jared: That's run by uh levernews.com.
• 36:37
  Jared: And so if you go there, you can see, listen to the past season, the current season, and there's a big page for how to purchase the book from there.
• 36:45
  Jared: Otherwise, the master plan book is available wherever you want to buy it, Amazon, um, Barnes and Noble, all those other outlets.
• 36:54
  Joel: Awesome.
• 36:54
  Joel: And the podcast is on everything, it's on like Spotify and Apple Podcasts and everything, right?
• 36:58
  Jared: YouTube, Spotify, uh, everywhere you wanna you wanna listen to it.
• 37:03
  Joel: Great.
• 37:04
  Joel: Well, I highly recommend it.
• 37:06
  Joel: It's it's awesome, entertaining, super insightful, um, the book and the podcast.
• 37:11
  Joel: So everybody check it out.
• 37:12
  Joel: Um, we'll include links to all this stuff in the show notes.
• 37:15
  Joel: So thanks again for joining us, Jared.
• 37:17
  Joel: Thanks so much, Joel.