SPI 878: How I Reached the New York Times Best Sellers List with Caleb Wojcik

SPI 878: How I Reached the New York Times Best Sellers List with Caleb Wojcik

Pat Flynn: Caleb, I had a dream last night.

Caleb Wojcik: Oh.

Pat Flynn: It’s not, it’s not that kinda dream.

Caleb Wojcik: Okay, cool.

Pat Flynn: No, this is, this is about my book. Okay, so a lot of you know that I recently published a book Lean Learning, and there have been aspirations of hitting a list. And I had this dream that I hit the New York Times list, and it was so real that I cried and I was jumping up and down and I was like calling friends, letting ’em know.

And then all of a sudden I woke up and it was not true.

Caleb Wojcik: Well, we don’t know if it’s true yet or not because the list doesn’t come out until…

Pat Flynn: The New York Times list comes out later today. But first of all, I was like really upset this morning because I had felt the energy and then it was gone. But I went back to bed, had a different dream, woke up, and then saw a buddy of mine sent me a message that I hit the USA Today list.

Which is a huge deal.

Caleb Wojcik: Congrats.

Pat Flynn: Like it’s, it’s, thank you. So we are number 13 in all of us. Of all genres. In all formats. Above like several books that I know and you know, from authors that I love and trust and admire. And to be number 13 is wild.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: It’s crazy. So we find out in New York Times later, even if we don’t hit that, I’m so happy with the results because what this means is more people are getting access to it.

It is hitting potentially more national spotlight and I can always now forever say that I’m a national bestseller, which we can put on our stuff in future publications, on our courses, whatever. Yeah. Like, so that’s, that’s pretty cool. And I think we wanted to come in today and have Caleb sort of lead a chat about the process from the outside.

Right. I had a podcast episode come out last week about just all the emotions behind what it was like. ’cause I was dead tired. I was just frustrated with a lot of the process, but now on the other end of it, very happy. But still, there’s a lot to learn and I’d love for you to poke around and see, yeah, what we could do to help people who might be listening to this.

Caleb Wojcik: Well, what I’m most curious about is, you talked about the book writing process, working, publisher revisions, all that sort of thing, I’m most interested in how do you even try to sell enough books to get on these lists? Like what are the different things people are doing?

I feel like it’s a black box where you don’t know how to sell that many books. You know, you can do the traditional things. You can talk about on social media. You can email your list and try it as many people as you can, but it’s a hard sell to sell a physical book nowadays.

Pat Flynn: I mean, my big question was do people even read anymore?

You know, I mean we have an audio book which helps and we have a lot of audio listeners, but then at the same time, if you wanna hit a list, then you have to drive toward the hardcover book. Yeah. Not the audio book.

Caleb Wojcik: Physical copies. Not even Kindle. No, not even Kindle for some.

Pat Flynn: And so like that was a little bit of a rub between myself and the publisher.

Like I preferred and I wanted the audio book to come out later. Mm. So that people could get just the hardcover copy, which would give it the best chance to hit a list. Yeah. But they were like, no, we don’t. We don’t do that. Yeah. Even though I did that, and I proved it in my self-published books, so this is one of the things you lose control a little bit when you work with a publisher.

But again, we were still able to do really well, but we could have maybe done better. Maybe this is the difference between hitting the New York Times or not, I don’t know.

Caleb Wojcik: Or all those audio books that maybe someone wouldn’t have bought if there wasn’t available to help the USA Today list or something.

Pat Flynn: Right, right. True. And so as far as selling books, I mean, of course email list, sending that out. Pitching it, selling it, talking about it. Again, social like you said, but you know, including bonuses is key. Having something that would give a person a reason to buy it now. So we had pre-order bonuses and different accountability groups that people could be a part of if they joined early enough and depending on how many they bought, they could get access to different things.

Yeah, so we have like a Slack group for one level. We have like a Zoom check-in accountability group for learning different things that will happen across a couple months. So things like that were great. I have some workshops that were available just for people who picked up the book in time, and that helped a little bit.

I saw numbers come in because people had to send in their receipt.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: To sort of validate that. The podcast tour, I was on 50 different podcasts and I mean, we’ve only sold thousands of books across millions of impressions, and that’s just apparently the reality, yeah, of it now. And when I even think about my own consumption behavior for, for stuff, it’s, it’s mostly video.

I’m not reading books as much, or if I’m hearing about a book, I typically find a summary on it that somebody else made that can help me download that much faster if I need it at that time..

Caleb Wojcik: Why aren’t people buying books and you don’t buy books?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Yeah. I was talking about this with somebody the other day.

Another entrepreneur who has sold millions of dollars worth of courses to tens of thousands of people. And she had also come out with a book recently and she’s like, we can do all this, but then we can’t even push like a $20 book. Like it’s just really hard. Yeah. And so this really speaks to just the change of the industry and the medium.

I mean, I don’t think books are going away, but it’s getting hard.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: So I don’t know if somebody were to ask like, is it worth writing a book? It depends. I think there’s some prestige that comes with it, especially with a traditional publisher and you know, the shots of it in Barnes and Noble are really cool and are used for credibility, but I don’t know, it’s hard to answer that now.

Truly.

Caleb Wojcik: I mean, I think it puts you in a different echelon of people. It’s always gonna be like in your bios of like author of, and like, it can help open doors for you. You can, it is an excuse for you to reach out to be on podcasts to get your name out there, yeah, as well.

Pat Flynn: That’s true. So there’s a bigger strategy that the book is just a part of.

Yet this took four years ever since the proposal was made and several edits and a lot of headaches and quite a bit of time. And again, weighing all those things against each other, it’s like, well, could we have A self-published something much quicker and get something out there or use that energy elsewhere?

Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. And then would I work with a traditional publisher again? I’m not quite sure yet.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: I’m not quite sure yet, to be honest. Yeah.

Caleb Wojcik: And I think it probably felt like you were finishing a race to get to the launch date, but then there’s like a whole nother race.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I finished the marathon and it’s, like.

Caleb Wojcik: Which starts the, like.

Pat Flynn: I get to eat a banana and then like do another marathon.

Yeah. Yeah. Which it does feel like that. You know, this book in particular. Was written to have the possibility of going super wide, right? It’s not just for entrepreneurs, it’s a much bigger genre of self-development and self-help. It talks about education. It’s useful for really anybody, and that’s the struggle.

If you want it to be more wide reaching, you have to be a little bit more general and less specific. Yeah. But then the less specific you are, the harder it is for a person to know this is a book for them.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: So the strategy for me is a long-term vision of seeing people start to get a hold of it, talk about it.

And we had talked about the struggle of book selling, but then you see people like James Clear, who’ve been on the New York Times list for 300 weeks straight.

Caleb Wojcik: 288 or something is what it said yesterday.

Pat Flynn: Mel Robbins and her book. The Let Them Theory is literally everywhere. I see this green book at Target and Walmart and at the airport and like everywhere I turn and it’s number one right now and it has been for several weeks.

So I mean, people are buying books. How are people knowing what books to buy though? It doesn’t feel like it’s from necessarily their favorite person telling them to go buy the book? I feel like it’s because it just takes a, a cultural wave. Atomic Habits had hit a cultural wave where everybody was just talking about it in the office with each other, and then people were buying bulk copies for all their employees and didn’t happen right away either.

Yeah. Which is inspiring I think in the research I did with James’ book, he got on the list ’cause he, you know, he was a very prominent blogger and had a, a very loyal audience hit the list, disappeared, but kept going with the podcast interviews and kept grinding, which is in the phase that I’m in now. I’m not gonna stop.

And then eventually came back and has not left since, you know, took on this crazy cultural relevance, right? So we’ll see. This book has the possibility to do that. It was written so that it was so easy to read that anybody could read it and get value from it. And so we’ll see what happens. But to hit a list like the USA today, I’m very proud of that.

I do have to recognize that I do have to slow down before I, I speed back up again and just go, wow. Like I did something really cool.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: That not a lot of people can say, and I can always say, now I’m a national bestselling author. Like, actually, ’cause my last bestselling book was a Wall Street Journal bestseller in an ebook format.

So people could argue like, well, I mean that’s back in the Kindle heyday. Yeah. And like, that’s the only reason why ’cause there wasn’t that much competition. Yeah. So it felt good.

Caleb Wojcik: What other things did you do other than like the bundling and promoting it on your own and doing the podcast things? What are these unique bulk buys and how do you have to format those so that they don’t hurt you on these lists? Yeah.

Pat Flynn: You can’t just buy 10,000 of your own books, right?

Caleb Wojcik: Take your whole advance, right.

Go to Amazon. Thousands of ’em. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: They track apparently, and the New York Times is still very mysterious. There are people who sell loads of books who never get on there because of the category that they’re in or just the political stance they have, honestly speaking. And there’s a lot of things like it’s very biased in many ways.

You know, there’s that. But to position yourself from my understanding, and I have to give credit to where credit is due, Rory Vaden from Brand Builders Group is incredible. He’s taught me so much about kind of how all this works and to best position myself in a legit way to make this happen. And so, you know, he has this term called BILS books in lieu of fee.

So, a strategy that we really went in with was, Hey, event, like I’d love to speak at your event. Whether they ask or I, I go and propose like, Hey, I’d love to show up and speak at your event. Here’s my normal speaking fee. However, I have a book coming out, so instead of paying me money for my fee, just buy this many books.

And so to have different communities, different conventions, different events, do that is, is great ’cause you get your numbers up much bigger. However, if you have too big of bulk buy and too many of those and very little sort of organic individual sales, then it’s just gonna be like, okay, well you just have connections who are buying these things for you.

Yeah. And that’s it. So the, the sort of trick, if you will is to collect the names and addresses for those individuals at those events. And this is a way that then those books can be distributed to all the retailers that need to be so that they count. Because if you have too many book buys, it’s just not gonna count.

Here’s the thing though, like, let’s, I’m not gonna name any conferences in particular, but let’s say a conference bought 500 copies and there were a few that did, and then we go, okay, well here’s a form. Have everybody, it’s, it’s gonna be free for them, so let’s send them the form and they’ll fill it out.

Let’s get 500 of them. You know, you have 5,000 attendees, like let’s get 10%, a hundred names would come in. Yeah, that’s it. Nobody would fill it out.

Caleb Wojcik: For a free thing.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, for a free thing. And it’s like I spoke to a lot of people and they say, this is how it is. Yeah. It’s just a part of the game. So again, I think the, the launch strategy requires a lot of these things and a lot of the promotions.

I also did like a really cool social lead up to it the week before I got sick though, so I wasn’t able to continue it, but I was doing basically 21 days straight of just behind the scenes of the book launch leading up to the book launch. And there was the moment where I opened the book out of the box when I got to see it for the first time.

And I put a little nod back to the feature there when you know, George McFly got his book at the end, at the end of, of the movie. And I was like, this is my moment like George McFly, If you put your mind to it, you could do anything kind of thing. And then the moment where like I had a crash out the moment where I got on certain podcasts and I got to share the behind the scenes and drive into LA and to see Sean Stevenson and how bad the traffic was, and just kind of letting people in on the process that worked really well for just touch points that weren’t just selling.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: And I think that brought the human aspect to the promotion. It brought the, how important this was. It was even less about the content in the book and more just like follow the journey with me. Right. And this was something that I learned when you and I worked together with the Switch Pod that really sold the Switch pod was.

Hey, for 14 months we’re gonna show you how we invent this thing and we’re gonna take you along for the ride. Yeah. And so that’s what I did in a sort of contained period of time. And it, and it seemed to work to get people to want to support. ’cause I got direct messages from people saying, Hey man, you worked so hard on this, like, I wanna support you.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah. And it’s like a smaller scale version of the guy that just sailed all the way to Hawai Yeah. Like he quit his job, bought a sailboat, tried to figure out his sail in Phoenix. Yeah. And like. People wanted to be along for the journey and they could celebrate when he made it finally. Right.

Pat Flynn: And so like they’re rooting for him.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah. Right. And so the more you can bring people along on that, I know it, it might be tough to do that depending on what your project is, but I do think that raw behind the scenes thing is something that, especially in this age of AI, is going to be so magnetic a hundred for people to like gravitate towards to want to see that as opposed to like generic stuff that everyone’s posting ’cause they batch processed it through ChatGPT or something like that. Yeah, it’s like AI can’t yet copy your story.

Pat Flynn: The storytelling is key, and I’ve said this multiple times in different podcast episodes and videos. That’s gonna be the number one skill in the future is storytelling.

How you take the information that is freely available and wrap it around something that connects on an emotional level that becomes relatable. And that’s what I was doing and I was getting those reps in getting practice in. I’ve gotten a lot of reps from my other shorts channel with the Pokemon thing.

Yeah, so like I was familiar with the editing, which was great. From this point forward though, I think short form video is gonna be a very prominent strategy for me moving forward. I do wanna lean into that a little bit more.

Caleb Wojcik: Lean.

Pat Flynn: Lean, Lean Learning. Exactly. I mean, and create a specific container of time to focus on it, to give it the best shot, not just dabble in it, but really go deep.

And part of the Lean Learning processes, finding somebody else who’s done these things before and kind of learning from them. And one of those people is Joseph Wynn, who wrote the book, Don’t Believe Everything You Think, which is a really good sort of like self-reflection book about like. What you believe is what happens and unlearning how to deal with the mental process of, of happiness and what you think is real out there, what people say about you.

All the, it’s, it’s really good. Self-published. Initially I met him in Tennessee and he talks about how TikTok was his number one strategy for getting his book out there. And you were like, what? I was like, yeah. I was like, wait, tell me more. And I mean, he has videos that he himself has published that are very simple.

He’s just flipping through the book and he’s like, this book will undo 10 years of mental damage that you’ve done to yourself. Or something like a good hook. Yeah. But then it’s like, wait, what? And then you there, I mean like literally 3.2 million views on a ten second video. But the bigger strategy is he is selling books through TikTok shop, mainly through affiliates who are talking about the book and getting like a little bit of commission from it.

Mm-hmm. And so what happens is now you have these influencers on TikTok who have audiences, who have reach, who have their own versions of their own hooks, who are talking about this book and telling people to go and get it. Because they’re incentivized. They get paid, but then this helps make more sales for Joseph.

And now his book has been on the New York Times list for the last several weeks in a row. At number four, I think, this week, and largely driven through short form. And I know that most authors aren’t thinking about that. So I wanna get ahead on, and, you know, I wanna learn about it and I’m gonna dissect it and I’m gonna share it with all of you later as I discover more and, and just kind of figure out how that works.

But I feel like that’s gonna be a major part of the long-term game because again, this book will help you undo how you’ve learned. And it’s a very hooky title book too. Yeah. It’s like how to achieve more about learning less like you need to learn, like stop learning. Yeah. Which is very counterintuitive and I think provides for a great hook.

So if I can utilize different creators in the way that they connect with their audiences and with the similar messages, I think it could, it could have the, again, the potential to take off. This is the bet that I want to take. You can take all kinds of bets with whatever it is you wanna do, meeting which strategies make sense for you.

This is the one that I feel like might be the best bet with all the cards that I have in front of me.

Caleb Wojcik: What would you say to someone that’s looking to be traditionally published versus self-publishing? You do the self-publishing for the first three books. Yeah. And then you decide to do traditional. Why did you decide traditional for this one, and what would you say to someone that is interested in.

Pat Flynn: Two reasons I went traditional with this one. Number one, I just wanted to see what that process was like. Because I had done self-published, like you said, and everybody had been asking me, well, what’s better? I didn’t know. So I went through this process specifically just to experience that, and it’s been definitely, like I said in the last episode, a learning process.

And we’ll go deeper later about literally the pros and cons in a more specific for author kind of video. But the second reason was because this book is a genre much larger than the one that I normally speak in, which is just for entrepreneurs. I felt, or I thought at least that the distribution and the authority that came with a publisher like Simon and Schuster would help with the credibility in a space that I yet to have credibility.

And I think that was a fair take. Is it panning out like I thought, I don’t know. I think it’s still early. Yeah. But that’s why now to the question, is it worth it? I think it depends on your goals. For me, I think it’s worth it for the experiment and the learning, and also for this reason, like I said, for the personal development space, however, you know, I did get an advance, but even then, I don’t know if it was worth the money that I got for it to go through the delay in how long this took.

The lack of control on certain parts of the process, especially the, honestly, I didn’t get back as much traditional marketing and PR that I thought it was gonna get that I didn’t have access to. Like I thought that there would at least be one Good Morning America type of situation that there’s been none of that.

But at the same time, you know, honestly, having a publisher say, Hey, this is due on this date, like it got me going.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah,

Pat Flynn: Maybe a book would’ve never happened if I didn’t have that force function like I talk about in the book. Yeah. So there’s something to be said for that as well. So it’s not a clear line for myself. Or really anybody. There is prestige that comes with it. But I mean, Joseph Wind’s book was self-published. Miracle Morning, which is seen, I don’t know, 5 million book sales never hit a list. It’s changing lives and he’s making a lot of money. Hal Elrod, that was self-published. Yeah, the Coaching Habit by Michael Bunge Stanier self-published like hundreds of thousands of copies sold, if not millions. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think you need traditionally published books anymore like you once needed before.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah. But it could help open certain doors or help you meet certain people or certain relationships. Right. Could build out of it.

Or as they see the initial success of a book, they might recommit to it in a way. You know, they’re working with tons of authors and tons of books come out and like, then they see which one’s okay, this one’s actually taking on rights more forced this author like brought a lot to the table and launched it.

Well now let’s like recommit to it or you know. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: And then there’s also hybrid models. There’s different companies that will offer that distribution, but allow you to keep more of your royalty, won’t have an advance per se, but will have a lot of the same advantages. That a traditional publisher might have.

Caleb Wojcik: We have mutual friends that negotiated to keep the audiobook rights. So there’s a different way to do it. We’re like, okay, let them help me with the hardcover version and I’ll keep the rights to the audiobook.

Pat Flynn: Keep audio. Yeah. I mean, I fought for that. I wasn’t able to win, but mm-hmm. I would’ve loved to keep the audio rights.

‘Cause as a podcaster, that would’ve been great. But again, the message is more important to me than the money on this. And I feel like if the message is good enough and if it reaches enough people, it’ll. Come back and many times over. So we’ll see what happens. But that’s the update for now. Yeah. On the book USA Today, number 13.

Caleb Wojcik: What’s your next book? I’m just kidding.

Pat Flynn: I’m not ready for that. I’m not ready for that. Honestly. The next book might be. An updated version of Superfans, you know, that was written before the SPI Community was even a thing. And there’s a whole chapter on building community. It was written before Deep Pocket Monster, and this is blown up into even certain platforms.

Caleb Wojcik: Before TikTok.

Pat Flynn: Before Circle.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s true. So I, I feel like an updated version of that could be great and. I feel like that message continues to be important to build for superfans and the human connection and experience that you offer as a business owner versus just the transactional stuff. Yeah. Well, awesome.

Thank you, man. Thank you for everybody supporting Lean Learning and this has been great, and thank you for leading this conversation, Caleb, and be sure to subscribe to the podcast for the YouTube channel. If you’re watching this on YouTube, we’ll do more stuff like this over time. We’re talking for the second half of the year about ways to uplevel our content and have more fun and get more done for you.

So stay tuned and wishing you all the best. Thank you.