The Creativity, Education, and Leadership Podcast with Ben Guest

The beauty of the Amazon Adwords is everybody who's searching on Amazon Books is a book buyer. You don't have to convince them to buy a book. You only have to convince them to buy YOUR book.

This is a bonus episode of my miniseries on how to PLAN, WRITE, EDIT, and PUBLISH your book. This episode is how to MARKET your book.

My co-host for the series is Greg Larson. Greg has written and edited more than 80 books.

In Part 1 we reviewed how to PLAN your book.

In Part 2 we reviewed how to WRITE your book.

In Part 3 we reviewed how to EDIT your book.

In Part 4 we reviewed how to PUBLISH your book.

Today Greg and I and special guest Mark Paul review how to MARKET your book.

Mark’s self-published book The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told: A True Tale of Three Gamblers, The Kentucky Derby, and the Mexican Cartel, has sold more than 40,000 copies which puts it in the 99.99th percentile of books sold. The Los Angeles Times says, “It's light, it moves quickly, it's fun.”

Greg’s book, Clubbie: A Minor League Baseball Memoir, has sold more than 4,000 copies which puts it in the 98th percentile of books sold. The Los Angeles Daily News says, “If Clubbie isn't the best piece of baseball literature since Ball Four, it's the leader in the clubhouse.”

My book, Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball: Memoir of a Namibian Odyssey, has sold more than 400 copies which puts it in the 60th percentile of books sold. The New York Daily News says, “I was hooked from the start. A terrific read of the can't-put-it-down variety!”

In this episode I first interview Mark and we talk best book marketing practices and what he learned moving 40,000 books. Then I take the best marketing advice from a previous interview I did with Mark and present that advice. Finally, I take the best marketing excerpts from Greg from our first conversation and present those. Enjoy!

TRANSCRIPT

Ben Guest:

Hi everyone. This is Ben Guest, and I've just finished a four part mini series with Greg Larson on how to plan, write, edit, and publish your book. So this is a bonus or companion episode on an important part of publishing your book which is, after you publish it, you have to market it. What good is a book that no one reads, right?

So this is a special episode where I've taken three different interviews and taken the best parts of those interviews about marketing and combined them. The first is a brand new interview with the author, Mark Paul, who I've had on previously. Mark self-published his book called The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told, and at this date, he's sold more than 40000 copies, which is amazing. If you sell more than 4000 copies, you're in the top 2% of books sold in one calendar year, to sell 40000 is in the 99.9999 percentile.

It's an astounding number of books, especially self-publishing, the other distribution and marketing muscle of a traditional publishing house. So Mark knows his stuff. In the first interview, which leads off this episode with Mark, we talk two things. We talk genre choice at the beginning, before you even start planning your book, thinking about genre choice and using a great tool called Publisher Rocket, which is available on kindlepreneur.com.

I'll link to that in the show notes. And then we talk about Amazon Ads and kind of the back end after you've published, how to market your book. After that is the first interview I did with Mark several months ago, and that was Episode 34. I've taken the best parts of that episode that apply just to marketing and chopped that up and included that. And then the third part of the episode is the very first interview I did with Greg Larson also several months ago, and I've taken the best parts of that interview that applies solely to marketing and chopped that up.

So you're getting a brand new interview with Mark Paul, the excerpts of the best bits of marketing advice from Mark Paul from a previous interview and the best marketing advice from Greg Larson from a previous interview. So this should be a helpful introduction to book marketing. If you enjoy this episode, please recommend it to others. Please like the podcast on the platform of your choice and subscribe to my weekly newsletter at benbo.substack.com, B-E-N-B-O, .substack.com. Benbo is my family nickname. So, benbo.substack.com. I put all of this content out here for free. So if you enjoy it and you find useful advice or information in it, please take a minute to like and subscribe. Thank you and enjoy the episode.

Ben Guest:

Mark, thank you so much for coming on.

Mark Paul:

Glad to be here again.

Ben Guest:

You are the man when it comes to moving books, you've sold over 40,000 books of your self-published fantastic book, The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told.

Mark Paul:

Thank you. I love mark getting my book. I never stop. If you're around me, you're going to hear about my damn book, I guarantee it.

Ben Guest:

So somebody comes to you, they have an idea, they want to write a book. How would you advise them to think about the process of marketing before they even start writing their book?

Mark Paul:

The number one thing I learned that I didn't know until after published my book and started marketing my book is, unfortunately, you're not going to sell many books unless you're in a genre that people buy a lot of books. You can sell a lot of books with an average book in a high demand genre, as opposed to having a magnificent book in genre that nobody cares about, nobody buys books.

Mark Paul:

But I mentioned to you that I wrote a book that in its premise is about a female, a filly trying to win the Kentucky Derby against the male colts, something that had only occurred twice in 150 years. And that's a great story, but there's not a lot of people out there looking to buy books in the horse racing genre. So I would've really probably not sold a lot of books, but I got lucky because my book had a big component to it, is that the guys that bet on this filly to win the Kentucky Derby made the bet at a little rinky-dinky racetrack in Tijuana, that they found out late was owned by the Mexican cartel.

Mark Paul:

So now they were faced with this dilemma, which kind of a cool thing where could a filly, a female beat the colts in the Derby. And of course now you've got, women are interested, you've got women engaged, sports fans, horse racing people, but now I have a genre of true crime and I'd probably have sold 10 books in true crime genre for every book I sold on horse racing, even though you could say my book is about ...

Ben Guest:

And you've mentioned that either on the first episode we did or off air, that when your book broke into the top 10 on Amazon of true crime, then I think you saw a bump in sales. Is that correct?

Mark Paul:

Absolutely. One thing I learned is you have to always be afraid. I lived in fear of falling into the well, and once you get into the Amazon algorithm well of not selling books and not being something that they think their audience wants, I don't know how you ever crawl back out of the well. One thing that I did is I really studied Amazon ad words and I realized quickly in marketing that Amazon is magnificent in one way.

Mark Paul:

And that normally when you run an ad, if you were going to run a Google ad words about your book, the problem is, is that most people, 99% of the people that are seeing it, aren't there to buy a book. So, you're up against it and you're wasting your money. The beauty of the Amazon ad words for books is everybody who's searching on Amazon books for a book is a book buyer.

Mark Paul:

So you don't have to convince them to buy a book. You only have to convince them to buy your book. So you already, you've got a real buyer on your hands there. So now you need to get into that algorithm and its success to get success. One thing that I did, I was not out afraid, especially in the beginning to spend money on buying ad words and having a budget for my book.

Mark Paul:

And they always tell you, well, if you're on Amazon basically, and you're self-published, you can get about 70% of every dollar of sales. So they say as long as you're spending money and you're not spending more than 70 cents per dollar received, you're at least breaking even, which was kind of my immediate goal. But I actually thought about it after a while. I was saying, well, I'm selling books, but I'm not making any money because I'm spending 70 cents every book that I sell.

Mark Paul:

But then I realized something, this might seem self evident, but it wasn't, it dawned in me, I said, well, hold on, I'm getting 70 cents for every dollar I spend, but that's only for my Kindle books, for my eBooks, but for every ebook I was selling, now I was shocked at this, for every ebook book that I sold I'd sold two paperbacks, and I wasn't paying anything for my paperback.

Mark Paul:

So although I was spending all this money to sell my eBooks, I wasn't realizing that I was selling twice as many of this on my paperback books. So don't be afraid to spend money on your ad words, especially out of the gate, and especially, obviously find a category or two that you can dominate. Find a little niche category that you can be the number one author in. And that'll give you that cool little Amazon orange banner, that you're a number one author and when you die on your gravestone, you can write that I was a number one author. It might have been in the category where I was joke is, gay dinosaurs. It's a very small category, but by God, I'm number one.

Ben Guest:

Here lies John Smith, beloved father, son, and best selling author in.

Mark Paul:

They can never take it away from you.

Ben Guest:

They could immediately leave off the category. Love it. So let's talk Amazon ads. Can you kind of break down for the listener how Amazon on ads work? I think there's a bidding process.

Mark Paul:

Yeah, the best thing that I found, and I don't get any money for this, or what is it? Rocket-

Ben Guest:

To Rocket ...

Mark Paul:

Fantastic. They're really cheap. It's $35 a year or something to join. And when you go on Publisher Rocket, you finally understand there's all of these categories. Well, first of all, when you go on Amazon, they tell you, you get three categories, but you really don't. You really get 10 categories. All you have to do is email them and tell them the 10 categories you want your book in. So, that's really important. So if you go and you study all these categories and you know similar books to yours, what categories they're in, then I would try to pick five of them that are big selling categories, like true crime.

Mark Paul:

And then I would try to pick a few of those that are really minuscule little small genres that perhaps you can be number one or at least top three in for that. And one thing about that website is they'll actually tell you all of the keywords that those books are using in their ads. So you need to know all the ad words. And then what I did too, I created these lists and listenings of any book that was like my book, any categories, words that were like my book.

Mark Paul:

And also then I would actually advertise all the competing books and all the competing authors. And I would bid on all of those keywords as well. The best course racing book ever written was Laura Hillenbrand, Sea Biscuit. And so, I would bid on Laura Hillenbrand, her name. I would bid on Sea Biscuit and I would want anybody who's looking for Sea Biscuit, I would hopefully have my I book come up before Sea Biscuit because I was paying good money for it, because I wanted to dominate the horse raising genre.

Ben Guest:

And that advice is so key, and that's exactly the advice that you gave me before I published my book and I followed it to a T. So you identify some categories that are big categories and then you identify a couple of categories that are super small and niche. Just to give the listener an example, a funny example. So I downloaded on my phone the other day, Twitter and Facebook. So I go to the Apple app store and I search for Facebook. And the first thing that comes up is Facebook, right?

Ben Guest:

So I download it. Then I search for Twitter. The first thing that comes up is Facebook, meaning Facebook has bid well in that ad space, right? So Twitter comes up second under their own search. So it's the same thing, whatever book you're writing, you want to find, my friend, Greg Larson calls it, your pilot author.

Ben Guest:

Somebody that the author in the book is comparable to yours, and then you can see like Mark is saying, on Amazon ads, you can say, Stephen King, when people search for Stephen King Misery, my book comes up first. Now something like that, a huge book, a huge author, you're going to bid really high. But then I identify more niche authors in niche books because again, to your point, someone going on the Amazon bookstore is going to leave with a book, it's going to be someone else's book or it's going to be your book.

Mark Paul:

Exactly. And you wouldn't want to bid on Stephen King because it'd be too expensive. And you don't want bid on things that aren't related to your book because people aren't going to buy your book. So you have to make sure that if you wrote a book on basketball coaching, I'd be bidding on Phil Jackson and Showtime and Coach K and all that stuff. That's what I'd be bidding on, not Stephen.

Ben Guest:

100% and so jet us to break this down for the listener. So I wrote a book about the power of meditation and the impact that it had on coaching basketball. Obviously Phil Jackson is a number one for that. And so when I did my Amazon categories, which Mark mentioned, not category, sorry, keywords, when I did my Amazon keywords for my book, one of the keywords I put in was Phil Jackson and basketball.

Ben Guest:

And then Phil Jackson has several books and I included the titles of all his books. So that means when it's a keyword, that means when someone searches for that keyword, your book is going to show up in that search. Now that's totally free. Then separate the Amazon ads that you bid on, I would bid on Phil Jackson, I would bid on More Than A Game, which is the title of one of his books, Sacred Hoops, another title, things like that.

Ben Guest:

So there's keywords, which are free, there are categories which we've talked about. So again, my book would fall under basketball, coaching, sports, things like that, memoir, travel writing. Those are free when you register your book and upload your manuscript to Amazon, and then you pay for the Amazon ads, but it's the same principle. The same principle applies across all these things.

Mark Paul:

So I would say that was the number one thing that I did was spend money. And then what's great is that if you start doing well, then as you have more revenue and more sale, you can spend more money. And as you spend more money, you climb up these charts. And so I'm sorry, I just, it's a vicious capitalistic system, but if you can either accept it or fail, it's your two choices.

Ben Guest:

Yes. And so we've talked about the back-back end, right after you've published your book, after you've done all of that work, but you mentioned at the top, something you should think about even before you begin writing, even before you begin outlining, which is genre choice. And again, Publisher Rocket is very helpful in that. Mark, can you talk about genre choice? And if you were advising someone who wants to write a book, what they should think about when it comes to genre choice?

Mark Paul:

Well, you'll quickly realize that there's, I don't know me, maybe 15 genres that are big sellers and that's a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that if you can get into those genres, you could sell a hell of a lot of books. The bad thing is that the bigger the genre is, the better selling it is, now you've got to compete with all of the romance novels and all the things that are selling, but you need to be aware of it up front and realize that if you're writing a book that's in a genre that people don't sell books in, nobody is searching for your book and you could have a magnificent book.

Mark Paul:

And I still would tell you to write it if it's a story that you want to tell in your heart, it's important to you and you write a great book, that's a goal unto itself, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, but then don't be disappointed when it doesn't sell, because nobody in the history of mankind has ever sold a lot of books in that genre.

Mark Paul:

But the good news is that these genres are diced up in a lot of different areas. I mentioned true crime. I learned right away, I could not ... Even now, actually one thing nobody really talks about is paperback versus ebook sales. And that's an interesting thing as I said a moment ago that I sold twice as many paperbacks, I sold two paperbacks for every ebook that I sold, which surprised me, but that's kind of a standard thing in the industry.

Mark Paul:

But I also learned that I cannot compete, I could not compete as a self published author in hard copy crime segments because I was just dealing with all of the true crime books in paperback that are sold at the airports, that are sold at Barnes And Noble, that are sold by the big publishers.

Mark Paul:

I didn't have that behind me. And there's an area that I couldn't compete in, but I could sure as hell compete in the ebook categories of that. So even now I have bookmarked on my computer and my book has been out now for almost two and a half years, I've bookmarked horse racing, Kindle horse racing books, best sellers.

Mark Paul:

And I'll click on a couple times a week and see how my book's doing. I don't even bother to click on any true crime category for hard copy or for paperback, because I know that I'm not going to do well in that area. Because I don't have the infrastructure, the physical distribution channel that the big publishers have. You're not going to compete there, doesn't mean you're not going to sell paperback, I'm not telling you. I would absolutely tell you to do it, ebook and definitely a paperback.

Mark Paul:

And you can do a hard cover if you want to or not. It's not that important, but I definitely would tell you to do a paperback because you'll sell more paperbacks than you do eBooks, but just basically market your ebook because that's the only area that you can really be competitive. And then realize too, when you check your sales, you can check your sales specifically, oh, how am I doing in best selling basketball books in eBooks and how am I doing in best selling basketball print books?

Mark Paul:

And I guarantee you, then you're probably getting your ass kicked in paperback basketball books because you're not in the airports, you don't have that distribution, but you actually can compete in the ebook category.

Ben Guest:

Mistake I made was, so Amazon now offers paperback, hard cover and I published in all three at the same time, but the sales report is broken up into ebook and print, meaning combination, paperback and hard cover. So especially the first couple of weeks say coaching basketball, I was number one in ebook and then I was number five in paperback and number 12 in hard cover.

Ben Guest:

So my hard cover and paperback sales cannibalized each other. So one way I encourage authors to think about publishing, one of the few things that the traditional model has correct, I think is you publish your hard cover first, hard cover and ebook together, then paperback later because on Amazon, your paperback and hard cover sales are going to cannibalize each other. Mark, last thing for you-

Mark Paul:

I wouldn't agree. I always-

Ben Guest:

No, go ahead.

Mark Paul:

When you have people with differing opinions, I wouldn't do that because if I'm taking the time out of the gate to sell books, you are always going to sell more books early than you are late. My wife has to put up with me all the time now. I will come in and I will say to her, "How are you doing?" And she'll say, "How are you doing?" And I go, "Oh, I'm really depressed. My book isn't selling well anymore."

Mark Paul:

And it's like, what do I expect? I expect two and a half years later, I'm going to sell just like I did in day one. You think, well maybe you should, you have a best selling, you have a lot of great reader comments, I have over 1700 reviews, why wouldn't I sell more books now? And I think the reason is, is that people that are going to buy basketball books, you've saturated after a few months. People that are going to read books about the cartel like my book, horse racing like my book, sports like my book, after a while you run through your core audience.

Mark Paul:

But if you're going to launch early because for every paperback, for every ebook you're going to sell, you're going to sell more paperback. So I'm not sure. I would probably do them both at the same time. Points well taken.

Ben Guest:

No, I always love disagreement because then there's learning there. So my take on this is, so right now Amazon's always changing a little bit, with eBooks, you take home 70% of the sales and with paperback and hardcover, you take home 60%. So for example, my paperback is priced at 7.99. My hard cover at, I think 14.99. So obviously you make more money on the hard cover.

Ben Guest:

So my thinking, but Mark, tell me if you disagree or you have a different approach or you would advise someone differently is, next time publish ebook and hard cover because I'm going to generate more profit from the hard cover and more sales on launch week and launch month, publication week and publication month. Therefore, if people don't have the option for paperback, whether they're going to take home 70% of ebook sales or 60% of the more expensive hard cover.

Mark Paul:

It would depend on how expensive your hard cover because my ebook was 7.99, my paperback was 14.99 and my hard cover was 24.99, you're just not going to sell a lot of stuff at 24.99. So I'm not sure I would agree with that.

Ben Guest:

That makes perfect sense. You'd have to weigh sort of how many sales are you losing by not having to paperback because like you, the vast majority of my sales have been paperback. Go ahead.

Mark Paul:

Stay at the top with that algorithm, you have to fight and kick and you've at least got to get into that bloodstream somehow, at least. Again, in your little genre and your little niche, you have to be at the top of that or you just, you're not going to get the rankings you want.

Ben Guest:

And we've talked about this and you mentioned this on the first episode we did, one of the best ways to stay on top of the algorithm, and this isn't something you or I have done, is to have a series. If you're dropping a new book every three months or six months of, the virtuous cycle of that, virtuous circle of that is your third book is going to generate sales for your second and first, your fourth book, so on and so forth.

Mark Paul:

I couldn't agree. If you said to me, what did you learn in your five year saga of writing a book and publishing it and marketing it, and you said, Mark, you have to feed your family by being an author, what would you do? First of all, I would be scared to death because do not do this for money, by God do not do this for money.

Mark Paul:

It's difficult. I sold 40000 books and I'm telling you don't do it for money, but I've definitely, I would do a fictional series. And that gives you a lot of things you can do. And you can give away the first book in your series and get people to like your characters or you can sell it in 99 cents and you could do a lot of promotions. And I also, this is probably completely wrong, but first of all, I'm no expert, I've written one book in my entire life, one nonfiction book.

Ben Guest:

You're no expert, you've only sold more books than 99.999% of authors.

Mark Paul:

I've only done one. And I can tell you that, I think that writing a non-fiction book is so much harder than writing a fictional book because first of all, you're going to wind up spending six months or two years just doing the research to be accurate in your book, even if it's about your own life.

Mark Paul:

So that's going to take a lot of time and then you can't just make stuff up. You can't just get creative and start banging out 10 pages a day freelancing. It's got to follow very narrow script and times. But in writing fiction, if you're just creating, then I think you could bang out a lot more pages and you could do a lot books. And I definitely think the only way to make money, only way to make money as an author would be to have a series of books that you're always promoting. No question.

Ben Guest:

100% and then that back list just generates steady income. Last question, back to genre choice, and again, Publisher Rocket is a great tool to help select which genres, which categories to be in. So let's say someone's writing travel memoir about Namibia, very small interest built in audience for that. Would you recommend trying to identify a more popular genre that you could in a truthful way, in an accurate way link your book to, or would you say just don't write it?

Mark Paul:

If you told me, oh, I would tell you, well, you have to ask yourself why you're writing it. Are you writing it to sell books? Are you writing it to get it shared or you're writing it for, do you want to share it with your children and your two neighbor? I would market that book. I would never talk about Namibia. I would talk about Africa, but more importantly, I would talk about overseas travel in that I would try to somehow tie in Anthony Bourdain or some famous guy who has a well known genre. And I'd say, I want anybody who's thinking of buying an Anthony Bourdain travel book to look at my book.

Mark Paul:

I would say and I would go, how does he do it? Where do they advertise? What are their keywords? What's the imagery that they want? That's what I'd want to capture. If you get too narrow, you have no chance to sell. But travel, that's a really good comparison, Ben. And if you had a travel book about a small place, don't make it about the small place, make it about the grand experience of travel to far away, dangerous, unique places.

Ben Guest:

And for the audience, Mark has a fantastic website with an unbelievably kick ass book trailer for his book, which in the first episode we did, he strongly recommended doing a book trailer. I took that advice. So I can't encourage you strongly enough to go to Mark's website, which is markpaulauthor.com.

Ben Guest:

And he also has a couple blog entries that he's put together, talking more in depth about all these topics.

Mark Paul:

And all our podcasts, my podcasts are there, including all the ones that are done with you and you do a great job, Ben. And by the way, what a great book, I really enjoyed your book a lot.

Ben Guest:

Thank you very much. Oh, and so you mentioned your book at the top. For the audience out there, you place this incredible bet with what ended up being a cartel in Tijuana. Did you collect them?

Mark Paul:

Well, everybody thinks that my book, because it's about a filly trying to, a true story, it's a true story about a filly trying to win the Kentucky Derby, they think that in ... I will tell you part of the ending is that she actually is successful and she actually wins the Kentucky Derby, but that's not when the book ends. In many ways, that's when the book starts because now these guys are faced with, can they get into Tijuana and can they collect their prize without getting killed? And no, I'm not going to tell you that, you have to read a book.

Ben Guest:

I love it. And that was the advice off air Mark gave to me about, don't tell people the ending, right?

Mark Paul:

They've got to buy the book, so don't give away my ending.

Ben Guest:

You worked hard on it. I worked hard on mine so people can buy it. And Mark's book, we were talking off air and came up with this sort of description of it. It's sort of a combination, heist story, right? So now you've got all this money in Tijuana, how do you get it out? And it's a buddy ...

Mark Paul:

It's a buddy cop movie combined with Ocean’s 11. We've thrown a little bit of the Me Too movement in with the girls kicking ass on the boys.

Ben Guest:

And as listeners may know, I'm now out in Los Angeles and Mark lives in Beverly Hills. So Mark, I will see you Thursday for dinner. Thank you so much for coming on.

Mark Paul:

Great. Great talking.

Ben Guest:

Thank you. So, that was my interview with author Mark Paul. Now here are clips from my first interview with Mark that I did last year. Here, we talk about the importance of an author website, making a trailer for your book, like a movie trailer, but it's a book trailer. And we do a deep dive into using Amazon ad words.

Mark Paul:

It doesn't matter how well edited it is or how great the cover is, if it's a boring topic that people don't care about, you're in trouble. One of the things I've been fortunate with my book on is that my book was actually number one in 10 Amazon categories. And one thing I learned about categories of books that's hugely important, in other words, I'm number one in horse racing, almost always [inaudible 00:30:48], number one in sports gambling, number one in gambling, those are great and I'm very proudly be number one in there.

Mark Paul:

But typically, I just checked the day, I always check this, [inaudible 00:30:58], I just checked today after two years, I just checked today, I'm number two or number three in biographies of true crime, white collar crime and organized. And the funny thing is that, if I was number 10 in organized crime, I would sell five times more books than I would be number one in horse racing, number one in sports gambling and number one in gambling because not a lot of gamblers and horse racing people buy books, but people are searching for true crime books all day long.

Mark Paul:

So one of the things that we'll talk about with ad words and the like is, what really helped my book, why did I sell so many books? I sold 10000 books in the first 90 days and right now, I've sold about 35000, the reason which is not like James Patterson or something, a big author, but for self-published authors they're good, is that I'm like a country music song who crosses over onto the pop charts. And you could sell a lot more songs on the pop charts than just the country charts along.

Mark Paul:

So that's a really big thing is if you write a book, try to figure out how not to market it to just one genre, try to market it in many genres, but specifically, gosh, darn it, figure out how to sell it in categories that people are looking for, because you could have the greatest book in the world but if it's about some obscure topic, it doesn't matter. Nobody's going to find you because nobody's looking for you.

Ben Guest:

I think that's so key. And maybe we can talk about keyword selection, Amazon keyword selection in a second. And one of the benefits of all of what you just described happening is that of course, as you know the Amazon algorithm kicks in and starts recommending the book to like buyers. You said young authors, when you're talking to them and you give advice, what are some of the pieces of advice you find yourself telling multiple people?

Mark Paul:

Definitely hirer a professional, having a great cover is super important. Having a great title is important. I had a title that I liked much more than the title that I used. I like in horse racing, the Kentucky Derby's referred to as the greatest two minutes. And initially my book was titled the greatest two minutes. I love that title, but it doesn't do anything.

Mark Paul:

Now, my title's almost confrontational in face. The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told, all the gamblers go, no, it's not. I know a better story. My cousin Jimmy, well, now they know about it and they're talking about it, right? So, title's important, cover's important. And then really I would say looking at lots of different categories and you mentioned Amazon, which is the dominant place. I probably sold 92% of all my books solely on Amazon. Even though I published wide, I'm on Barnes And Noble and I'm on Apple Books.

Mark Paul:

The thing is on Amazon., you can spend money and you can market and you could affect your sale. I don't know how to affect and change my sale on Amazon or Barnes And Noble, I'm kind of at their mercy. And Amazon, you can spend money and get results. So one thing I learned at Amazon early is that when we self-publish your book, they tell you can be in three categories.

Mark Paul:

So you could be in history. You could be in American history and history of civil war. But what they don't tell you is that you actually can be in 10 categories. All you have to do is ask. And if you email them, you go to the chat rooms, just so you need to go research really carefully, all those specific categories. And one of the things that I learned right away, I would try with those 10 categories is try to pick two or three categories that you can hopefully dominate or be number one in, and then try to choose other categories that are maybe much more competitive, like true crime.

Mark Paul:

And true crime or I have to compete with Bill O'Reilly that. I have to compete with these really big, well known authors, but by being next to Bill O'Reilly I sell a lot more books. So I would say pick an easy category. To me, there's a category called track betting, well, there's probably, two books published every 10 years in track betting.

Mark Paul:

So how can I not be number one in track betting when I go to do my ad words and pay for ad words, I make sure I just outbid everybody because you know what happens, by being number one in this dinky little category I get to have that really cool number one orange banner on Amazon, it says, number one best seller. It is. And maybe you're in a category of gay dinosaurs or something. It's not a lot of competition, but figure it out, and then find some categories or a lot of books that are selling.

Mark Paul:

I tell you, I don't get any money for [inaudible 00:36:13] I'm associated with. Going to Publishers Rocket is a really great tool to be on. For next to nothing you can go on in, they'll give you all the categories. And when you click on it, they'll give you the categories and the keywords and they'll tell you how many, each of those books that are in the top categories, how many they're selling, how many books they're selling, how many published paperback books and hardcover books they're selling, and really look at those categories. That's huge.

Ben Guest:

100%. I use that tool all the time because it helps you know your competition.

Mark Paul:

Exactly. Also, make sure that you also do your book in hardcover, in paperback, not just in ebook. One of the things that I learned earlier is, when I first started advertising on Amazon keywords, they're going to tell you, you're getting about a 70% commission split, so if you sell a book for $10, you're going to keep about seven and Amazon is going to get about three.

Mark Paul:

That's true, but that's also minus your ad cost. So they tell you really, they call it ACOS, average cost of sale, how much you're paying for your ads versus how many sales you're getting, that number and you shouldn't be spending more than 70% of your ACOS, your average cost of sale, where you're advertising, you're selling books [inaudible 00:37:40] money.

Mark Paul:

Well, first of all, like I told you, I don't mind in the little categories, I don't mind this money because by God, we work so hard, at least come out with a couple of these cute little Amazon batters, you can cut and paste, do a paint version, and save that image and you'll have it for all the time and put it up in your wall and you can say I was an Amazon.

Mark Paul:

So definitely, don't be afraid to dominate in the little categories. But one thing that I learned is I would say, sometimes I would go oh, my ACOS with 83 cents. I would go, oh, that's shitty. I'm getting my ass kicked here. I'm spending more money than I'm receiving in my commissions. But then about four months later, I got my first commission for my paperback sale.

Mark Paul:

And then it dawned at me because one thing that was really shocking to me in this world of wifi and internet and online and Kindle readers and everything, I still sell about two thirds of my book are prints. People go ahead and buy my book for $15 instead of $8, because the paperback's $15 and the ebook is $8, but I still sold two times as many paperbacks.

Mark Paul:

So what I'm saying is that if I wound up spending 83 cents to get a 70 cents sale, I wasn't doing any ... I was also getting my paperback sales out of that number. I started realizing that maybe I could actually be spending a hundred cents. I could be losing by my ebooks, as long as I'm selling a ton of print books, I'm making money. So, that's okay. I also did an audio book.

Ben Guest:

Talk to us about that.

Mark Paul:

I really enjoyed doing my audio book. First of all, I would not recommend being your own narrator unless you're exceptional. I'm pretty comfortable with public speaking. I never showed up, I'm always talking, but it doesn't mean I'm a good narrator. The narrator that I had [inaudible 00:39:47] is really fantastic. So I would do that. It's really enjoyable. I don't know, I've made money at it, but I probably three, four, 5% of my books sales have been audio books, but it was really enjoyable.

Mark Paul:

I'll tell you what, one thing that I would really encourage everybody to do, when I die and go to my maker and I go, what are your five proudest moments? I'll tell them that marrying my great wife and having my two sons but in the top five will be the book trailer that I did. I did my own book trailer. It's on my website, makrpaulauthor.com. That book trailer is 58 seconds long and it's had 38, excuse me, over 310000 downloads, if you could imagine.

Mark Paul:

300000 downloads. And that was a really good way for me to sell my book. And I really enjoyed doing that. What I did is I don't have any video on it. I used all still photos, photos that I purchased combined with some stock video footage, a little bit of stock video footage that I was able to purchase from Shutter Stock for one of those places.

Mark Paul:

And then I did do my own narration and I went to a sound studio and I paid, it wasn't that expensive, I think I paid about $180 for the hour in the sound. And they recorded that and spliced it together for me. But I really think having a book trailer in today's visual world, particularly for young people is really valuable. I was out at a cocktail party getting, I ran into a big movie person, right?

Mark Paul:

I was telling them about my book. And they were fading in interest and I said, "Hey, do you have 57 seconds?" And I just took out my cell phone and I put on my download by ... I showed them my book trailer and within a minute they were like, oh, you've got to see this, bringing other people over. And I emailed them my ebook and they're reading it right now, people that are not interested, visually they can see that link, I will definitely do a book trailer.

Ben Guest:

Ah, that's such great advice. I mean, I'm just making a list here, Mark, of the gems that you're dropping. So just keeping track, book trailer-

Mark Paul:

Author website, you've got to have a good author website. It has to be there, it has to be something of interest.

Ben Guest:

Talk to me about that please.

Mark Paul:

Oh, I just, again, I hired a company that does ... I used Author Bites. I did promotion with them. I was very happy with them. I like going to one of these companies that's already done 800 off their websites. So, they know what they're doing and then you can go on and steal all the best ... There's no reason to reinvent the wheel. Just go look at the five author websites that you think fit your book the best and go copy what they're doing. I probably spent, I don't know, $1000 on my website. It wasn't importantly expensive, maybe a little bit more.

Ben Guest:

Imagery is really important, having some good pictures and visuals that you can market with are important.

Mark Paul:

So, my book has a lot of different genres in them. I think that's one of the reasons it was successful. Yes, it's about sports. Yes, it's about a race horse, and a female race horse. And that helped me because women buy two thirds of all books and women don't buy books typically about sports gambling but they do buy books about horses. So I found places, there's horse lover websites, and I would publish my book and promote it and pay to be on the horse lover's websites. So, everybody else has got a romance novel about a woman being swept off her feet by a handsome young rodeo star.

Mark Paul:

And there's my book next to it, but it's there, I sell books there. And then I sell books in gambling. But I sell more books in true crime because the gamblers had to try to [inaudible 00:43:50] the cartel. So again, every book was different, but if you can get knowledge and spread it out and try to be a crossover hit, you'd have a lot better chance of selling than just being, just one book in one narrow genre.

Ben Guest:

Of all the different things you've done to market your book, what's had the greatest ROI?

Mark Paul:

Amazon as words, that's by far, that was the game changer for me. Authors are very analytic and we're the kind of people that when we buy a car we'll actually read the owner's manual before we drive the car. When I was already to launch my book, I probably spent 30 hours every week for the first month looking at Amazon ad words, really studying it, trying to understand it. There's another, you probably know it, there's other service called-

Ben Guest:

Kindlepreneur.

Mark Paul:

That's it. Thank you. Kindlepreneur is phenomenal. And one of the things that I realized when I would look at the book descriptions, book descriptions are really important and you have five seconds to grab people, so when you're going to write your book description, and you're going to get your book reviews up there, a couple of really important pieces of advice, one, it's more important who gives you the review then what the review is.

Mark Paul:

Because I know me, when I'm reading a review, I don't really care whether it's a glowing review that was written by the guy's mother, right? But if I can see the review that is written by some name, maybe written by somebody from the LA Times or, even something that has some credibility with me, that's really important.

Mark Paul:

So I'm an [inaudible 00:45:40] author. I didn't know anybody. I didn't have any reviews, critical reviews. I didn't have Laura Hillenbrand who wrote Sea Biscuit giving me a review. So I said, what the hell can I do to get names up there? Well, I live in Beverly Hills, there's a lot of movie people here and I got all my movie friends, some of my friends had been involved with maybe they were the cinematographer for a big movie, maybe they were a publisher.

Mark Paul:

So I could write, cinematographer for Lone Survivor, and then I would put Lone Survivor in bold, but now people go, oh look at this. The guy that was involved in Lone Survivor like this. And then over time I would get, eventually I started getting more reviews. I did get an LA Times and of course that featured among LA Times. So the other thing with Kindlepreneur is that when you go online and you look at book descriptions, or look at books that don't sell and look at with James Patterson or these top selling authors, I noticed something, drop off over here, the bigger selling authors, their copy has a lot of white space, but it also has bold. It has italics, it has quotation marks.

Mark Paul:

It isn't just a bunch of uniform, two paragraphs of tightly spaced information that nobody's going to take the time to read. And the way that you have to do that is just free in Kindlepreneur, you write what you want it to write, and it has to convert it to this unique code that Amazon uses. And it just, you print what you want and you drop it into this online tool at Kindlepreneur, and then it publishes it the way you want it to be.

Mark Paul:

It's really important. If you look at my copy in The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told, it lays out in full, it shows that I have the LA Times as a review and I have people that they might recognize it that wrote reviews because people are scanning, they're probably having a glass of wine and they're on their iPad. They're not reading every detail word, they're making a decision, do I want to spend $7 on this book, and make it really attractive. That's super important.

Mark Paul:

And your copy needs to grab them. Don't tell them about some esoteric thing. Tell them about why this is exciting and why they're going to want read it. One of the tag lines that I use a lot is, would you bet your life on a 50 to one shot? [inaudible 00:48:27] something that's a book, something that grabs them. And the other thing is you can see, always be marketing. I'd swear to you when I go out, I sell books when I'm in an elevator.

Mark Paul:

I love my book. I found out how to make it really exciting where people want to buy it and I'm always selling books. I can books at a picnic. And one of the things that I do on my website, I do get people to contact me. I go back to anybody who talks to me, and I have kind of an epilogue that I have in there, but in my epilogue and the only thing that I have highlighted in yellow is please leave a review. And I have the link because they don't know how to leave it, they don't know what to do.

Mark Paul:

And you just give them a link. And my friends that I wanted to post a review, I send them a link and I email them, please give me a review. Do not publish your book until you have at least 10 reviews.

Ben Guest:

I've seen that advice over and over again, even to the extent that some people say, if you're writing a fiction series and you think you have something, write the first two or three books before you publish the first one, just so that they're lined up, ready to go. You mentioned Amazon ad words and I've heard advice about that, but I haven't yet started with Amazon ad words. Could you talk to me about that process and what you've learned and KDP, it's called KDP select or whatever it is?

Mark Paul:

You just go to KDP and you can upload your book. Although I really would encourage you to hire a publisher, a paid publisher who will do all the things that you need to do, put it in the right formats and all published properly. They do all of that for you, although you certainly can do it yourself. If you're on a limited budget, I would not publish my book because I couldn't afford to pay somebody to do these services.

Mark Paul:

I fortunately could pay somebody to make sure all the wording was done and formatted properly. I elected to publish wide. In retrospect, I don't think I'd bother. I think I'd just go to Amazon. You can't fight them, they're just too big and powerful and you're going to sell majority of your books there anyway. And then they have, how you can do campaigns and they break down the ... I haven't been doing this as avidly as I was two years ago, they have different ...

Mark Paul:

You can. I did multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple campaigns. And I came up with about 600 ad words that I could market my books and that might seem crazy. But again, that Publisher Rocket really helped me because what I would do is I would look at okay, in the 10 categories that I'm competing, what are the 10 books that are in those categories?

Mark Paul:

And then I would see, I would put in their books in Publisher Pocket and it would tell me what the most popular keywords are in those categories. So I would go, I sell books in true crime. What are the most popular keywords for true crime? I would put together a list of all of them. And then I would go, all right, I sell books in the horse race. What are the keywords in the horse race? All these different categories.

Mark Paul:

And then I would do separate campaigns. I would start a campaign just for horse racing. I would start a campaign just for gambling. You know where else I sell books? I sell books in the history of sports and there's some big books in there. There's a book called Boys In The Boat, which is a really good book. But [inaudible 00:52:09] and I would study that book and I would see what the keywords that they used in order to sell books.

Mark Paul:

So I'd come up with this really broad ... The other thing that they do, that's really good again, Publisher Rocket is they'll print this out for you. And it's $50 a year. [inaudible 00:52:31], they'll tell you all of the books that are the top sellers and those books, and those book's authors become keywords.

Mark Paul:

So in other words I said, all right, my book, the number one book of all time, maybe in horse racing is Sea Biscuit. So I advertised Sea Biscuit and all my ad words, I advertised Laura Hillenbrand, the author. If somebody's searching for Laura Hillenbrand, they're going to see my book come up. If somebody's searching Boys In The Boat, they're going see my book come up.

Mark Paul:

And so, I really did a lot of keywords, a lot of advertising. And there's a saying, it's not my quote, [inaudible 00:53:14] but he says, when I was first starting to market and advertise, there's this saying that says, I didn't think, I experimented. And that's kind of what I did. I didn't know what would work. So I just did it all, but I wasn't afraid to spend money either. And I know that I had an advantage there that I could spend money.

Mark Paul:

And if I lost five grand, that was okay. Turns out I didn't, I made money, but that's because I was willing to spend money. The other things that they do is they have these campaigns that are basically auto fill campaigns, where Amazon will go out and choose the keyword for you. I'm not online right now, I don't know exactly what they're called, but you can't miss them.

Mark Paul:

And I can tell you that those Amazon auto campaigns that they do, where Amazon chooses the words are far better than anything you could do on your own. So if you said, I'm not techy, I don't want to come up with 600 ad words, I don't want to spend 30 hours a week, fine. Then just go with their auto campaigns, but you need to monitor them every single day. I don't need to monitor them every day now after two years.

Mark Paul:

But when you first start, I would monitor them twice a day because I would see a campaign that's selling, maybe I'm spending money, I'm spending $200 a day on that campaign. But if I'm bringing in, especially if I was spending $200 day in that campaign, I was bringing in $150 of revenue, I was okay with that in the first month. I didn't care if I lost money, I wanted to see what worked.

Mark Paul:

I figured out how to fine tune it. And I've done that. So now after a month or two, I can pair it down to what doesn't work and spend more of my money on what does work. As an author, you cannot sit in your room and wait for the world to find you, the world doesn't work that way. You have to put yourself out there and unfortunately you have to spend money, right? I really believe you really do have to spend money in order to let people know that you're there.

Ben Guest:

I mean, there are eight million ebooks on Amazon Kindle, on the Kindle store.

Mark Paul:

And when I was at the top, when I was selling the most books, some months, let's say I was selling 5000 books a month, I was probably the 5000th best seller on Amazon means, that means that I never got to be in the top 100 on Amazon, even top 1000 on Amazon. But I was still selling 5000 books [inaudible 00:56:02]. So, it's a big world.

Ben Guest:

If you extrapolate from eight million books on the Amazon Kindle store, you're in the 1% of sales.

Mark Paul:

What's great about Amazon ad words, I will say this is that if people are on Amazon Kindle and they're searching for books, they're going to buy a book. If you go and do an ad on YouTube, the chances of the person on YouTube that actually reads books is maybe one in 100, right? But if they're on Amazon Kindle searching for books, they're going to buy a damn book. All you have to do is convince them to buy your book. That's a lot easier to sell.

Ben Guest:

Let's end with a question. Oh, do you think it's a better use of time and money to do the auto Amazon ad word campaign or to fine tune your own keywords?

Mark Paul:

If you can only do one, the auto's absolutely. I don't know how they do it. They are better at it. I can say now I do, I spend a lot more time with the auto campaigns than I did before because I learned how good they are. But I also think that I can't give you the analytical backup for this, but I think that the fact that I was out there and I was doing lots of campaigns, I think also helped Auto campaigns.

Mark Paul:

I think that the computer algorithm saw, this guy is spending money, people are clicking his links, they're buying books and you need to go up into that food chain where they think they have something to sell. Also, I did something now. I just went on to Kindle Unlimited. I resisted it 18 months, but now after 18 months or so of my book being on the charts, I've noticed that my sales, they're still good.

Mark Paul:

I was selling, when things were really going good, I was selling 5000 books a month. Now I'm selling about 700 and I don't like that. I go, what do I got to do? So I started doing, I noticed a lot of the top selling books are Kindle Unlimited. So I did that and I've only been doing that for four days.

Mark Paul:

So I don't know what I'm doing there either. There's a certain joy of that. I clicked on it this morning and I saw that I'd already had, I forget-

Ben Guest:

The page reads?

Mark Paul:

Yeah, 2000 page reads today. I thought, well, my book is 200 pages long, 10 people have read my book. And as an author, isn't that really what it's about? I mean, if I could have done all of this and lost money, a little bit of money, it still would've been one of the greatest joys of anything I've ever done in my life. It's fine.

Mark Paul:

And so going on this morning seeing, wow, 10 people, because I could see the page reads have read my book, that was good and it made my day. That's cool. I think that if you do things, not for money, but for passion, you'll probably make money that'll come through.

Ben Guest:

And now last but not least, here are excerpts from the very first interview I did with Greg Larson way back in August of last year and the best marketing advice that he had. We talk about creating an ecosystem around your book, creating a website, a YouTube page, et cetera.

Ben Guest:

Greg goes into detail with all of that. We also talk about finding your pilot author and following the same path that your pilot author followed. Tons of great advice in this. Enjoy. Greg, thanks so much for coming on. Let's start with book promotion, and maybe we can start with your website. The website is fantastic. Let me make sure I have the right address to send everybody to. It's clubbiebook.com. So that's C-L-U-B-B-I-E, book.com.

Greg Larson:

Yes, sir.

Ben Guest:

Can you talk about putting the site together and your thoughts with book promotion.

Greg Larson:

Yeah. As far as putting the sites, I'd actually asked a lot of authors about their advice on creating a website. A lot of people say, oh, it's not necessary, hire somebody else to do that. I have just enough experience with say web design or SEO marketing, all that kind of stuff to be dangerous enough. As far as book promotions go and creating the website, my only thought process with creating the website was for people who add a good time reading the book, I want to give them extra content to enjoy for free as much as possible.

Greg Larson:

So, that's the way it's designed. It's for you read the book and you show up and there's a bunch of behind the scenes pictures and old videos from the years of being a clubhouse attendant in 2012, 2013, and as far as promos in general go, I mean, I take every single opportunity that comes my way. I created my own podcast, I chop up into clip up on my YouTube channel.

Greg Larson:

My thought was I need to create as much content as I possibly can around this book. And that's the only way people are going to find it. Otherwise, a lot of people just put a book out and they expect the world to just find it and make it great. Sorry, art is not a pure meritocracy. It is meritocracy plus marketing.

Ben Guest:

100%. One of the best nonfiction books written in the past 30 years or so is Freakonomics. And I was listening to an interview with one of the co-authors, Steven Levit. And he was saying, because of Freakonomics, he gets sent books all the time to blurb and he thought at first there was going to be a lot of mediocre books and not well written books. And he is like, there are so many great books out there and they're just undiscovered because there's so much material in the market.

Greg Larson:

Oh yeah. I don't know. I mean, there are millions of books self-published on Amazon every single year. And what is it that separates a book that's never discovered, that nobody reads and a book that a bunch of people read that enters the cannon or the zeitgeist? A lot of it is marketing and quality. I don't know. Nobody wants to hear that. When I was in school, I would've preferred not to hear that. My professors would've told me that, that's not true. But here we are.

Greg Larson:

What's the lowest level media outlet that I can get attention from? And maybe it's a local news station. Boom. I take that local KUT Austin, Austin's NPR station gives me some attention. And then I use that to leverage into a pitch to CBS Sports radio. And I use that to leverage into a pitch to the LA Times.

Greg Larson:

And then it's just like, boom, boom, boom, climbing up the ladder. And to be perfectly frank, not all of them directly correlate to book sales. I can usually see a jump whenever something new comes out. But what it does create is this perception of being everywhere. You know what I mean? I have to think about it as a branding effort. It was a piece of art that I created my book Clubbie, but once it became published, it went from being an artistic endeavor to a business. And that's how I had to think about it. So now I'm thinking about what's my brand strategy and my brand strategy is make sure every person who enjoys baseball books finds out about my book.

Ben Guest:

So here's the million dollar question based on what you just said. What does correlate?

Greg Larson:

What I've found especially in the last year has been doing podcasts has, the most concentrated book sales I've seen have been doing podcasts and oddly enough radio shows, which I never would've expected. It's one of those people expect that to be a dying medium and maybe in some ways it is, but a lot of people still listen to the radio in their car.

Greg Larson:

So for example, I was on The Fan in Baltimore. My book takes place in Baltimore. After I did that show, it's a 15 minute spot, the next day I saw my sales jump up. I don't know exact numbers. I can just see the Amazon sales rank, but it jumped up tens of thousands of spots on the Amazon sales rank, which shocked me because everybody says radio is dead.

Greg Larson:

As far as book promotions go, I don't think that's accurate. Podcasts are actually better because once this goes up on your website, it stays there. Radio is one and done unless I capture it somehow, which I try to do as well. That's another one. I try to record as many radio interviews as I possibly can and then put it on my YouTube channel.

Ben Guest:

This is all great stuff. What is it about radio shows that bump up sales, do you think?

Greg Larson:

Part of it, there's still this perception that, because there's a higher barrier of entry, there's still this perception that radio is, I don't know, a more classic medium that has more prestige as opposed to podcasts, there's still this perception of anybody can do it, therefore being on a podcast, doesn't hold the same social status. That's going to change and that is changing, but there is something about it.

Greg Larson:

It's analogous to traditional publishing versus self-publishing. Self-publishing is going to dominate traditional publishing. But those old morays are hard to fight again, TV versus YouTube, it's all the same exact sort of change there. A lot of my readers are still stuck in some of the old morays of the past, as far as media goes.

Greg Larson:

And I'm going to use that to my advantage and get on the radio. And I don't know, it's not only old people. When I tell people that I was on CBS Sports radio or ESPN radio or something like that, it's still, there's a little ding that says oh, that's official, right?

Ben Guest:

So how do you get on radio programs?

Greg Larson:

I send out pitch emails, I try to send them out every single day. Today I sent out two pitch emails, every weekday at the very least. So what I started with is I start with local stations and try to work my way up from there, like I said, but what I'll start with is I try to frame my book as part of a larger discussion. I don't say, I'm an author and you should promote my book. I say, here's, what's going on in minor league baseball right now.

Greg Larson:

There's a bunch of in income inequality issues in minor league baseball, there's contraction going on. And not only are those issues a microcosm of what's going on at the US at large, but I'm the perfect person to talk about it because I wrote a book about minor league baseball that came out this summer. And I word that in a way that's, I don't know, more nimble than that, but then I include a couple of status markers, like for reference here's my interview that I did on MLB Network, that kind of thing.

Greg Larson:

And my success rate is, if I get a 12% success rate in a week, that's good for me. So sending out media pitch emails, I expect a huge rate of failure. And I think that's what keeps a lot of authors from doing it.

Ben Guest:

And I think that's also helpful because we talked earlier about how marketing is an important component of the process. And I also think sometimes, we mention this off air as well, authors, we can be so internal that we don't pay attention to that. And it's such a closed world that being able to share this information is just so helpful.

Greg Larson:

Oh yeah, where I didn't even know who to pitch in the first place. And most people don't. What I did was, it seemed so obvious after I thought of it, but it was such a revelation to me, I found an author who had published a book similar to me the year before. And I just pitched every single media outlet that had covered his book.

Greg Larson:

And then not only do I know who's interested in my work, but then I can actually use him as a launching point of saying, hey, I noticed that you covered Brad Balukjian last year. My book is very similar from the same publisher. Here's what it's about. That has been a godsend to me, because a lot of authors don't even know who to reach out to.

Ben Guest:

Greg, that is so smart. So the pitch email, the structure is something along the lines of, here's some things that are happening in baseball. Here's how my book is connected to that. Here are some other interviews or media hits that I've done. Is that right?

Greg Larson:

You want me to read you a pitch word for word? Would that be helpful for anybody?

Ben Guest:

That would be fantastic.

Greg Larson:

Here's a pitch that I just gave to NPR using my local NPR as a launching point, I say, hi person, I'm Greg Larson. And I recently published a book with university of Nebraska Press that helped bring light to income inequality issues in minor league baseball. Some baseball fans know the facts and figures around these problems. And then I give a couple of facts about minor league baseball, but most people don't know what that world looks like on the inside and how it is a perfect microcosm of economic issues in America.

Greg Larson:

With the changes taking place this summer and rampant income inequality across the country, I believe this story helps highlight issues that plague the US at large and would be a perfect fit for NPR programming. What do you think? And then I give them my cell phone number and then I send them a link to a media kit where it's just a Google drive that has pictures and has blurb images that I created and a full PDF of the book.

Greg Larson:

And then I say also for reference, here's my recent interview in Austin's NPR station, KUT, best Greg Larson. That gives me a 10 to 15% success rate. So I think about it in terms of opening with personalization. Why am I contacting you? What have I seen of yours, liked recently, why is this issue important? How does my book fit into the conversation? Let's schedule a time.

Ben Guest:

So, let's go back to the website for a minute.

Greg Larson:

Sure.

Ben Guest:

What were the fundamentals of the website design for you?

Greg Larson:

So I chose Square Space, which is a software that I'm somewhat familiar with. It's just plug and play. And I was just, as far as design goes, I created a logo with somebody on Fiverr, I think, and that cost me a couple bucks, maybe 15 bucks. And then I used that cheap logo to take it to a more expensive designer, then I paid 300 bucks to have them make a more professional looking one.

Greg Larson:

And so have I seen a direct ROI on say, that logo design that's all over the website? Probably not, but again, it just creates this whole aesthetic. I can put that logo on my newsletter. I can put that logo on every piece of media that I create, the website, blogs. I created a landing page. This has been incredible useful. I created a landing page for my signed hardcover copies that people buy.

Greg Larson:

I just assume that whoever's hitting that landing page doesn't know anything about the book. And I created, just tried to create a little story with visuals, what the book is about, a couple of reviews of it, and then a link to buy. And that has been helpful for me to sell some copies because those copies, I make way more money on people buying directly from me than I do somebody buying from Amazon.

Greg Larson:

And then I have a blog that I just update every once in a while. There's maybe six blogs on there. But oddly enough, one of my blogs that I wrote is the number one way that people come to my website, which I never would've expected. I mean, that was one lesson in there was that the things I thought would land or connect with people are definitely not the things that actually connect with people.

Greg Larson:

It's perfectly analogous. On the website, it was a blog post about what the best baseball jersey numbers are. That's the number one way people find my website and with the book, people are really interested in the love story of me with my girlfriend and the downfall of our relationship during this baseball, which I thought was this unnecessary distraction from the main story. But it's one of the things that people ask me about the most.

Ben Guest:

So website, and then you have a YouTube page that is dedicated to Clubbie.

Greg Larson:

The way I thought about the YouTube channel, first off, I had a lot of hesitancy to even do a YouTube channel in the first place or a video podcast as I was thinking of it. I thought, well, I don't have enough content or on the book, I'm not going to have enough to say, nobody's going to be interested in this. All of the standard self-defeating that I have before I start any creative endeavor.

Greg Larson:

But what I found was I had a specific focus. As a clubhouse attendant, I learned a lot about baseball that most fans don't, just obscure stuff like how to make a rosin bag, what pine tar smells like, all these little things. And I thought, this YouTube channel is going to be dedicated to the most obscure baseball knowledge on the internet. Boom. I had a focus.

Greg Larson:

And so each episode I would talk for maybe 15, 20 minutes about a specific thing, what's in an on deck circle bag, why do some baseball players sniff their bats? And there's specific reasons behind it because the baseball comes off of the bat so fast that it creates this burning sensation on the bat where they can actually smell the wood burning.

Greg Larson:

And I'll just go deeper into, it's like behind the scenes in more detail into stuff that's covered in the book. And what I've found is that, I don't have a ton of subscribers, there might be 30 subscribers, but what I've found is, it's another one of those things ... Hey, Penguin, what are you doing? Get out of there. She's not allowed in the bedroom. The audacity.

Greg Larson:

But what I found is, it's another one of those clout building things where people can see that I have a YouTube page and there's all these videos. I don't know, there might be 50 videos up there and they might have a couple hundred views a piece. I don't think they're very high, but again, it's the perception and the ubiquity of Clubbie is everywhere kind of a feeling. That has been the most valuable part.

Ben Guest:

Just, it being one part of getting the word out or what's the most valuable part of it?

Greg Larson:

Yes, the fact that they exist, the fact that-

Ben Guest:

Ecosystem.

Greg Larson:

That's 100% it. Podcasts, the videos, blog posts, anything, just get the word out there. Yes.

Ben Guest:

What was the date of publication?

Greg Larson:

April 1st of this year.

Ben Guest:

So, let's say the month of April, how many hours a day are you putting into all of this, promoting the book?

Greg Larson:

Well, it's slowed down some, but the first month of April, I mean, I was treating it like a part-time job. I would say it was between three and five hours a weekday in the month of April. And since then, I would say, it's gone down to an hour to two hours every weekday. And now those one to two hours are either dedicated to doing it in interview or sending pitch emails. That's the majority of it. And then on Fridays, I'll usually schedule a bunch of videos for the next week on TikTok and YouTube.

Ben Guest:

Love it. What was the most helpful thing you did to promote the book pre-publication, pre-publishing?

Greg Larson:

I concentrated a lot of my effort, how to put it, I think a lot of people shoot their cannons too early when it comes to pre-publication where it creates this perception of I'm going to start promoting my book, well, sometimes I just don't promote it at all, but the people who do promote it, they start to, and then it goes on too long and publication date hasn't hit yet.

Greg Larson:

And then by the time the book comes out, the people in their atmosphere, whether it's friends, family, people on their Facebook, social media, they're fatigued. They're like, this book didn't already come out. I've been hearing about it for three months now. The most helpful thing I did was concentrate, I tried to concentrate everything to one month ahead of publication, just to, well, what did that look like specifically? I maxed out all of my LinkedIn connections every single day of on the preceding months.

Greg Larson:

And I focused entirely on people who were in my target audience. So people who worked. I would go to every single minor league and major league baseball team, go to their employees list and just add everybody until LinkedIn wouldn't let me add anymore. Boom. All of a sudden I have a social network completely filled with my potential readers.

Greg Larson:

On Facebook, I had been apathetic about Facebook leading up to my book release for years, but I finally said, f**k it. I'm going to go and add in all of the people from high school, all the people from college that I have just been ignoring on there. And then again, do the same thing. Find people who looked like they were in my target audience.

Greg Larson:

I went back through old rosters of the teams that I worked for and added all of those guys. And then all of a sudden Facebook's algorithm was kicking out people to me who were in my target audience. Doing that, so now the people in my atmosphere, people who were interested in me specifically or were interested in the content. And then when I was doing podcasts and posting about it's going out to people who might be likely to read the book, that made a huge difference.

Ben Guest:

So let's take Facebook. So now you've you made these connections. Are you creating a group? Are you inviting people there? How often, let's say in the week, the seven days leading up to April 1st, how often are you posting about the book? How are you communicating it, et cetera?

Greg Larson:

I didn't create a specific group, but I was posting in other groups. I found a baseball books group, for example, or I found Orioles groups for, I don't remember how many days leading up to the release. I had a countdown where I would create a meme of some kind that said, seven days to release, six days to release and so forth. So people knew that there's some anticipation building, but I didn't start so early that again, people got fatigued by it.

Greg Larson:

And again, I just want to make an important point on that too, as an author, nobody is as familiar with your content as you are. I think, oh, I'm posting about this too much. When people don't give a s**t about something, they just ignore it. They really don't give a s**t, but there is a certain aspect of momentum that is important leading up to a launch, but after a launch, it doesn't matter, dude. Throw that s**t out there and people will ignore what's not relevant to that.

Ben Guest:

So, let's talk after launch. So after April 1st, what were the two or three most helpful things you did to market the book?

Greg Larson:

Now I'm on a roughly 10 pitch emails a week pace. But at that point I was obsessively pitching media outlets, podcasts, everybody I possibly could. That was by far the most helpful and continues to be the most helpful. I don't know if I would change any part of the that. I think I would do all of that exactly the same. And if anything, I would put even more time into sending pitch emails.

Greg Larson:

I found an author who published a similar book to me and I just tailed all of his media outlets. That was an easy first step. If I were to do it differently, I would've done more research into that world and different podcasts that I could have been on outside of what he had done. I did an easy first step, which is fantastic, but I would've done more research there.

Ben Guest:

Did you reach out to that author by the way?

Greg Larson:

Oh yeah. We're friends. He blurbed my book, we text and stuff. I always went into that relationship like, I am only here to help him and anytime I ask him for something it's only after I've provided him 10 X value. So I never went into it like, what can I get from this guy? It was like, what can we do for each other? And what do we have in common? That's the way I thought about it. And it's made all the difference in the world.

Ben Guest:

So, that is your book marketing 101 class. I hope you enjoyed it, found lots of helpful information. Mark's book is The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told. It is the best selling horse betting book ever written, more than 40000 copies sold. He also has a great audio book. So after listening to Mark's audio book, I'm thinking about doing an audio book for my book, which is Zen In The Art Of Coaching Basketball: Memoir Of A Namibian Odyssey, which you can buy on Amazon.

Ben Guest:

And Greg's book is Clubbie, also a memoir about his time working as a clubhouse attendant in minor league baseball. So I encourage you to support authors, support the two authors who have shared their knowledge on this podcast and buy all three of our books, Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told by Mark Paul, Zen In The Art Of Coaching Basketball by Ben Guest and Clubbie by Greg Larson. If you enjoy this content, please subscribe to my newsletter Benbo.substack.com. That's B-E-N-B-O, .substack.com. Thank you and have a great day.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com

A fifteen hundred advance and I get ten percent of net proceeds…

This is Part 4 of a Four-Part Miniseries on how to PLAN, WRITE, EDIT, and PUBLISH your creative work.

My co-host for the series is Greg Larson. Greg has written and edited more than 80 books.

In Part 1 we reviewed how to PLAN your book.

In Part 2 we reviewed how to WRITE your book.

In Part 3 we reviewed how to EDIT your book.

Today we’re going to review how to PUBLISH your book.

Specifically, Greg and I go into the differences, and benefits, of self-publishing versus traditional publishing.

TRANSCRIPT

Greg Larson:

The perception hasn't yet caught up with the reality, that's it? In the general public and in the traditional publishing.

Ben Guest:

Hi everyone. This is Ben Guest, and welcome to part four of my four part mini series on how to plan, write, edit, and publish your book. Today is episode four, publishing your book. And my co-host for this series is Greg Larson. Greg is the author and editor of more than 80 books. In this episode, we talk primarily the differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing. There's a lot more information I have to share on self-publishing, having self-published my own memoir, Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball, and Greg traditionally published through the University of Nebraska Press, his memoir, Clubbie. We talk about both books in this interview. If you are interested in self-publishing, I can't recommend episode 34 enough, that self-publishing marketing and promoting your book with author Mark Paul, who has moved more than 40,000 of copies of his self-published book. So there's a ton of information in that episode. And in this episode, Greg and I break down the differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing. Enjoy.

Greg Larson:

Traditional publishing is just... Unless they transform their model to increase royalties and control to the individuals, it's just a model that's not going to work much longer. The problem at the core of all of this, is that from a readership standpoint, there is still this perception, maybe rightfully so, that a traditionally published book is going to be a better book than a self-pub. And that might be true by and large right now. But if you self-publish on Amazon, for example, you could get 75% of royalties, I think. And then Amazon's printing services just print on demand and just take 25% of the royalties for their part of it and you get 75%.

Ben Guest:

And you own your book.

Greg Larson:

And you own. Another problem is distribution. That self-publishing is... Those relationships are very real. So my publisher for Clubbie, University of Nebraska Press has relationships with Barnes & Noble or smaller publisher or smaller bookstores across the country. So that automatically, boom, before my book was even out, I had a thousand copies sold to these distribution outlets that are solely based on those relationships that the publisher has built. Now, would it be possible for an individual author to build similar relationships with distribution? Yeah, maybe, but then that's a lot of non-writing, non-promotion time. If you want to do all of the things that a traditional publishing house does, you're eventually going to have to become your own publisher. And in some ways that's the case, like building a relationship with your own copy editor, building a relationship with your own cover designer and person who does interior layout.

Greg Larson:

Ideally, that would be the same person. But I look at my rights and my contract, it's a $1,500 advance on the cloth bound, the hard cover, which is the only one that exists right now in physical form. I get 10% of net proceeds from sales on the first 3000 copies sold, and we sold 1500. And then I get 12 and a half percent on the net proceed for the next 2015, so I would max out at 15% royalties, net royalties. So my first royalty check came in. This is based off of a sales period where I had about 1500 sales. Right. $818 for 1500 copies sold. Now that's less the $1,500 signing advance. So approximately $2,300, it's a dollar and 50 cents per copy, something like that, is what I get paid.

Ben Guest:

There has been a ton of great promotion around Clubbie. Every single piece of promotion I've seen, you did yourself.

Greg Larson:

Yes, it's truly shocking. I was busting my ass all summer. I didn't expect any help from my publisher, and they lived up to that expectation, marketing-wise, if I said, "Hey, this person wants a review copy sent, could you send it to them?" They were quick on that turnaround time, but I got no indication that they cared one way or the other. And I was expecting that going into it. But yeah, dude, I was busting my ass getting into Forbes, LA Times, all these really big publications and got pretty unbelievable blurbs that did move the needle for me, but it was all me.

Ben Guest:

Right. And if we just do the math, so 1500 copies, that worked out, basically, between the advance and the royalties, let's say, 2300, 2400, somewhere around there.

Greg Larson:

Yep.

Ben Guest:

Okay. Let's say you sell 800 copies self-published on Amazon and you sell it for $7, right? You're going to take, I think it's 70%. You keep 70% of the royalties, seven times 800 times 0.7.

Greg Larson:

So that would be closer to $4,000.

Ben Guest:

So if you sold 800 books yourself, which you've done all the promotion, you wouldn't pocketed $4,000. Now there is a press has chosen you. Right. University of Nebraska Press can publish any fucken book. There's a million books out there. They've chosen you, so in the future, you are a published author that a publishing house has selected. At the same time, I was talking to my dad about this because my dad is in his early eighties. And so to people of his generation and the generation after him, how Mifflin publishing your book or whoever, Simon & Schuster publishing your book, that means something. But I said, "Dad, when's the last time you opened a book and looked at who published it?" No one even knows who's publishing books anymore.

Greg Larson:

Okay. I agree for the most part, but there are two things I would content. Those getting a contract from a big five or big six publisher is a far cry from getting a contract from a small press or a university press. That difference is true and real as far as design goes and as far as all of that goes. I would take a contract from a big five publisher. And then two, you're right, nobody looks at who the publisher is and says, "Oh, I'm not going to read that because it's some made up thing." But it's very likely that you would never have the opportunity to dismiss a self-published book, because it would never be in front of your face to be able to dismiss in the first place. Whereas, if I pull a book off the bookshelf at the bookstore, like I got to assume an older person would, they're not going to have a self-published book on the bookshelf in the first place.

Ben Guest:

Yeah. Hundred percent. And also to finish doing the math, we said the two non-negotiables in the editing episode, the two non-negotiables are a good copy edit, good cover design that might end up being around $5,000. So if you got to pay for that out of pocket, self-publishing, that $8,000 you just earned is now down to 3000 versus the 2300, we just kind of spitball.

Greg Larson:

Yeah. That's a benefit of the self-publishing process, is that you would have complete control over that. And you could pick whoever you want who has availability. You have to put the costs up front, but to me that would be worth it. Odds are, I'm going to self-publish my next book. I'm glad I went the traditional publishing route my first book and now shift. And now it's like, "Okay, I've been knighted by the traditional publishing world to a certain extent." I don't think I would've gotten that media attention if I were Greg Larson Press or whatever imprint I would make up. I don't think I would've gotten those media pieces. And now I have to ask myself, "Okay, the equation of, oh, getting in the LA Times, sold me 30 copies." I have no idea. I take that away if I'm self-published. But what I'm really taking away is proceeds of $45 for better royalties and less media attention.

Ben Guest:

With the media attention, I'm definitely going to give you a call when I'm a couple weeks out from self-publishing my coaching memoir. And just kind of put together the Greg Larson playbook. And then we can kind of see, okay, if you're self-publishing and doing some facts, similarly of the things that Greg did on his own, how much attention can you garner without a press behind you?

Greg Larson:

Yes. I think you'd be able to get my hypothesis that you could get decent amount of local media, like your hometown, that kind of stuff, like local newspapers, but the national media, I still haven't been able to test that hypothesis yet. But will gladly walk through. I've got a course for it, media pitch mastery course with Self-Publishing Sherpa, will gladly walk you through that process that I'm going to walk Ben through when the time comes.

Ben Guest:

Nice. Now I hope I don't die on Everest. Did you with Clubbie... I think I know the answer to this, but did you write the book and then shop it around or did you do a proposal and a query letter and all that stuff?

Greg Larson:

I did both. I was shopping it around when I was writing it, but I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I was sending query letters and I start off by sending query letters and then people would ask me for a proposal and I was just like, "Oh, I don't have a proposal. I've barely even written it." And then I finished the manuscript and I was sending query letters just because it was a memoir and I was chopping it like a novel and that didn't hit. And then I wrote a proposal, but the work of the proposal, like the sample chapters and the proposal were already done and a lot of that [crosstalk 00:09:23].

Ben Guest:

Right. And that's how you then ultimately connected with University of Nebraska with the proposal?

Greg Larson:

Yeah. There were a couple of university presses that were interested and I went with Nebraska just because I liked their baseball catalog.

Ben Guest:

Nice. And what is the world of university presses?

Greg Larson:

It's basically like a small press. It feels like it's halfway between a small press publisher, like Graywolf or... I don't know, any other small presses, Solaris. Who the f**k knows what any of their names are? But these small presses with the small catalog and a small team, it's halfway between that and a bigger publishing house, like a university... I don't know how to describe it, man. They seem like they have more history. They have a catalog that goes back farther than a newer press.

Ben Guest:

Was it just a cold email or cold call that you gave University of Nebraska or what?

Greg Larson:

Yeah. I sent them an email. The sports editor, I had queried him before I'd even written the book. And he said, "How is this any different than other sports books? Like Pat Jordan's baseball memoir was." He's like, "How is this any different?" And I was like, "Well, it's different because of this." He never responded. I queried him again, never responded. Then, I think, the third time I queried him, I had a proposal and he called me up and was like, "Yeah, I'm very interested. I'm going to bring it to the editorial board. But I think they'll be very interested." I had that phone call with him in September, of 2019. And then my book published April, of 2021.

Ben Guest:

Right. That's the other thing, right?

Greg Larson:

Yes. Now granted part of that was because we are the lining up with baseball season. He's like, "Look, I'd like to publish it in 2020 spring season, but it's a little too late for that. So we'll do 2021." Thank God, because it just happened to coincide with a lot of changes in the minor league system that happened to be going on this summer as my book came out. So the timing was serendipitous.

Ben Guest:

Last question. So if I put myself on the couch here, I'm working with this retired MBA player on this autobiography, an established author who says traditional publishing's the way to go, stop writing, do a proposal, shop that proposal. What's your advice?

Greg Larson:

Proposal doesn't hurt.

Ben Guest:

And my recommendation was, we self-publish it. Now having talked to this established author, he's like, "Don't self-publish, traditionally publish it, shop it around."

Greg Larson:

And you would get paid to write the proposal?

Ben Guest:

Yeah. If we're going to do that, for sure. I'm not going to write it for free.

Greg Larson:

Right, right, right. My advice would be to both of you. Right. To you I would say, tell him that the odds are very good, that he's going to waste money hiring you. Set that expectation that, [crosstalk 00:12:00] I will write the proposal for you. The odds are very good that you're going to waste money doing that, but I will gladly do. But with him, it's like, if you really think that it's a worthwhile thing to do, let's go all in. Why not? Because maybe we're wrong. And maybe you find out that there is a really good contract for him. Now, granted getting in a large advance, for example, isn't always a good thing because if you don't earn out your advance, it's really hard to get the next book deal. Maybe he doesn't want to do another book deal. Who knows? But if he's even thinking about doing a traditional, it's his book, let him go that route. You've guided him.

Ben Guest:

Right. Right. But my advice to him is going to be, nah, if you do that, they're going to own the book. It's not going to be published for two years. And, let's say, on our own we sell what? 3000 copies at whatever, $10 a copy, you're going to take home 24,000.

Greg Larson:

Right.

Ben Guest:

Is an advance going to generate that much money? Probably not.

Greg Larson:

No.

Ben Guest:

Publish it on our own and then you own it and you collect 70% of the royalties. That's the end of my four part mini series on how to plan, write, edit, and publish your book. There's still much more to say, especially about self-publishing and marketing, which is the key, once you publish your book. So future episodes and future issues of my email newsletter will go into more depth on both of those aspects, self-publishing and marketing. You can subscribe to my newsletter at benbo.substack.com. That's benbo.substack.com. Benbo is a family nickname, B-E-N-B-O .subt.com. There, I have weekly podcast interviews just like this one. And I occasionally send out a newsletter post where I go into more detail about writing and self-publishing. So again, you can subscribe totally free at benbo.substack.com. Have a great day.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com

There is an alchemy to editing.

This is Part 3 of a Four-Part Miniseries on how to PLAN, WRITE, EDIT, and PUBLISH your creative work.

My co-host for the series is Greg Larson. Greg has written and edited more than 80 books.

In Part 1 we reviewed how to PLAN your book.

In Part 2 we reviewed how to WRITE your book.

Today we’re going to review how to EDIT your book.

TRANSCRIPT

Greg Larson:

Editing is everything that comes afterwards; with writing, that, I think, it's weightlifting. It's just showing up, putting in the reps, and pounding something out. That can be done by anyone who can hit a keyboard or who can write; but editing, I don't know, man; it's a certain alchemy to it, and I have no idea.

Ben Guest:

Hi, everyone. This is Ben Guest, and today is Part 3 of my Four-Part Miniseries on How to Plan, Write, Edit, and Publish Your Book. Today, Greg Larson and I are talking editing, and specifically, strategies to look at your book with fresh eyes. That's the key in the editing process, to be able to see your book new, and make changes based on seeing it "for the first time."

Ben Guest:

Greg is the author and editor of more than 80 books, and we discuss his memoir, Clubbie, in this podcast. And we also talk a little bit about my memoir, Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball. Enjoy the episode.

Ben Guest:

I guess there are two main components to editing. One is self-editing, and the other is working with an editor, either a trusted reader, group of readers, professional editor, et cetera. Let me start with a couple tips and tricks that I use.

Greg Larson:

Please.

Ben Guest:

And I got this from a guy named Glen Stout, who has written a number of excellent books, and was the series editor for The Best American Sports Writing, which I read growing up. It was really a seminal introduction to good writing for me. And so anyway, Glen told me, "When you get to a certain point, re-do the entire manuscript in a different font, preferably a font you don't like; and then print it out, and read it in the new font." Because there reaches a point, I think for all of us as writers, where we need to trick ourselves into being able to see the work in a fresh light, as new as we can. So tip or trick number one is, print it out in a different font, different size, et cetera. Yeah.

Greg Larson:

I love that, because that's... It's so true, man. Those little tricks, you're like, "What the... That's not going to do anything." That kind of s**t really does work. You're going to look at it like it's a completely book, and you're going to see nooks and crannies that you didn't before. I'm stealing the hell out of that times. F**k Times New Roman dude, I'm going Wing Dings on this next draft.

Ben Guest:

Comic Sans, in 14.

Greg Larson:

Particularly a font that you don't like, that you don't like. That, I think, is really key. I really like that.

Ben Guest:

It's great, isn't it?

Greg Larson:

Yeah.

Ben Guest:

And the other two, the second one is one that everybody will tell you from the beginning of time, which is to read it out loud. And reading it out loud, you can hear right away if a sentence isn't working.

Ben Guest:

And then the third one is, and I haven't tried this yet, but, and again, this was Glen recommended this; bought an older Kindle, and these ones you can put a PDF on here, and then do the read aloud function, where it reads it in that computer voice. So it's not an audio book; it's just that kind of funky computer voice that doesn't even know the correct pronunciation or grammar or anything. But by listening to it, say it's similar to printing it out in a funky font; by listening to it like that, and I haven't done this yet, but I'm going to with the memoir that I'm just finishing. Listening to it like that; again, you're hearing it in a new way.

Greg Larson:

When you said, real quick, the memoir that you're finishing; you're talking about the one you're working with, the basketball?

Ben Guest:

Oh no, sorry. I should have been clearer. So, I got... That project is, we're right in the middle of just interview, transcription, writing. The memoir is about meditation and coaching basketball. And that one is 95% done. Probably by the time, hopefully, that these podcast episodes come out, it'll be right around the time on publishing that book. So that one's just about done.

Greg Larson:

Wow.

Ben Guest:

It just needs a few more things here, and then a copy edit, and then it's good to go.

Greg Larson:

Dang, I didn't know that you were that close.

Ben Guest:

I have this phrase, "Are you 90% finished, or are you only 50% finished?" And again, it comes from my filmmaking background of doing documentary, where you just get so lost in the weeds, and you can't tell, "Am I... Is this almost?" And I'm just thinking about every last little bit or, "Eh, it's just not working. I got something, but it just needs, it's going to need a lot more."

Ben Guest:

And so, for a long time, I was in that, "I think I'm 90% done, but I'm not sure if I'm 50% done." And actually, going back to our episode, writing, what really cracked it open for me was going back and looking at some of the journals I'd kept as a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia, and having some I actual dialogue that I had quoted in my journal, that I could pull out and let the dialogue do the lifting, as we talked about in the writing episode. Because I was telling and not showing.

Greg Larson:

Yeah.

Ben Guest:

I was giving a laundry list of experiences that I had had, that sort of led to this epiphany of letting go of control, releasing control of trying to coach a team, and so on and so forth.

Ben Guest:

So anyway, long story short, it was by finding real-time dialogue that I had in my journal from years ago, that I could plug in that it really, "Okay. Now I'm more than 90% finished, and I just need to polish up a few things."

Greg Larson:

Yeah. So the previous version was probably a lot of summary, and not as much scene building.

Ben Guest:

Exactly. It was way too much. I've been working with Glen on this, and it was way too much... And he made the point of, "Okay, you have this background. How did you reach this point where you're letting go of the team, you're into meditation and so forth. How did you get there?" So then I wrote a chapter explaining how I got there. But it's the same thing we talked about last time, if you've got to explain that, you've already fucked up. Explaining it just made it boring. In some cases, I'm talking about being in the Peace Corps 20 years ago in Namibia; how do I make that come alive? And then fortunately, I kept some journals, and I found one of the journals, and bang, I had some dialogue in there that was perfect for what I'm trying to convey.

Greg Larson:

Backstory as exposition, was something that one of my professors in grad school really hammered in us: sprinkle in where it's necessary, but front-loading it all at the beginning, snoozefest, dude. Nonfiction memoirs in particular, I think make that mistake a lot; way too much background. "I was born in 1924." So nobody gives a s**t, dude, unless you're Teddy Roosevelt or whatever.

Ben Guest:

And I'm sure we'll get into this more in future episodes, where we talk the business side of it in marketing and promoting. But you have to think about who is the audience and who is the reader?

Greg Larson:

Yeah.

Ben Guest:

And I think a lot of times, especially for first-time authors, or for people that have an interesting story to tell, they want to tell their whole life, rather than, and we talked about this before, in the planning stage, there's a point to this writing. There's something you want to communicate. And if it's not related to that, it doesn't need to be in there.

Greg Larson:

Yes. Writing is entertainment. Even if it's art, it's entertainment. And if it's not entertaining and it's not informing, then what are you doing? It's just a journal.

Ben Guest:

And why am I reading your book? So going back to the editing process, for me, that's where we're making a reduction. Right? What does that look like for you?

Greg Larson:

For the handwritten novel that I'm doing, when I finish writing it handwritten, I'm going to have to go to a computer, and I'm going to have to transcribe it. That's like a free edit, because I get to think about it as not being an edit. I'm like, "Oh, I'm just transcribing it." But inevitably, who knows? That might be one of the times where I'm most in the weeds in the book ever, where I have it here on the page, and then I'm typing it on the computer. I've not thought about this out loud, explicitly, but was like, "Oh, will I make obvious changes while I'm doing the transcription?" I think, no. I'm going to honor exactly what's on the page, and I'm just going to write comments on the side for, "Oh, this has to change, because X happens in notebook 10, that kind of thing."

Greg Larson:

And then, I'm going to let it sit for six weeks. And in that process, I'm going to write something else, something completely different, probably something comedy, funny, silly stuff. And then after six weeks, I will go back through and read it. And I don't know if I'll have a pen in my hand or not, but I'm going to print it out. Not in a funny font yet; not in Wing Dings yet. I'll do that later, but I'm going to print it out and just read it like I'm a reader, and just see what the hell I have. And then, I will go back through, and then it's slash and burn time. I will print it out, and I will cut up different sections, like on a chapter-by-chapter level; I will cut up different sections and pieces of dialogue, and move it around physically, like on the ground. That has been actually really helpful.

Ben Guest:

What does your file management look like on your computer?

Greg Larson:

I have a Google Drive with a Notes document. That's just s**t I think of, that is in no order whatsoever. And that's just an ever-growing document. And then, I have a document of the actual prose; and then I have a bunch of articles, all that stuff. They're all in the same folder on Google Drive.

Ben Guest:

How often are you saving a new version of your draft?

Greg Larson:

I was just looking this up. I started writing prose in the middle of May, 2016, and I finished writing that first draft on September 1st, I believe. And so, I had a rough draft that included stuff that just said, notes, if you need seen here of what you look like. I left that alone in that document, copied it and pasted it to a new document.

Greg Larson:

So it is basically, I will start a new document once I've made one pass at the full manuscript; and then I'll just move on from there. I think for Clubbie, I did four heavy duty edits, and then the tweaking proofreading stuff, that who knows how to quantify that. I have no idea.

Ben Guest:

Yeah. I feel like I don't save enough new drafts. Now I know that I can always go back and find something, but I feel like I probably make a new draft once a week as I'm going through it. But probably need to do it more, just because you have a nice turn of phrase, and then you change it a little bit and then, "Ah, damn. What was that again? I can't remember it exactly."

Greg Larson:

Yeah. And doing it by a timeline like that, you're... It's arbitrary.

Ben Guest:

Yeah. Okay. So you said something earlier, that is the most important part of the editing process, which is, with the new book, you're going to put it in a drawer for six weeks, and then pick it up again. And so, those three tips and tricks about seeing the book in a new way that I gave at the beginning, basically, they're all variations of the process of letting it alone until you can see it with new eyes, with fresh eyes again. The author, Peter Olson, I interviewed him a couple months ago, and I asked him, I said, "How long do you like to let a draft sit?" And he said, "However long I let it sit, it's never long enough." And I thought that was the exact right answer. You want to just forget it. You want to forget what you wrote, so you can see it new again.

Greg Larson:

Yes. I look forward to that a lot, that feeling of... just that feeling of having those notebooks written, and letting it sit in a drawer, and just know that it's complete; the hard part is complete. There's other hard parts, but wow. It exists. Now, it's just a matter of polishing it up, and I'm not going to look at it. It's like waiting for Christmas. The way Stephen King described it, "You're reading something that was written by a soul twin. It feels that you can barely remember it, but it's like somebody who is you, but not you wrote it."

Greg Larson:

I've been doing yoga a lot lately, and at the end of you have the Shavasana, where you're in the corpse pose, and you're basically unwinding after all of the work of the last hour. I don't know what exactly, but there's something analogous there of, the work is complete; at least this phase, the work is complete. And I get to look back and see what the hell it is that I just created. It's kind of scary.

Ben Guest:

It's leaving $20 for yourself in your winter coat. And you're going to find it again six months from now. For me, the hardest part, although still fun, is the writing. Once it gets to the editing phase, the absolute hardest part is done. So, in addition to forgetting and then looking forward to what it is you wrote, it's also, this is the easier phase for me. So I can't wait to forget it, so I can rediscover it, and almost pat myself on the back a little bit for doing this well or doing that well. Even though I'm going to be critical about things, it is very much, you look forward to rediscovering your soul twin's work.

Greg Larson:

Yeah. You can surprise yourself; even us doing the breakdown in the last episode of the revision process for that piece I wrote for Clubbie; even there, I feel a pleasant surprise of, "Oh. I didn't even realize that I did that. That's pretty good." Because I can get really hard on myself, I think, like most authors. Just, "God, I have no idea what I'm doing." And then have to remember, "Nope. Not knowing what you're doing is the most important part of the process."

Ben Guest:

So, for the self-editing phase, the things we've talked about so far are, putting it in a drawer and letting it sit.

Greg Larson:

Yeah.

Ben Guest:

Print it in a different font, read it out loud, let your computer read it out to you. And for me, generally, in the self-editing phase, in addition into just reducing as much as possible, trying to get into the scene as quickly as possible, get out of the scene into the chapter, out of the chapter as quickly as possible. It's also going back to what we were saying earlier, of show, don't tell. Maybe it was the last episode; show, don't tell. I want to be mindful of, "Am I explaining to the audience what it is they should be feeling?" And any time I'm doing that, or nine times out of 10, if I'm doing that, I need to cut it.

Greg Larson:

Yeah. I talked about what I'm going to do with this handwritten draft; but I just realized going back through these old versions of Clubbie, that when I was banging out a first draft on Google Docs, what I would do immediately when I finished the first draft, once I let it sit for a bit and I went through it, I did the spell check tool. Yes. Spelling and grammar, spelling and grammar check. And I just accepted everything it told me. So then, all of a sudden I have this garbled mess. And when I accept everything it tells me, boom, all of a sudden it's like a new draft. And then I formatted it, and it's boom, it's like a new draft. And without doing any cognitive work whatsoever, I just gave myself a revision; and it felt like a free step-up. That was all... I had forgotten that I did that until I looked back.

Greg Larson:

But that was a really cheap way of getting a pat on the back for, "Oh, I already did a revision." And then I try to keep it to global stuff. If I get, even in the first revision, if I get too in the weeds of... If I get too into polishing weeds of every single word in the sentence, I will get lost. So I try to keep it global content edits first, of, "Oh s**t, I have a placeholder for content here. Let me just bang something out real quick." I try to do that, and then I try to do a full pass of content restructuring, organizing. And then when I go back through, then it's, "Okay. Now we're deep into polishing by sentence and word." And that takes who knows how many passes; a half dozen passes, maybe more sometimes.

Ben Guest:

Hi, everyone. Ben here with a quick commercial break, which is for Greg's company.

Greg Larson:

This episode is brought to you by Self-Publishing Sherpa. If you're a busy entrepreneur, coach or consultant, and you'd like to grow your business with a book, let's talk. Yes, this is Greg Larson, the guest of this episode, and here's the deal. Writing a good book is easy; but good books don't grow your business. Writing a great book that attracts new clients is hard, really hard. Editing is even harder. Add in cover design, interior layout, publishing and marketing, and it's enough to keep you from writing a single word at all.

Greg Larson:

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Ben Guest:

So that polishing phase, that refining every sentence, shaving syllables. What does that look like for you?

Greg Larson:

That's the point at which I start reading out loud. I don't read out loud until then. That's when I start reading out loud, and I just try to listen for things that get stuck in my throat; just for things that on a gut level, if I find myself trying to read past it too quickly, that's indicative of me trying to shoo something away from work. That's the only thing I know, dude. It's hard.

Ben Guest:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). I can spend two minutes on, "Da, da, da, said Greg."

Greg Larson:

Right.

Ben Guest:

Versus, "Da, da, da, Greg said."

Greg Larson:

Yes.

Ben Guest:

And so, for me, it's just... And actually, this probably goes back to being an English teacher. I don't want to repeat words, especially in a paragraph. I want to have a nice rhythm. And then the icing on the cake, is if I can have a little bit of alliteration or assonance in there, I'm going to sprinkle that in there. But it's that spooky process of, you're 1/3 aware of what you're doing, and 2/3 unaware.

Greg Larson:

This is the spookiest part of the process, the most unexplainable part of what exactly are you doing when you're doing those final polishes?

Ben Guest:

Yep. And so, another thing that I do, and I'm just going to open it on my computer so I can tell everybody. So I... Your computer has a dictionary. And I did this years ago. I uploaded Webster's dictionary from like 1910. So you can find the file, and upload it to your computer dictionary.

Greg Larson:

Huh.

Ben Guest:

You can upload any dictionary that's out there. And so, it's this great old-time dictionary, that if I get stuck, if I need a synonym, I'll punch a word into the dictionary, and see what comes up. So for example, in this autobiography that I'm working on with a retired NBA player, he played college at the University of North Carolina. And Dean Smith, his college coach, is sort of the hero of the book. And so, I'm working on the chapter about freshman year, University of North Carolina, and I'm going online and looking at photos of Chapel Hill, and trying to figure out how to describe it.

Ben Guest:

It's got Georgian architecture. And so, I just put Georgian in the dictionary, and stately comes up. And so now, stately, "Oh, that's a great word. I never would've thought of that." Now I put stately in there, and it's majestic. And then, in this Webster's dictionary, it gives you a famous quote. So it's a Shakespeare quote. "Here is a stately style, indeed." Shakespeare was always using alliteration.

Ben Guest:

So now, the stately campus of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, majestic and grand. I got it all from... It started with Georgian architecture, punched it into the old-timey dictionary, came up with stately, and then definition of stately included majestic and grand. Now I have my words that are a little bit different than I would have used if I'm just trying to come up with it on my own.

Greg Larson:

You're using the Mac, the home dictionary, the utilities dictionary that comes with the operating system?

Ben Guest:

Yeah. The way that I heard about this, is the famous author and writing teacher, John McPhee had a dictionary that he used. And actually, John McPhee published a book about three or four years ago called Draft No. Four, where he goes into this whole process. And it was in one of those articles that he mentioned this dictionary. So, let me see... So, the dictionary that comes with your computer, if you're on a Mac, is the New Oxford American Dictionary. Right? So this is my screen, and this is the New... If I click on dictionary, this is the New Oxford Dictionary.

Greg Larson:

Yeah.

Ben Guest:

But I added Webster's, and I got it from John McPhee, Webster's Revised, Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.

Greg Larson:

I like to use Desk Dictionary.

Ben Guest:

What's that? Tell me about that.

Greg Larson:

Webster's II New Riverside Desk Dictionary. Honestly, I like it just because the content is pretty thin; each entry is pretty short. But what I like about it is the size and the weight are perfect. I can... It's easy to carry. It's easy right here. And it's packed with enough words that it's very useful.

Ben Guest:

Yeah. So much of art is about making connections. And so, when we're talking about writing and editing and sentence construction, and really drilling down on what's the right word and the right sentence, I need to make a connection to a word that I'm not normally going to think of.

Greg Larson:

Yes.

Ben Guest:

So having a dictionary that has a bunch of words in it that are slightly out of time, so 1913, Webster's 1913 Dictionary, it's going to find words that I wouldn't normally associate with this other word that I'm trying to figure out, what's a synonym to use.

Greg Larson:

Yes. Yeah. The thesaurus work is done for you, just in the definitions.

Ben Guest:

Okay. So that's the self-editing process. Now, working with an editor; and you've done both. You've been an editor and a book coach, and you've worked with an editor. What are your thoughts about that?

Greg Larson:

As an author, I won't go to an editor until I'm at the copy, edit, and proofreading stage. When I say, "All right, I've polished it to the point where it's as good as I could possibly make it right now, in this stage of my career." If I... Okay. So my copy editor for Clubbie, she was amazing, Amanda Jackson. She gave me a lot of really good sentence-by-sentence, just grammatical stuff that needed to be changed; that was necessary and good.

Greg Larson:

But what she also did was she pointed out two really important narrative discrepancies, where she said, "Hold on a minute. This scene that happens on page 125, makes it seem like you are the messy roommate with your girlfriend. But the corresponding scene on page 74 makes it seem like it's the other way around. It's okay if there's a discrepancy there, but as a reader, it's confusing without at least a little bit of explanation."

Greg Larson:

And I was like, "Oh, s**t. Me just putting the facts forward, or putting the scene forward wasn't enough. I actually needed... We were talking about nine times out of 10, you don't need it. That was one of the one times out of 10 that I actually did need to explain a little bit more. And she pointed that out. And then she also pointed out that my ending was confusing. It still might be confusing; that the ending made it seem like I was going forward in time, instead of a flashback in time. And I was like, "Oh God. I didn't know that." Those two insights alone, even if I took away all the commas and all that kind of s**t, were well worth the entire... Those two insights were worth everything that she did for me.

Ben Guest:

Yeah. I think the two non-negotiables in writing and publishing your book are a thorough copy edit, and a good cover design.

Greg Larson:

Yeah.

Ben Guest:

Those are the things that you pretty much have to spend money on. It doesn't have to be a lot of money, but you need to allocate resources, in terms of money, for those two things.

Greg Larson:

Yes. If I'm thinking about self-publishing, if you have a publisher and a contract with them, royalties, all that kind of stuff, they'll take care of it. But if I'm talking about self-publishing, I'm thinking if you want to do it right, you have to be allotting $5,000 to those parts of the process, combined. Copy edits, that might be $500 to $1,000. Cover design might be $4k to $5k, something like that. $5k is minimum to get a high quality design like that.

Ben Guest:

So for me, in the editing process, working with an outside editor, I love... And this goes back to being in the film world. I love to work with an editor when I have final... I hate to work with an editor when they have final cut. So, in filmmaking, that means somebody's writing the check, then they're going to have... If a company or an organization has hired you to make a film about what they do, they have final say over the product. And that for me, I don't like not being able to control the final output. But when someone is giving you feedback, and then you can decide, or I can decide, "Okay. I am going to incorporate this feedback." Or, "I understand what they're saying, but I'm still going to make this choice, a different choice." That's when I feel really comfortable, and it's like having a great dance partner, when you're working with a good editor.

Greg Larson:

Yeah. Dude, I couldn't agree more; if I couldn't have final say. There was one thing that actually came up. Okay. Yeah. When I was doing the copy editing process, my copy editor changed a lot of my... She put in a lot of semicolons that were necessary. It's okay, two independent, but related clauses. Yes. Technically, that's supposed to be a semicolon. But every... I was like, "There are no semicolons in a minor league baseball clubhouse. This does not fit the ethos of this world."

Greg Larson:

So, by the book, technically you have it. But for the world that we've created, it's wrong. And luckily, my publisher and my editor were on board with that, and understood my explanation. I just cannot imagine these pieces of dialogue with semicolons instead of m-dashes; because that was my go-to; anywhere there would be a semicolon, it would be an m-dash. It just keeps the things, keeps stuff moving. But that's the kind of thing that you have to look out for in an editor; because their job is to be buttoned up and more binary. And you have to be on their ass; sometimes, it's not binary.

Ben Guest:

Yeah. If I'm editing, I want to point out you're making a choice here.

Greg Larson:

Yes.

Ben Guest:

Okay, great. You're a choice to use an m-dash instead of a semicolon. A good editor is helping you realize, "Did you realize that you're making a choice here?" And then, if you realized it, you're good with it. Half the time, it's, "Oh, s**t. I didn't realize I was making that choice. And that's actually not what I want." So to me, a good editor is pointing out, "Okay. Just want to make sure you were consciously intending to do this, or you're consciously making a choice to do this."

Greg Larson:

Yeah. That's where I was a professional editor only. There's a reason why I do book coaching instead and some ghost writing, although not as much. I'm just not, how to put it; I'm just not good at it. I can see through so much of proofreading. It gets in the way of the flow. Proofreading is necessary for the layout, but in copy editing, so much of proper copy editing gets in the way of the narrative flow. It's like stuff... I don't know, man. I think it should be sloppier than that, at least for my stuff. Again, the New Yorker, they're all buttoned up, all that; but you've seen the stuff I write. I like to chunk things together, and there's fragments all over the place. And I like that because it's, that's the flow.

Ben Guest:

One of the things that we keep coming back to, is the idea of juxtaposition, counterpoint. And so again, my training initially is in filmmaking; and the best book on film editing is called In the Blink of an Eye. You have a hierarchy of when to make a cut. The second level is to match Sam Jackson's holding a coffee cup in his left hand in scene A, and we cut to the over-the-shoulder shot. He needs to be holding the coffee cup in his left hand in scene B. But more important than matching continuity, is cutting for emotion. So if this cut, even if something is wrong in terms of continuity, but fits the emotion, then you cut for emotion. And what you're talking about is ultimately our job as writers, is to engage the reader. We're writing to create hopefully, an emotion in the reader. And that has to come necessarily before, "Is the semicolon here correct?"

Greg Larson:

Yes. And we have an advantage over a filmmaker, that we can change the scene if we want to.

Ben Guest:

Yes.

Greg Larson:

So we-

Ben Guest:

We can change the content.

Greg Larson:

We can put the cup in the metaphorical correct hand, and we can get the emotion right.

Ben Guest:

Exactly. Okay. Those are my thoughts on editing. Any more tips and tricks, any other thoughts on editing?

Greg Larson:

Here's the framework that I give my clients for self-editing; and it's just really, I call it the GLOW framework. You start four rounds, global edits, line-by-line edits, out loud edits, work with a professional.

Ben Guest:

I love that framework.

Greg Larson:

And then you have framework that glows.

Ben Guest:

I love that framework. Okay. I think that's the all I've got on editing.

Greg Larson:

Yeah. If I said anything else about editing, I'd be talking out of my ass even more. It's pure alchemy.

Ben Guest:

That's Part Three, The Editing Process. Next week, Part Four, Publishing Your Book. If you enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my weekly newsletter and podcast, at benbo.subststack.com. That's benbo.substack.com. B-E-N-B-O.substack.com. Have a great day

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com

This is Part 2 of my Four-Part Miniseries on how to PLAN, WRITE, EDIT, and PUBLISH your creative work.

My co-host for the series is Greg Larson. Greg has written and edited more than 80 books.

In Part 1 we reviewed how to PLAN your book.

Today we’re going to review how to WRITE your book.

Episode Transcript

Ben Guest:Hi everyone, this is Ben Guest and welcome to part two of my four part mini-series on how to plan, write, edit, and publish your book. My co-host for this mini series is Greg Larson. Greg wrote a fantastic memoir called Clubbie. He's ghost written and edited over 80 books. In this episode, we talk the writing process and start with how writing is similar to standup comedy.Greg Larson:There's nothing more brutal than in the moment feedback of a standup comedy audience. That's a really great gift, because as an author, we don't have that. We're just inside our own head. I think that's why a lot of writing can turn masturbatory, where you're not thinking about what's the audience want? What's going to keep them reading the next sentence? As a standup comic, that's right there in your face, in a very painful way. It's an immediate stimulus response condition.Ben Guest:You know if it's working, immediately?Greg Larson:Yes. With writing, you don't really know, you just have to... I don't know what... You have to trust it. At least in the first draft.Ben Guest:I do this thing, sometimes. If I can, where if I'm in the same physical space with a good friend, family member, a trusted reader, I'll print out a chapter, a section, a scene. And I'll say, "Can you read this and give me feedback?" My parents were in town the other day. I did this with my dad and he said, "Sure." It's just maybe four pages. He said, "Sure." He left to go to the dining room table, sit there, and mark it up. And I said, "No. Can you sit right here and read it?" I kind of want to watch you in my periphery while you read it. It's as close as you can come to something like film making, when you watch it with an audience or stand up in front of a crowd, where you can just tell from the body language, "This is working. This is not working".Greg Larson:Yeah. What was his response?Ben Guest:His response to that was just like, "Okay", at this point with enough creative projects, he's like, "I'm not going to question the process." It was fine. It's better with my mom because my mom will kind of make... She'll laugh or she'll smile or she'll frown and I can see, "Okay, wait. What sentence are you on? Why did you frown right there?" You don't really get to do that as a writer. If you do, you can't do it too often because people just get sick of you.Greg Larson:Yeah. I mean, you could be the best writer in the world and with that kind of microscope on your reading process, it eventually becomes like, "Whoa, there's a lot of pressure to read".Ben Guest:Right. Also, I think you touched on something earlier, which is... So I used to be a high school, English teacher. I used to tell people, "Standup", I never did stand up, "But standup and teaching are similar in that you know right away if it's working. That you can't fake laughter and you can't fake an engaged group of students." There is that component. There's also the component when we write of... sometimes we want the reader to have to figure some stuff out. Sometimes we don't want there necessarily to be clarity. That goes back to your point of your compatriot, who's writing something and then sort of explaining exactly what that piece of dialogue meant. Whereas if we're really doing our job, we should be laying the bricks down where the audience can make the next step.Greg Larson:Yeah. There are times where you do need to interject. That's a hard one, man. I don't know... I don't know how you know... It's a gut feeling thing, I think. How many times do I interject and tell them what the meaning is and how do I do it? I know what I do is in the first draft I will over explain so that I can shave back from there. I know that I do that, but to know where and when to shave, is a gut thing.Ben Guest:Yeah. It's so hard. I think, in general, my measuring ratio is nine times out of 10... you don't need to explain it. One time out of 10, you need to. It's tough to know.Greg Larson:Yeah. I like that though. That sounds right to-Ben Guest:It's so easy to over explain. That's the number one thing, when I go back and edit my own work, the first thing that goes is like, "Why are you explaining what this means for show, don't tell"?Greg Larson:One of my old professors, John McManus, he had this rule that he would tell us. He'd say, "With the scene direction specifically", he's like, "Only leave it in there if it does two jobs. If the one job is to be a visual stimulation of some kind, and that's it, then delete it. But if the job is to be okay, show us a visual, but that visual also tells us something about the character. "Oh", he said, as he crossed his shoes, which were mismatched. It's like, "Okay, that says something about that character. That they're a little bit haphazard. They're not thinking things through, that kind of thing." That is a rule that I try to keep in my mind.Ben Guest:I love that. I think that leads us right into where I want to go next, which is... So you shared three different versions... three different drafts of just a couple paragraphs from Clubbie. I kind of marked it up. I have a couple thoughts that I kind of want to dive into which is... What I'll do actually, is I'll read part of each version because this is a little bit different, not different, bad or different, good, but just different than the process that we're describing. What I'm seeing here is the first version is just very much the skeleton, the bare bones, the framework. I'm doing this. I need to do this, this and this. Then the second version is really adding lots of description and detail. Then the third version is pairing it back just a little bit. Adding just the correct dialogue. Adding some humor and kind of turning that literary dial just a little bit. Does that make sense?

Greg Larson:I think that's exactly right.Ben Guest:Let me read one paragraph from each of the three versions. This is just to kind of set the scene. This is when you're first getting to Aberdeen, is that correct?Greg Larson:Yep. That's right. I'm basically, I'm walking into the equipment closet with my new boss. I am being shown a world that is going to be my new home for the next two years. I have no idea what I'm getting myself into.Ben Guest:Right. Of course, you're now showing us, the reader, this new world. You want to convey, "I have no idea what I'm getting into." Going back to show, don't tell... The last thing in the world you want to do is say, "I have no idea what I'm getting into." You want to convey that feeling just through this scene?Greg Larson:Yep. That it's exactly right.Ben Guest:So version one…

Jason throws the Aberdeen hat on your head. Just one of the caps left over from the year before. Blue, BP cap with cursive, A. Nice cap. Stretch fit. Okay, that's version one. Then version two of that exact same scene. He pulled out a blue stretch, fit cap with orange trim on the bill and an orange cursive capital A, for Aberdeen, on the crown, rather than the IronBird's logo. He slapped it onto my head so that the bill was halfway over my eyes and I could only see his feet. I left it like that.

Okay. Right there, I think it's already miles ahead of version one, right?Greg Larson:Yeah. Version one, I was just trying to get the idea... I wasn't even writing. I was just saying what was going to happen.Ben Guest:It's sort of somewhere between writing an outline... Is that fair?Greg Larson:A hundred percent.Ben Guest:Before we get to version three, when you're doing version one, just that sort of all half outline, half writing, how long does that take you? Or is it just head down? There are a bunch of typos and so forth. Is it just head down writing sprint? What does that look like for you?Greg Larson:For this book, that's what that looked like. It was 2000 words a day and I was just banging it out. If a piece of dialogue or a specific visual came to me, I would put it in. Literally, the first paragraph of the section I sent you said, "We need to know what you look like early on here so we can compare it to what you look like mid-season?" That's just a note to myself. I don't write like that anymore, usually. That is just me cranking s**t out as fast as I can to get to the stuff that's actually prose.Ben Guest:Why don't you write like that anymore?Greg Larson:It was fast. It's okay for a first draft to be sloppy, but it was so sloppy that some of the ghosts from the early skeleton would get stuck in the later versions. That problem is the reason why I'm writing my new book, by hand. I can't just bang that s**t out. Every choice is more costly... physiologically.Ben Guest:That's so interesting. You're writing the new novel, by hand... Is that translating into a more finished piece of prose in the rough draft?Greg Larson:Yeah. I'm writing prose two pages a day. It might be 500 words a day. I don't know. This is the most recently filled notebook for my current novel that I'm writing. This is all prose. This is all prose. I know that I can go into the back final pages... On the last page I have a header that says, "Notes." This is just where I have ideas for things. What does Dana in my summer look like? Use my ex-girlfriend's relationship as a model. First, new and real love, so it feels permanent. Those kinds of notes. That's not prose. Those are just notes to myself. Before, I would've put them all together like I did with Clubbie. Here, they're sectioned off to the back so that I can refer back to it and say, "Oh yeah, I still have that here. I'm going to use it as a reference point for writing the actual prose".Ben Guest:Yeah. That a hundred percent makes sense. Like you said, now, the price to write those sentences is a little bit more just by virtue of doing in it with pen to paper. Now, are you noticing your thinking is changing as you're writing the sentences? You're thinking in more complete sentences?Greg Larson:Interesting. I think so. I find it's definitely the cleanest first draft I've ever written. It's still sloppy enough. The sloppiness is in the organization and the structure, as opposed to sentences and the structure and the organization. What I find is that I am sitting with the notepad open more often, looking around and thinking before writing and then going into a flow. Whereas before it was just 2000 words, let's crank this s**t out. Then, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. It's definitely sharpened things. I don't know for sure. I never go back and read. If I go back and read, it's dead. Any book that I go back and read in the middle of it dies.Ben Guest:Interesting. You don't go back and read a few pages before you start writing the next step?Greg Larson:Absolutely. After as many people as I've coached for book writing and all that stuff, that is the easiest and most surefire book killer that most people make. I don't care if they're professionals. I don't care who you are. That's the best way to kill your book.Ben Guest:Tell us why?Greg Larson:Because you go back and you're faced to face with the fact that you don't know what you're doing. The whole point of a first draft is to not know what the next step is. You're not going to know what the next step is until you finish the first draft. If you go back too early, you're going to see how much you suck. Even if it's fantastic writing, you're going to get in your head about it. You're going to get stuck trying to perfect chapter one instead of actually writing chapter two, and going forward. There's just too many pitfalls, man. I see people fall into it all the time.Ben Guest:Another pitfall, I think, is so when it comes to creative projects, it's been my experience and I've done film, I've done writing projects... It's my experience that... I may have mentioned this. There are two types of people, those who talk about their project, those who finish their project. Those who finish is a much smaller number than those who talk about it. Where people can get caught up... This ties into what you're saying, is doing work around the creative project, but not doing the actual work. If I go back and I start with chapter two, before I start reading chapter four... I read all of chapter two and I start fixing stuff. I can sort of tell myself, "Okay, I'm working on my book today." But I ain't really working on my book today-Greg Larson:That's exactly it. With the novel project I was doing that exact same thing. I was like, "I need to learn the perfect three act structure before I can start writing this book. I need to read Joseph Campbell. I need to read McKee and I need to go through all these different craft things before I can write this." I was researching and I was studying, but it wasn't me putting pen to paper.Ben Guest:Lately, I've been on a Twitter kick in terms of trying to increase the number of followers and post more helpful content. What I've been doing is, is doing threads. Threads about self-publishing. Threads about podcasting. Threads about meditation. Maybe, two or three threads, a week. It's fun. There's sort of a video game aspect of leveling up whether it's marketing or your followers or your engagements and so forth. I'll always save it for the afternoon. I think you told me this, you do all your promo stuff in the afternoon because it's not the work. It's around the work, but it's not the work. It's really easy to get sucked into that stuff, because it doesn't require you at your peak creative powers, which for me is first thing in the morning.Greg Larson:Same. To the point where, since we talked the first time, I've done zero. I'm just completely focused on this novel.Ben Guest:I think with most creative projects, but especially with writing, it's this weird thing of... It's important, I think, that we go out and live in the world and experience the world. We're going to take that experience... We talked about your book last time... the book you're writing now and that sort of stems from a very intense experience with you and your ex-girlfriend or the person you were seeing. We have to go out and live in the world... the sort of build up some experiences that we can then isolate and be it our solitude of process and write. It's this weird thing of, I think if we... if we stay in our room too much, that can be... and that can be just as seductive as social media. To stay and just write and refine and write and refine. But we have to go out and experience the world because that's going to be the basis of the next project.Greg Larson:Totally agree, dude. Some author said that he's either writing or doing something worth writing about. I get what he is getting at.Ben Guest:Yeah. I do something a little bit different than what you were saying as far as never going back and checking. Usually, what I do... So the big project I'm working on, right now, is co-writing a retired NBA, player's autobiography. It's been a great process, so far. He played 15 years in the league and won three championships with the Bulls, in the nineties. He is not a household name. The book is really about the trauma of a terribly abusive childhood and overcoming that. I think a book you're probably familiar with, David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me. It's sort of in the vain of that.Ben Guest:What I do, before I start writing, I might go back and there's a couple different books. There's the Goggins book. There's Open, by Andre Agassi which is for most people's money, the best sports memoir that's been written. Maybe, one or two other things that are around the voice and around the style of what we're trying to do. I'll do that. Then, I'll go back to the previous chapter... the previous few pages, just to get myself back in that flow, that voice before I start writing the new thing. Does that make sense?Greg Larson:It does. Like you're preparing yourself for the new day of writing?Ben Guest:Yes. Yeah.Greg Larson:Interesting. But you don't actually go back and edit.Ben Guest:It sounds kind of like what you're doing is... Each morning I'm getting up and I'm jumping in the deep end of the pool. I'm kind of wading in, from the shallow end, to reacquaint myself to the authorial voice so that it's consistent.Greg Larson:That makes a lot of sense. I've actually been thinking about that lately. How much the specific day influences the content that I'm writing. I'm like, "Wow, if I had written the same scene a different day, would it be different just because I'm coming to it with whatever random energy I'm bringing to that day of the desk?" I'm curious to see without that sort of consistency, how inconsistent the tone is and whether or not that's interesting or confusing for the reader. That first reader's going to be me, inevitably.Ben Guest:Right. The other thing I have to be really careful about is what I'm reading. You can almost unconsciously start to imitate that style.Greg Larson:Right now, I'm reading some Nietzsche. I think that's far enough for me that I think it won't influence anything.Ben Guest:I love it. Little, Nietzsche. Little, Danielle Steel.Greg Larson:Right.Ben Guest:The other thing is... because you're writing by hand... Are you working on any other writing projects?Greg Larson:No, I'm doing some book coaching, but that's just emotional coaching.Ben Guest:Right. I imagine given that you're not trying to write in someone else's voice. That you're writing every day. You probably are being consistent in terms of tone and voice.Greg Larson:That's true. I'm pretty deep into my own... into my own voice, right now. More than I have been in a long time, I'd say. Maybe ever, but definitely in a long time.Ben Guest:Okay. Let's go back to these three versions. I read version two. I'm going to read version two again, before I read the final version. For the listeners, as much as possible, try to pay attention so that you can see how just a few things have changed between version two and the final version, but how it makes all the difference. Okay. This is version two.

He pulled out a blue stretch, fit cap with orange trim on the bill and an orange cursive capital A, for Aberdeen, on the crown, rather than the IronBird's logo. He slapped it onto my head so that the bill was halfway over my eyes and I could only see his feet. I left it like that.

Again, what we're talking about at the top is trying to let dialogue do some of the lifting. The whole point is to communicate a feeling to the reader.Ben Guest:Here's the final version, keeping that in mind. Final version.

He pulled out a blue stretch, fit cap with orange trim on the bill and an orange cursive capital A, for Aberdeen on the crown... on the crown. He slapped it onto my head, the bill sagged halfway over my eyes and I could see only his feet. "There", he said, "Now you look like a clubbie."

Okay. That it's the difference. I forget who said it... Mark Twain, maybe. The difference between the lightning bug and lightning, right? It's almost the same paragraph. Just a few slight changes in that bit of dialogue at the end. "There", he said, "Now you look like a Clubbie." That conveys so much feeling.Greg Larson:Yeah. It's the initiation process. That's the period at the end of the sentence of, here's the new world. Here's where you'll be sleeping. Here's the toothbrushes. Here's the equipment. Now you're in the s**t and you have no way out. I'm glad that you gave me the assignment because I went back through and there's this sentence... It's a super long, run-on sentence. He pulled out a blue stretch, fit cap with orange trim on the bill and an orange cursive capital A, for Aberdeen, on the crown, rather than the IronBirds logo. That has the right information but I was like, "That's just way too much in your mouth. That's way too much to read." I just chunked it together. When we think about sentence construction, he pulled out a blue stretch fit cap that... Well, here's the final version you read. He pulled out a blue stretch, fit cap with orange trim on the bill and an orange... Comma, helps to break up the sentence, but it's a necessary comma. Cursive capital A, for Aberdeen on the crown. Period. He slapped it onto in my head.Greg Larson:It's... instead of one long run-on sentence, it's a pretty long sentence followed by a really quick, he slapped it onto my head, which sort of prepares us for the ending... the ending quickness, as well. There's a parallel quickness, I think.Ben Guest:A hundred percent. Just the taking out, rather the IronBird's logo...Greg Larson:Yes, which is grammatically confusing.Ben Guest:Right. Grammatically confusing. Doesn't add anything because you've already described the hat. Just that little change, as an English teacher, was always clarity in all things. That's why you want to write, well... clarity. Writing prose, you don't necessarily want clarity at all times. James Joyce is legendary for not having clarity. The sentence works so much better just with that little edit.Greg Larson:Yeah, I think so. I never had any idea that that's what I did.Ben Guest:The dialogue... just that one line of dialogue varies said, "Now you look like a clubbie." It's the counterpoint to, the hat may be the wrong size. It's not properly balanced on your head. It's this new world. It's the counterpoint to, "You may look like a clubbie, but what the f**k is going on?" Adding that piece of dialogue? What do you remember about doing that?Greg Larson:The thing with nonfiction, I'm never inventing things. That conversation is in there, in my memory. I was tweaking little pieces of dialogue to make it... If I write exactly how people talk, it's just garbled up. In my memory, there's just this fragment of him saying that I look like a clubbie after you slap the cap onto my head. I didn't even think about it as being significant. I just threw it in there because it's something that I remembered. Putting it at the end seemed right at the time. It was one of those instinct choices where I was thinking, "I didn't know all of this stuff that we just talked about. I didn't know what it symbolized or anything like that. It just felt right." That's so much of what I did. Even in the later drafts of this book and probably in the later drafts of every book, it's just following that gut instinct.Ben Guest:Yeah. I think one of the key techniques to conveying a feeling... to conveying an emotion is juxtaposition, right? Is that counterpoint. A lot of times when it comes to literary nonfiction, to memoir, I think, one, it's so helpful that if you have a journal you can refer to or you mentioned having videos and photos... All that stuff is so helpful. Then the job, once you get the scenes out, is rearranging one scene to juxtapose with the next scene. Or a piece of dialogue to juxtapose with what's happening. Or a lot of times what I'll find myself doing is going back and figuring out, "Okay, this was June of 2015. What were the pop songs? Is there a snippet of this song that I was listening to at the time or that was popular at the time, that can be a nice counterpoint to what's happening in the scene?" Just like in film, the sort of the core skill of filmmaking is the edit where you're literally juxtaposing one image to the next. I think that's a great technique that you used a good effect here of, juxtaposing what's happening with... a line of dialogue.Greg Larson:Yeah. I had never even thought about it that concretely, but you're right. I was trying to... especially in this book, I might have even gone too far with that as far as... Yeah, the juxtaposition between what I expected that world to be like and what it was actually like, it got to the point where it might have been a little bit too melancholy because the what I expected to be like was this beautiful, pristine world of baseball and then was something much seedier than that. I think I went too far with that.Ben Guest:Why do you think you went too far?Greg Larson:Some of it is from reader feedback. More than anything, when I go back and read it, I'm like, "Okay, I get what I was trying to do." I was trying to be too consistent as in, I was trying to not get off of message. I was like, "Okay, the message is disillusionment. If I want to get the message of disillusionment across, I need to constantly have that juxtaposition between what I dreamt of as a kid and what I actually got as an adult." I just did it way too much. I don't think that's honest to what life is like. It's too much gray to be that one dimensional.Ben Guest:I think that's such a great point. I remember my favorite high school English teacher. After I became a teacher, I went back and took him out to dinner and we just talked teaching. He said something to the effect of, "After about five years, you're going to look up and be like, 'Holy s**t, there are kids out there.' For the first five years of teaching, you're just so locked into what? What I'm doing? What I'm saying? What's on the board?" Right? It was great because he broke it down. He was like, "Then five years after that, you're going to do this. Then five years after that, you're going to do this. You're just sort of breaking down in five year stages. The progress you make as a teacher." I think, when we're relatively early on our writing journey... and you kind of referenced some of the storytelling, gurus and books, we become so focused on linear progress of characters. If we're writing memoir, usually the main character is ourselves.Ben Guest:There needs to be kind of a clear A to B, B to C, C to D character arc. Of course, real life is really f*****g messy. People act in contradictory ways all the time. They progress and they regress and so on and so forth. It's not really true to life, to have one sort of tone to your character arc. We should celebrate the messiness. A good storyteller, a good writer can make that whole messiness cohere.Greg Larson:Dude. Totally agree. To make that messiness coherent, in some way, is hard because there has to be a reason. When my book, that I'm writing right now, I'm like, "Oh, this character is the bad guy", therefore... What? I can't empathize them with at any point? This mother character, this kind of the bad guy. My goal is to make her as empathetic as possible. I want the reader to identify with her maybe more than they identify with the protagonist. It's really f*****g hard. I don't know if there's a formula for it, but I'm just trying my best.Ben Guest:When it comes to protagonist and antagonist, I think, the best stories are when you're almost equally invested and rooting for both characters.Greg Larson:Yeah. I mean, it sounds cheesy, but Thanos and the Avengers, I mean, you look at him, you're like, "Yeah, he makes some good points. I kind of like him".Ben Guest:The fourth Avengers was Endgame... So the third one, Infinity War. He's... and I remember reading an interview with the... with the writers, Markus and Mcfeely. They're saying at a certain point, as we're breaking the story, we realize Thanos is the protagonist of Infinity War. The Avengers are the agonists. They're trying to stop this character who has an active goal.Greg Larson:That makes sense.Ben Guest:Trying to think of another example. The movie, Heat, with Al Pacino and Robert de Niro. Both characters are fully fleshed out to the extent that even though they're on a collision course, when you're with Al Pacino's character, you want him to win and Robert de Niro's character, you want him to win. Then of course, ultimately, they're going to collide. Another great one is Hans Gruber, in Die Hard. That's another example of... He's the protagonist. He's the one actively pursuing a goal. Bruce Willis is mucking things up. Bruce Willis is the antagonist of that movie, although he is the hero, of course.Greg Larson:Yeah. With the actual writing of the first draft, it's weightlifting. It's just showing up, putting in the reps and just pounding something out. I don't care if it's really smooth or it's what I do with the skeleton first drafts. That can be done by anyone who can hit a keyboard or who can write. A finished book is better than 99.9% of every book that's ever been conceived, right? That can be done by anyone. But editing... I don't know, man, it's a certain alchemy to it and I have no idea. We're going to shift into the editing part of the process. I have no idea if I'm going to have any sort of insightful wisdom to share with you, but I am here for it.Ben Guest:Well, let's just talk process. One of my favorite quotes is... I think it was Picasso, who said, "When critics get together, they talk meaning, when painters get together, they talk brushes".Ben Guest:That's the end of part two. Next week is editing. If you found this helpful, please subscribe to my Substack. Totally free, weekly podcasts and newsletter posts with content just like this one. It's at benbo.substack.com. B-E-N-B-O.substack.com. Benbo is my family nickname. Benbo.substack.com. Thank you, so much. Have a great day.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com

The only thing that matters is how a character transforms over time.

This is Part 1 of my Four-Part Miniseries on how to PLAN, WRITE, EDIT, and PUBLISH your creative work.

This episode is a deep-dive into the fundamentals of storytelling, fundamentals that apply to any genre and any medium.

My co-host for the series is Greg Larson, who first came on the pod in August with great advice on how to market your book.

Greg, author of Clubbie: A Minor League Baseball Memoir, was a fantastic resource as I finished and published my memoir Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball.

In this episode, Greg and I dive into the questions and process you should have in place before you start writing.

We discuss many genres of story, from sci-fi to memoir to zombie apocalypse, and many types of story, from prose to screenplay to film.

We touch on the Iceberg Theory by that old hack Ernest Hemingway.

And The Hero’s Journey, based on the work of Joseph Campbell.

We talk how to find your theme, create character backstory, and outline.

At the end of Part 1 Greg shares his process for ensuring he finishes his book.

It’s genius.

And involves BBQ.

Part 2 will focus on Writing, Part 3 on Editing, and Part 4 on Publishing.

It is our hope that these four episodes will provide a guide for you to publish your work.

Please share with the storytellers in your life and, more importantly, the people who have a story to tell.

Speaking of telling a story, this mini-series is sponsored by Greg’s company, Self-Publishing Sherpa. If you like our conversation and wish to engage Greg and his group, please schedule a free strategy call.

Last but not least, I’m adding two new features to the podcast with this episode (at least for this mini-series): Transcripts and YouTube video :-)

Episode Transcript

Ben Guest:

Planning obviously is the beginning of the creative process. Greg, what are your thoughts about planning?

Greg Larson:

In general, I think a lot of authors get stuck in the planning stage. What I find is people try to make a perfect outline. For example, when I advise people in non-fiction, my entire thought process is, just create an outline that will remind you what you need to write in two months. That's it. Don't write your book in the outline, none of that kind of stuff. But even before you get into the outline, figuring out who your audience is, figuring out who your ideal reader is in that audience, figuring out what your goals with the book are, and figuring out how you want your reader to change. This is more strictly nonfiction, but figuring out how you want your reader to change, those are incredibly important aspects of the planning process that I think a lot of people overlook.

Ben Guest:

Let's start there and let's start with nonfiction and we'll probably jump over to fiction as well at some point, but we'll try to signpost that. So in nonfiction, I think the key question to ask yourself at the beginning is what you just said, "Who is this written for?" And I think the mistake a lot of people make is, I had an interesting experience or I've had an interesting life, or I had an interesting business, or I met this person or whatever. It's great that it's interesting to you. If you want to write that down for your kids, for your family, for your best friend, great, do that. But in terms of connecting to someone who doesn't know you and has no connection to you, you have to ask, "Who is this for?" Tied to that, "What do I want them to get out of it?"

Greg Larson:

A book with no audience is a diary, which is purposely fine and valid, but it doesn't need to be published as a book necessarily. The way I think about it, especially with memoir, a lot of people think that a memoir is a series of things that happened. Do you ever hear somebody tell you a story and they just go through every single detail, they're like, "Well, what was the cashier's name? I forget what they... or the week it was." None of details matter. They're not relevant. The only thing that matters is how a character transforms over time and the story that gets them to transform. So when you look back through your life and you're interested in writing a memoir about it, you have to think, "What is the shortest period of time in which I had the greatest transformation?" That is how you answer that so-what question for the reader, I think. Once you're able to put a timeframe on it, even if you're not writing a memoir, any kind of nonfiction where you have personal stories inside of it, once you have a tight timeframe around it of, "I started out as a new clubhouse attendant in a minor league baseball team and I ended as a grizzled veteran." Boom, I have a constrained timeframe that I can work with.

Ben Guest:

So we're talking about both a compressed time frame, and as importantly, the greatest amount of change that happened in that compressed timeframe?

Greg Larson:

That is what makes the most compelling stories, I believe.

Ben Guest:

We talk about storytelling traditions, and if we go back to Aristotle and Poetics, it's unity of time, place and action, everything should happen over three days and two nights. I'm a big fan of the film director, Michael Mann, who did Heat and Miami Vice and Last of the Mohicans. And he's like, basically you want your story to be the most important few days, few weeks, few months, whatever it is, of your hero's life. It is the key moment of their adult life or even their childhood, what happened in those moments that changed them. And in that specific detail, it'll become relatable.

Greg Larson:

Yes. Yeah, exactly. A lot of authors, they'll try to become universal by being vague or not trying to exclude anybody with too many details. It's like, no, the universality is found in specifics.

Ben Guest:

Right. And so just to highlight this for the listener, we just said earlier, remember how you hear a boring story and the person tells you every little detail? So that's a story with too much information. The flip side of that is once you've nailed down the timeframe, and once you've nailed down the experience, now you want as much specific detail as possible and not to go, “Well, it needs to be more general so people can relate.” For some reason, the way we're wired to connect and empathize with somebody, the more specific detail the person gives, the more we relate to it.

Greg Larson:

The right details, for sure. I see this as a problem in a lot of literary fiction and literary nonfiction, it's like this self-congratulating scene building. The reader doesn't always need to see everything. If a couple of characters are in, say an arcade or something, a person generally knows what an arcade looks like, but if you're zeroing the focus into a specific detail, make it for a reason. Otherwise, it's just showing off, it's just literary gymnastics, but that's more into the craft of writing, not the preparation as much.

Ben Guest:

Right. I agree 100% with that. The keys in the early stages and the beginning stage is what's the experience, compressed timeframe, greatest change. And who's the audience. And within that audience, who's my ideal reader, and what's the impact I want this to have on my ideal reader?

Greg Larson:

What's the impact to, I want this to have on my life too? That's an important part that I think a lot of people miss. You should be selfish in this part of the planning process. Again, we're focused on non-fiction. Yeah, you might be writing a non-fiction book to teach people something specific, maybe it's prescriptive nonfiction, whatever it may be, but you need to have a selfish goal for yourself. If it is getting speaking events, if it is having more newsletter subscribers, having a larger following on social media, whatever it is, that's an important aspect to this process because you need to have an incentive to keep going that is somewhat selfish.

Ben Guest:

With Clubbie, what was your side of that? And what was the audience side of that?

Greg Larson:

For the most part, I was blind writing Clubbie. I learned through air, I didn't know how to do a lot of this stuff yet, but as far as audience goes, I had a specific idea in my mind of the audience, I was like, "My audience member... " Because with baseball, I could've gone so deep into statistics that it would've alienated certain people. But then if I would've assumed too much ignorance on the part of my reader, it would've alienated even more people. So it was like my ideal reader knows what an earned run average is and what a batting average is, but they don't know the significance of say a wins above replacement or the more obscure metrics. That was the knowledge level that I was working with. It's a baseball fan who knows earned run average and batting average, and that's the way I wrote it. But as far as like my specific goals, I was not articulating those to myself just yet. I don't think I was as nuanced in my planning process at that point.

Ben Guest:

When you started your outline for Clubbie, did you have a theme in mind in the way that in a piece of fiction writing generally we'll create a theme?

Greg Larson:

Yeah. The theme was Minor League Baseball players are taking advantage of and look at what that world is like. And I wrote, and I outlined, "Oh, this is what their love life is like," that's one chapter. "This is how the Dominicans are treated. And then this is how they handle the off season," that kind of stuff. And I wrote a rough draft in that way, and it was just boring, it was impersonal, it just didn't work. But then when I started writing it more as narrative nonfiction, as a memoir, I did this weird thing where I had two Google Documents, a Google Document on the right with just chaos notes. I chopped up some of the old boring pieces that I thought might be useful, threw it into this note document. I had little fragments of little notes that I would scribble in class and I would type it up in there. And then on the other Word document, I had, it wasn't even a draft, I was just starting to write what was happening in the story. I wasn't writing prose, I was basically just writing a summary like, "I drive down to Florida, I meet with the team, I meet X, Y, and Z here." And I kept doing that. And then what happened was, it naturally just turned into prose, and I didn't try to, but as I went on more and more, I was like, "Oh, I know what the dialogue is here because I have the notes on this side of the screen and I know what's happening." And then eventually, by the end of it, I was just writing a full draft. By the time I got finished with that full draft, I could go back to the beginning and then say, "Oh, I know what this prose is supposed to be." So it was almost like writing half of a draft and then going back and writing the first half of the draft, and that seemed to work.

Ben Guest:

Yeah, there's a phrase I heard once, I think it was something like jumping out of an airplane and sewing the parachute together as you're in the air. And that's what you did, just jumping in, putting it together. And by the time you get to the end, now I can go back and finish the beginning.

Greg Larson:

Yeah. Dude, I hadn't thought of this, I love that metaphor as well, but I hadn't thought this metaphor or this analogy before until like the last week. We were talking about therapy before we started recording. In the first draft, when I'm in a therapy session, I'm just saying whatever comes to my mind and I'm making connections that my unconscious mind is making that I don't recognize. Then it's my therapist who says, "Here's what's happening here." In the first draft, I'm the crazy person in the chair just making connections, just trying to trust my gut intuition, free association as much as possible. And then in the second draft and the third draft, I'm like the therapist where because now I'm outside of it, I can see what I was trying to do much better. It's that realization helped me recognize or more easily trust my instincts in the first draft.

Ben Guest:

That is so great, because one of the things that the therapist is doing, the professional is doing ,is finding patterns and helping you see patterns, right?

Greg Larson:

Yes.

Ben Guest:

So now, the patient side of it is we're just throwing stuff out there, so go back to writing, we're throwing stuff on the page, thoughts, ideas, quotes, fragments, and then therapist side of it is, we're finding the through line. And sorry, as I've mentioned on previous podcasts, there's some construction going above my apartment, so you may hear random little banging sounds and so forth. Let's jump over to the fiction side. One of the things I did over the pandemic was I wrote a screenplay, and it's a zombie movie, because in some ways, COVID, the pandemic, it was like living in a zombie apocalypse where this thing is spreading and coming and so forth. And the theme that I came up with was the idea that “Everything changes.” True in normal times, and obviously even more so when you're living through a pandemic. Everything changes. You had a normal life and now everything has changed. The reason I'm mentioning that in the outlining process is I have that phrase, everything changes. That's my theme for this screenplay that I'm going to write. And now I have that at the top of my outline, because I want that either consciously or subconsciously, to just be working as I'm doing my planning, because that's the heart of the piece and everything needs to be in service of reaching that. And it may never be explicitly stated in the screenplay, it may never be explicitly stated in theoretical movie, it should all be residing there in the intent of the writer.

Greg Larson:

Yeah. I like that idea. I've heard a guy I really look up to, he did the same thing where he would write, his word was “Vulnerability”. He just wrote “Vulnerability” on a Post-It and he always had it on his computer so that everything you write, if it wasn't in service of that word, he would cut it out no matter how good it was, and he had a lot of success in his book.

Ben Guest:

And the book was eight pages long.

Greg Larson:

“I'm not telling you guys anything about myself.” My version of that is I have a question that I'm trying to answer. Like the novel that I'm working on right now, my question that I'm trying to answer is, how do our relationships with our parents impact our romantic relationships? Because sometimes I hesitate to start with an explicit theme, because then it's almost like I'm starting with an answer before I even ask a question. I want to just explore the question and see and surprise myself in a certain way too. It's scary because I don't always know where the book is going and it surprises me, but it also makes it more exciting.

Ben Guest:

I love that. One thing that I want to be clear about is, there are many different paths up the mountain. As many authors as there are, that's as many paths up the mountain to completing your work that there are. And so I like this idea of just comparing our different processes. And again, in the detail, people will find things that they can relate to. So I love the idea of start with a question and then you're going to start working towards answering that question. I need to have the structure of knowing where this is going, and it sounds like for you, you don't need to have that.

Greg Larson:

Oh, I'm at least trying not to. The novel that I'm writing, I think I've technically tried it. This is the third time and I didn't really know that this is really the third time. But looking back in the past, I can see, "Oh, I tried to tell this in some way." The first time I tried it was four years ago and I legit had no plan whatsoever. I was just writing words and then what came out were just fragments of chaos and it wasn't a book, it was just like a series of thoughts. The difference now is that I have a rough idea of the ending and I have a rough idea of this question that I'm trying to answer. But what I'm allowing myself to have is to discover new characters along the way. That's been a biggest one where these two characters are in a summer camp and I think it's all about this love story of these two characters in the summer camp falling in love for the first time. But then lo and behold, that the man of this camp actually becomes a really prominent figure, even though I didn't realize this was going to happen, and so now I'm not going to say, "Well, it wasn't in the outline, so I'm not going to have this character." It's like, "No, I discovered this guy and he needs to be a fully developed character as well." That's been the biggest difference in this iteration of this novel."

Ben Guest:

That's fantastic because that's also part of the magic, that's the spooky side of it. Right? So if we're talking actionable items, I guess for the listeners, for people that are interested in writing a piece of nonfiction memoir, a biography, what have you, think of the most transformative time in your life and the lesson or lessons you learned in that time. From there, think about, how would you like if you were to write this experience down, if you were to create a piece of art around this experience, how would you like that to impact someone else, someone you don't even know, someone reading this story? What's the takeaway you want them to have? And then from there, think about, what are your goals for writing this book? And who's your ideal reader? Who are you writing for day to day? Does that cover it?

Greg Larson:

I think those are the most important questions to ask. I would call that the positioning part of the process. The questions you need to answer, ask yourself and to answer before you go into the outline process. Yeah, I think that covers it.

Ben Guest:

And then on the fiction side, and again, many different paths up the mountain, I think two ways to do it. One is to think of, "What is a theme like ‘Everything changes’ that I want to explore, that I want to process, that I want to think about? What is a question I have? How do our parents impact relationships with our romantic relationships? So what's a question I have? Now, how do I want to explore that?" One way would be to start with a theme, another way would be to start with a question outlining. How do you outline?

Greg Larson:

So for nonfiction, I'd say this applies to both prescriptive nonfiction and narrative nonfiction, but I start with brainstorming a table of contents, not even thinking about it as a table of contents, but just brainstorming the main stories and brainstorming the main lessons that I want to evoke in the book. I try to come up with a minimum of 20, and then inevitably, it's going to get condensed down and you're going to add more. But starting with 20 I think is a really good starting point. And then once you have those 20 brainstormed chapter topics, not even think about them as like chapter titles. People get obsessed with chapter titles way too early and it gets them stuck. But once you have those chapter topics, again, don't even worry about order and structure yet. I use a table in Google Docs where I have chapter topic and then I have either a thesis or a question that I'm trying to answer in the chapter, as in like, "What overall point am I trying to make in this chapter/what question am I trying to answer in this chapter?" And then I come up with a hook. Your mileage may vary, but I've never seen anybody successfully write a nonfiction book after coaching 100 plus people who has basically written their book in the outline. I haven't seen anyone do it successfully yet. I'm sure somebody does, but just like sentence fragments in the outline. What's the hook? Story of getting fired from a FinTech company. Boom, that's the hook. I'll remember that when I go to write it. And then I do, "What are the stories or anecdotes or examples in the chapter that I want to tell? What are the points I want to make? What are the actions I want the reader to take based on those points that I'm making?" Those are the biggest ones. Most people just tell stories and they don't have any takeaways. An even smaller percentage of people have stories and then have the takeaways. An even tiny percentage stories, takeaways, and actions to take. That's the key to writing excellent nonfiction, I think.

Ben Guest:

And can you say a little bit more about the actions to take that focus-

Greg Larson:

Yeah, for sure. That's exactly what we're doing in this podcast, it's a perfect example of it. We're talking abstractly, but then you're saying, "Okay, based on what we said, here's the action you should take." An example, I helped my friend edit his book that's written for young men in their 20s who are trying to find their way in life after college. And he had a story about him moving to Austin and not knowing how to make friends, and that's an interesting story. But then he said, the takeaway is that you need to treat everybody as though they're a friend until they prove otherwise. Boom, there's a takeaway. There's an aphorism that they can use. And then he had an action for them to take, he's like, "Create a customer management system for friends, and here's how I do it, here's how you can do it." So he had a story, a takeaway, and an action, a specific action for them to take. And what I've found is that people who write nonfiction, more often than not, they think that the things that they know are way more useless than they are. It's like if you're an expert in something, even if you're expertise is in your own life, you're more often going to dismiss what you know just because you are an expert. It seems obvious and easy to you because you're the expert, but to a reader or a listener, you have to lay it out explicitly and that's valuable.

Ben Guest:

I love it. And when you're doing this kind of outline, you personally, pen-paper, computer, note cards, what?

Greg Larson:

I do it on a Google Drive document, and I have a template that I use that I can just repeat. I can copy and paste these 10 tables so that all of the segmenting off is already filled in. It's like, "Oh, there's a box for stories and there's a box for points." That kind of thing. That's how I use it. And then I write the draft. I'm writing my current novel on Legal Pad, but I would never write nonfiction on Legal Pad, I think, I don't know why exactly, but a narrative story I'd write on the-

Ben Guest:

Nice. So just to recap. One of the advantages actually with non-fiction is, basically, you know the ending. If you've selected this transformative moment in your life or you and I have both done ghost writing and co-authoring someone else's life, the transformative event or events. But generally, you want to keep it as tight as possible, the lesson they learned from that or the life lesson, I guess. If you know that, you know how it ends, you know what you want to communicate, that's then going to help you when you come up with the chapter topics. Because something that takes a detour off that main road probably doesn't need to go any further.

Greg Larson:

Probably so, but I want to make an important distinction here. The difference between a memoir and prescriptive nonfiction, a memoir is explicitly a narrative, it's nonfiction written with all the tenets of good fiction, character, scene, plot, all that stuff. That's a different beast in a certain way. And that should be constrained in a timeframe. Whereas prescriptive nonfiction, which is the type of... like how-to books, self-help books, business books, that kind of thing, they're going to have memoir elements of stories and stuff, but it doesn't need to be as constrained, it just needs to be constrained by the topic. So those stories can be plucked from all different aspects of your life, they both serve different purposes.

Ben Guest:

The prescriptive writing, like you're saying, there's lots of room for lots of different types of topics and lots of different stories and lots of different examples, and the overall theme can be as narrow or as wide as you want to make it.

Greg Larson:

Yes, exactly.

Ben Guest:

Okay. If we jump over to fiction, so if I go back to my zombie apocalypse screenplay, so now I have my theme, “Everything changes.” So now what I do is, I'm going to come up with the characters, and I'm going to come up with their backstory, the kind of music they like, are they an introvert or an extrovert? Do they have a lot of friends or just a few friends? What's their favorite movie? Just some information. When I then do act one, act two, act three, I have something to generate why this person is doing this thing in this moment.

Greg Larson:

Do you use character diamonds?

Ben Guest:

No. Talk to me about that.

Greg Larson:

It's a screenwriting tool that I've been trying to use for fiction. I'm not super familiar with it, but in general, a character diamond, it's like a four-pointed diamond, the same kind of diamond you'd see on a ski hill, like double diamond. A character diamond, so you have at the very top of a diamond like the point of a four points diamond you might see on a ski hill. At the very top is the primary trait of the character or their North Star, what they want more than anything else in the world. And then opposing it is their mask, the version of themselves that they show the world that they would probably never admit to themselves. And then on the other side, on the horizontal points, on one end is their non-negotiable, the hill that they're willing to die on, and then on the other end is their fatal flaw. And theory behind it that I've learned or that I'm trying to understand more completely is that, the more opposed each of those points in the diamond are, the more strong that character will be. An example, like Han Solo, I guess. Han Solo's primary trait, he's he's a maverick cowboy space bounty hunter. That's his primary trait. And then his shadow or his mask is that he's an emotionless swashbuckler. His fatal flaw, I think that he is money hungry and that he would do anything for money. But the hill he's willing to die on is his friends. So it's like these things are somewhat opposed. I'm sure I'm f*****g up the vertical diamond's points, but we're learning as we go here. But the more opposed these things are, the stronger the character. I'm trying to understand that relative to fiction writing.

Ben Guest:

Right. That is a great framework because storytelling almost always involves conflict, internal conflict and external conflict. So that's a great way to figure out both the character's internal conflict and then find things that are going to spark external conflict. I think the most important is deciding what your character really wants, because that's usually going to drive the actions they take, and that will eventually drive the conflict. David Mamet says each scene should be, what does the hero want? Why doesn't she get it? What happens next? That until the character gets what they want, which doesn't happen until the very end of the story, you're always going to have forward plot momentum.

Ben Guest:

So to use our Star Wars idea, Luke Skywalker, in the first Star Wars, Luke Skywalker wants to leave home and go on an adventure. He gets that, not necessarily in the way that he was initially thinking, but that's eventually what he gets by the end of the film.

Greg Larson:

The details for these characters, their backgrounds and stuff, sometimes you just have to know that as the author, but your reader doesn't have to know that. How do you discern which goes in and which is just is for you?

Ben Guest:

I saw an interview with Tarantino about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And in that film, Leonardo DiCaprio's character is on a '50s Western TV show called Bounty Law. It's not really important in terms of when you're watching the film, they just cut to it a few times. Tarantino said he wrote six episodes of Bounty Law just so he would know exactly what this show is that this character had been the lead actor on that the movie is not even about. It's not about the lead actor. It's not about Leonardo being in Bounty Law, it's about 10 years later when Leonardo is losing his career. And I'm sure there are other authors that just have a really light sketch.

So for me, I like to be somewhere in the middle. I don't want to spend all this time thinking about, what did they major in college? And there are certain things like music or your favorite movie that if you know that, that's what you need to know to sketch the character out. So for me, I have like an iceberg that has a third underneath, one third above and two thirds underneath, something like that at maybe.

Greg Larson:

Got you. But you keep those things to yourself for the most part.

Ben Guest:

Yeah. I would say the ratio of what you know versus what you reveal is... Again, sorry for the hammering, I don't know, one to six probably. So, I know this character's favorite movie is Aladdin, there's a one in six chance that at some point that's going to be mentioned somewhere or referenced somewhere in the story. What about character in terms of nonfiction or in terms of memoir?

Greg Larson:

For my most recent memoir, I did a lot of interviews with the guys that were going to be characterized in the book. It's an interesting balance to play. The characters are real people and so in the first draft, I had to think about it in sociopathic terms, like, I'm not going to think about the ramifications of telling these stories on the real people, I'll think about that in the edit. And so the first draft, or I should say the first draft of my memoir as an actual narrative memoir, I had stuff in there about people that I eventually cut out because I was like, "This is wildly inappropriate." Inside Clubhouse stuff, even beyond inside baseball, it was just like, it might have ruined marriages kind of stuff. And I was like, "This is just not worth it." But at the same to time, I was looking at it through the lens of, what did I see? Anything that I see or hear is mine to own from then on, and anything that I could discover online, I would try to figure out as much as possible. I don't know, man, it's a hard question to answer because you're confined by who somebody really is and who somebody was as you saw of them at that time. I didn't do it real consciously.

Ben Guest:

Right. And that's one of the things you always have to think about with real people is, "This is my perception of one side of them or one side of their mask even, and this thing I'm creating is going to live "forever" I'm putting that in quotation marks, "in the world." So I think that tactic that you mentioned is exactly right. In the planning stages when it's just you and you, 100% honesty and openness about everything. Right now, it's just stuff you're throwing on the metaphorical page and it doesn't ever need to go further than that. But early on, I think it actually until you get to the editing phase, honesty is the best pilot, and the more open and the more honest, the better.

Greg Larson:

Yes. You're going to be honest throughout the entire process, but it's just a matter of how much you reveal.

Ben Guest:

Yeah. That's a better way to put it, 100%. Now we've got our char, we've got our theme, we have our question, we have our audience, we have our goals, we have our characters.

Greg Larson:

I was curious, actually you mentioned the three act structure in screenwriting, and that's another one of those things I'm like, "Man, how much does that apply to novel writing?" Where did you learn the three act structure and how did you start implementing it?

Ben Guest:

Sure. The most famous, I guess in interpretation is Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey. So act one would be leaving home, Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle are killed and he flies off to the stars. And then act two is discovering the new world and ends with the lowest point. So in Star Wars, it's when Obi-Wan is killed. And then act three is triumph. Usually you get what you wanted, but not in the way you wanted, you changed as a person and you bring peace back to the land or whatever it is. The Matrix fits that perfectly where Neo, at the end of act one is when Neo leaves the Matrix, is pulled out of the Matrix.

Ben Guest:

Then act two is learning this new world, and the end of act two is when Morpheus is captured, it's the low point. And then act three is the triumph. But I like to make it even simpler and so I go back to David Mamet, who said, "Act one is you get your character up a tree, act two is you light the tree on fire. And so it's just each scene should lead into the next scene. And generally, the scene should lead into the next scene because the character isn't getting something. So if we go back to Mamet's idea of up a tree, tree on fire, then the character is going to reach a stumbling block and then a character's going to reach a much bigger stumbling block. Those are your ends of act one and act two. So let me ask you, does that translate into fiction writing and memoir writing? I'm trying to think in my own mind now?

Greg Larson:

If I'm doing it well. That's the thing, is I think, well, two things, did you learn that from what's called The Hero with a Thousand Faces? I don't know.

Ben Guest:

Yeah. That's the Joseph Campbell book. I haven't read that book, but there's plenty of work that's been done off of it. Yeah, 100%.

Greg Larson:

But did you find that framework somewhere else?

Ben Guest:

Yeah. Just online, there's a bunch of stuff on the Hero's Journey and there's a circle diagram that you just follow the circle in terms of the events that can happen in that type of story.

Greg Larson:

As far as memoir, does that framework hold up for memoir? Here's some mistakes that I made when writing both my memoirs is that I wasn't thinking about it in terms of those really tightly defined storytelling elements. I was just trying to write a story interestingly, but I didn't even... A fatal flaw with literary fiction and literary nonfiction is that they focus more on character than story, which they're not mutually exclusive, but I was focusing more on the internal transformations of the characters, which is interesting, but it didn't always have... When you read upmarket fiction, you can tell that each chapter is like the cliff hanger at the end of an episode of a really great TV show and it keeps you going more, and more and that's not an accident. And it's a formula that I'm trying to learn, but I don't even know how to learn it exactly yet. I'm just trying to write this novel that I'm writing, I'm just trying to write each scene in a way that somebody transforms in some little way at the end of it, and that we get a little bit closer to what I think the ending is without wasting the reader's time and trying to do it as beautifully as possible.

Ben Guest:

So to that idea then the impetus to keep going is every scene I read in Greg's book, I'm learning a little something because there's a little nugget of truth of a life lesson in there.

Greg Larson:

Well, that would be more for prescriptive nonfiction, but if I'm thinking of a narrative of a memoir or a novel, I don't know that there even needs to be a life lesson, it's just the character develops or the plot advances a little bit farther. But with prescriptive nonfiction, ideally it would be some kind of life lesson, because a reader isn't reading a self-help book or a how-to book to watch a character develop. They're reading it so that their own characters can develop oddly enough. And so in order to do that, you have to help them transform at the end of the chapter. I'd never made that connection before, but a prescriptive nonfiction book is a book in which the hero is the reader.

Ben Guest:

Oh, that's deep. That's fantastic. And the hero's going on a journey, the reader's going on a journey hopefully, or they're going to take steps to go on a journey. Oh, I like that. I'm working on a memoir right now about coaching basketball, coaching high school in the states and then professionally "overseas" in Namibia, in Southern Africa. So what I try to do there is each scene, each chapter should have enough forward plot momentum that it makes you want to read the next chapter, very, very light cliff hangers. That's how I think about it in memoir writing that there needs to be, why is the reader going to turn a page? What are your thoughts about it with memoir?

Greg Larson:

I look back at my old work and I cringe because I would do it so differently now, but what I tried to do with my most recent memoir was end each chapter in a way that... It was like I would be in scene for most of the chapters. We're in the clubhouse, we're on the field and I'm describing details in a way that you can actually put yourself there. And at the end of each chapter, I would try to zoom out a little bit and not say, "This is what it meant." And when I was there, I would do something more like, I can find an example here.

Ben Guest:

I love it. Available at fine independent bookstores near you.

Greg Larson:

That's exactly right.

Ben Guest:

Or even better, signed by the author online.

Greg Larson:

That's right. At clubbiebook.com. So this is the end of chapter 11, where I am in the middle of two seasons. It's the off season and we spend a lot of time in my off season home in South Carolina with my girlfriend and our relationship troubles and it's like, "Am I going to go back to baseball or am I going to stay in South Carolina?" Well, there's another half of the book, so we know what's going to happen. So we're in scene in the house for most of the chapter. And then at the very end, I decided that I'm going to go back and there's these final couple of paragraphs where I zoom out and I'll read a few sentences.

Greg Larson:

And just like that, I packed my things into the caddy for the drive north, Nicole and I renewed our lease so I was coming right back there once the season finished. We said goodbye to each other just like we had so many times before. Aberdeen had been just a memory.

So now I'm zooming back a little bit.

I never thought I'd actually return there anymore than I'd returned to my youth, but I looked forward to the season in a certain way, like when you do the same things over and over again expecting something to be fundamentally different, because it's always the next meal, the next f**k, the next Christmas that will finally make you happy, the next baseball season, because this is all you know how to do. You don't ask the sun, why you orbit, you just orbit. You let the gravitational waves of the baseball season pull you in and you surrender yourself happily. You slap on your faded, blue stretch, fit BP cap with the orange cursive “A”on the crown and you drive your Cadillac from one single story, brick rambler to another somewhere just off the I-95 corridor in Maryland.

And so there's this zooming out that I think I wasn't consciously doing that, but that was how I would give the reader a cliffhanger. It was like, scene, scene, scene, zoom out for a little bit of, "Oh, here's the meaning of what happened," without saying like, "Here's the meaning of what happened." And I think that kept some momentum going, even though I didn't realize that's what I was doing.

Ben Guest:

That's such a great framework, Greg. So to my mind, the best storytellers out there are the folks at This American Life, the radio program, their framework is exactly that, scene, scene, scene, what's the bigger meaning behind this? Scene, scene scene, what's the bigger... And that's exactly what it is. So that I think is a beautiful way to end the chapter and to plug's into people's naturally wanting to make connections, hear a story and understand what the greater connection is, the greater meaning.

Greg Larson:

Yes. And I found that readers were actually upset or at least inquisitive about the parts where I didn't zoom out and provide the greater meaning. And I wanted to be like, "Well, just look at the action and discern for yourself." But they wanted my guidance as the author, which totally makes sense. Again, I can look back and see places that I would've done it differently.

Ben Guest:

What chapter was that the end of?

Greg Larson:

Chapter 11.

Ben Guest:

So in your outline, what do the chapter 11 outline look like?

Greg Larson:

If I recall correctly, I did not have anything like, "Oh, expand out at the very end of the chapters." No. I think it was just literally, I said off season, and then I wrote a bunch of fragmented details of come back to South Carolina, find mess, Nicole and I argue, like that kind of stuff. It was chaos us in a certain way, but that's how I think about it. It's like writing a book is taking like the chaos of my ideas into the order of-

Ben Guest:

Right. Back to our therapy analogy, randomness of this, this and this, okay, where's the pattern in it? The next thing that I do, if I go back to my screenplay and my act. So act one, if we do the zombie movie, act one is when the zombies start taking over the world and this father and his two teenage kids have to find shelter. That's the end of act one. And then the end of act two is the father has a medical condition, I gave him meningitis, and he needs to have a shot of penicillin to save him. So now the kids are going to have to leave the shelter that they sought out. So just act one, act two. And then in act three, the father dies, but the daughter who is the main character comes to accept that everything changes. And then what I'm going to do is plot out scene by scene. Scene one is going to start in the chemistry lab at the high school, scene two is going to be the hallway in the locker room, scene three is going to be the wrestling mat. And then I have the characters who are in that scene and the point of that scene. And now to your point about the diagram, the character diamond, on the left hand side of the outline for each scene, vertically I write each of the characters in that scene once. And then vertically on the right side, and I think this is the key, and this is going back to something you said really early on in this conversation, on the right side, I write down what is the emotion I want the audience to be feeling in this scene. Do I want them laughing, scared, nervous, whatever? All of that translates to any kind of storytelling, I think, except maybe prescriptive in terms of what is the emotional feeling, what is the emotion I want the audience to have at this moment?

Greg Larson:

Do you know how many scenes you're going to have in each act? Do you set that aside beforehand or know an ideal?

Ben Guest:

No. Generally, for me, it's like 10, 10 and 10. It's like a third, a third, a third, but depending on again, many pass, many stories. The other thing especially with fiction writing, so not screenplay writing, but fiction writing and memoir, it's also like the story's going to tell you how to tell it, because we haven't even into non-linear storytelling, but In some ways as you're working through the story, it will also reveal to you the way in which you should tell that story, right?

Greg Larson:

I like that. I like the screenwriting tenets because screenwriting has to be way more succinct than these other forms of writing, you have to be totally dialed in. That dialed-in process, I don't even start that until the editing phase. In the drafting phase, I'm just like, have a rough idea and f*****g bang it out, but I want to use that in my editing process because I can be too slip shot with like, "Oh, what exact points or emotion are we trying to evoke?"

Ben Guest:

I'm just trying to think of this, the memoir I'm working on now how I outline that. So it's 21 chapters, and you said Clubbie was 20 chapters, right?

Greg Larson:

Yep.

Ben Guest:

So similar number of chapters. And then I know the events that are happening in chronological order, first game of the playoffs is a chapter. And then maybe just the two or three key moments I want to hit in that chapter. And that's it.

Greg Larson:

Are you going off of like a journal or anything like that? Yeah, that's invaluable. I honestly, I don't know how people would write a memoir without having something like that.

Ben Guest:

What's really funny Greg is, the book covers two basketball seasons, and I kept a journal the second season. And the second season, everybody, all my early readers, they're all like, "Man, the second half of the book just moves in a good way." And I'm like, "Yeah, it's because I had so much of that iceberg to work from. And the first half I'm trying to remember conversations from five years ago."

Greg Larson:

Did you have a lot of summary in the first half of the book or were you still able to build-

Ben Guest:

The biggest thing, actually I was working on this morning, is just going back, and this goes back to screenplay writing of the idea of show don't tell. I was just doing a lot of telling and now basically I'm just going back and recreating dialogue to make it more in the moment.

Greg Larson:

Show versus tell is an important comparison. This thing that I learned in school that was really helpful distinction on that was scene versus summary of scene building of a story with dialogue and summary of here's what happened, "I went to the store that day and I bought apple juice," that kind of stuff. And another one, this is getting more into the craft of actually storytelling, but action is character is one of the biggest ones that I've stuck with, that one of my teachers taught me from F. Scott Fitzgerald. That's been a big one, don't tell the reader who somebody else is, just show it to them.

Ben Guest:

If you have to tell the reader, you’re a shitty storyteller. You should be able to show the character by the action.

Greg Larson:

I want to talk about one part of the planning process that I haven't mentioned yet that is so important that a lot of people screw up. I teach people how to do this and I still screw it up. You can have all this stuff right and you still... Forget about writing a great book, but not even finishing your first draft ever. You can do all of this right and just not write your words because of anxiety is getting in the way and because of all kinds of stuff. The way I think about it, you need a writing plan, accountability and a reward system in order to get your book regardless of what genre you're working in.

Greg Larson:

The way I think about it is this, a writing plan, how many words per day are you going to write? And are you going to be writing on only weekdays? Are you going to be writing only on weekends? Are you going to do seven days a week? That's your writing plan? Where are you going to write? What time of day are you going to write? And actually put in it in your Google or Outlook calendar, whatever it be. And so you have a specific word count that you have to reach every single week, for example. For me, it's two pages per weekday, so 10 pages per week.

Greg Larson:

My goal is two pages a day that turns into 10 written pages per week. That's my writing plan. And then the accountability, this is where a lot of people mess up, you have to have accountability in order to finish your book, I think. My accountability is that I send a video of the 10 pages I've written to my friend, my business partner, Alex, every Friday at 6:30 PM to prove that I've actually written a book. And those little details matter a lot because then all of a sudden, I have somebody that's like, I don't know if he even cares or would be disappointed, but I would be disappointed if I didn't have it to send to him.

Greg Larson:

And then the rewards and punishment, if I do that every week, I reward myself. For me, I go get barbecue or I go to a buffet or something. And then the punishment is I send him $100 if I don't do it. I think a lot of authors mess that up because those are the workday technicalities of actually getting your words down on the page. I don't know if it's going to turn into an amazing book, but I know that it's going to get me a finished book, and that's way better than an unfinished book.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com

Through the lens of narrative therapy we’re looking at people being defined, and their identities being authored, within larger systems and communities.

Travis Heath is an associate professor at University of Denver, specializing in narrative therapy. He earned his PhD in Psychology from the University of Northern Colorado, his MA from Pepperdine University, and his BA from Metropolitan State University-Denver. Travis is a former team consultant for the NBA and a psychologist in private practice.

I was first introduced to Travis through our mutual friend Andrés Alvarez, who sent me Travis’ Ted Talk, which starts with Travis recounting a patient telling him, “I will shoot them all.”

It’s a must-watch, and a great primer for our conversation.

In this discussion, Travis and I talk:

* My book Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball (available here).

* What is Narrative Therapy?

* “Be careful of the stories you tell about yourself and the stories you allow others to tell about you.”

* How Travis’ work is centered in the dignity of the individual.

* “Oftentimes we come to be defined by single stories.”

* “You can’t change the past but you can story that event differently.”

* Travis’ work in the NBA: “Everyone wanted to talk to Melo or AI. I was more interested in talking to Johan Petro.”

* “People are endlessly fascinating.”

* Mass shootings and gun sales.

* “Your care is bound up in mine, and mine in yours.”

* Is the NCAA a disordered system?

* The good side of Twitter.

At the end of the episode we talk about Travis’ upcoming book which you can pre-order here.

Please take a minute to share this post and podcast with anyone who might be interested in Travis’ work.

This episode pairs nicely with my conversation with mindfulness coach Greg Graber.

Podcast Links: Apple/Spotify

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com

You help somebody, you help yourself.

Brian Sullivan is a former Division 1 basketball player at Davidson College where he is second-place on several of the schools three-point records behind Steph Curry, the greatest shooter of all-time.

Brian played professionally overseas and then served as Director of Student Athlete Development at Davidson for three years, working with his college coach, the legendary Bob McKillop.

Brian is now a graduate student at the University of Denver, earning his Master’s in Psychology with a focus on sport and performance psychology. He has a great Substack, 3 Points, where he shares what he is learning about peak performance.

In this conversation Brian and I talk:

-What conditions need to be in place to perform at your best?

-Tools to center attention.

-Judson Brewer’s mental push-up

-“Don’t think a thought for as long as you can… After seven seconds everyone’s hand was up.”

-The great athlete myth.

-“Can you be aware of what you are thinking?”

-The role of emotion in performance.

-Coach Bob McKillop and his “McKillopisms.”

-The continuing impact of coaches.

-Life is about relationships.

-“Every year Coach McKillop will go to four or five weddings.”

-A model for flow state.

This episode is a companion piece to my four part mini-series on positive coaching.

And I explore many of these topics in greater detail in my book Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball.

Podcast Links: Apple/Spotify

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com

Not everything you do has to be perfect.

Logan Floyd and I met at an improv class through The Squirrel Comedy Theater in New York City (@TheSquirrelNYC). Logan most recently performed the lead role of Velma Kelly in the national tour of Chicago: The Musical (@ChicagoMusical).

In this conversation, Logan and I talk:

-How Logan’s favorite band senior year of high school was Paramore (“High school was a lot of good material for an A24 film.”):

-Studying Musical Theater with Kaitlin Hopkins at Texas State University and Kaitlin’s note to slow down and enjoy the process.

-The beauty of imperfection in improv.

-Logan’s key to understanding Velma Kelly was the insight, “She is scared to death.”

-“I inhabit a character most when I can find their spirit of playfulness and that spirit of playfulness connects to my younger self.”

-“In improv the first thing I think is, ‘How can I be helpful?’”

-I reference the incredible musical improv of Improguise, based in Cape Town, South Africa (@ImproGuiseSA).

-Logan and I improv two scenes from the suggestion “old soul.” 😊😊😊

-S/O to our improv teacher Sarah Grace Welbourn (@sgwelbourn), Squirrel Comedy Theater (@TheSquirrelNYC), and all of our classmates.

Podcast Links: Apple/Spotify

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com

As a coach, you may want players in perfect lines. The reality is when the drills get messy they learn a lot better.

Nick Hauselman (@bballbreakdown) has one of the most popular basketball YouTube channels out there. Previously, I was a guest on Nick’s podcast here.

In this episode, Coach Nick and I talk:

-How to build trust

-Steph Curry and Flow State

-How positive language creates a positive result

-Art Rondeau, Tony Robbins, and NLP

-The Sloan Conference

-Phil Jackson and Sacred Hoops

-New Books-Mindfulness and Spirituality

-Tom Izzo and “Trauma Coaching”

-“What’s your goal as a coach during the game?”

This is the final episode of my four-part positive coaching mini-series.

Episode 1 is with mindfulness coach Greg Graber.

Episode 2 is with Dr. Greg Sullivan, Director of the Positive Coaching and Leadership Program at the University of Missouri.

Episode 3 is with Chris Sullivan, Head Coach of the Men’s Basketball Program at Denison University.

Podcast Links: Apple/Spotify

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com

Omicron came from arithmetic.

Cases of the Omicron variant are surging in New York City with 31,024 new cases reported Saturday and the daily average approaching 20,000.

I asked retired epidemiologist Jim Setzer to come on the pod and go over some basics:

-Where did Omicron come from?

-Best practices to stop transmission.

-Where to buy N95 and KN95 masks. The New York Times recommends using WellBefore.

-Where we are headed.

-The best way to use home rapid tests.

-The infection window of Omicron.

Podcast Links: Apple/Spotify

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benbo.substack.com