Author and entrepreneur Tim Grahl (booklaunch.com) on how he has launched dozens of books to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other bestseller lists. Also why it’s the first year of publishing not the first week, that’s important for a book’s launch. A practical and authentic conversation about launching a bestseller, marketing and writing about devastation.
What does it take to launch your book and build a fanbase? What do most writers misunderstand about the craft of writing and launching their book? Tim Grahl has dedicated the last 10 years of his life helping over 100 authors – from bestsellers to first time writers – get their books into the hands of more readers. In this episode we talk about smart and authentic marketing steps every writer can take to find their first 1000 readers and give their book a chance of reaching the bestselling lists. We also dive into Tim's memoir Running Down a Dream and talk about writing about devastation and grief.
Tim Grahl has worked with authors like Dan Pink, Ramit Sethi, Shawn Coyne, Pamela Slim, Dan and Chip Heath and has launched dozens of books to the top of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other bestseller lists. He also runs The Story Grid podcast, where he had his own book edited live by editor Shawn Coyne. Tim has written books on building an audience: Your First 1000 Copies; on building a business: Running Down a Dream, He has also been the architect behind the hugely successful Story Grid writing community and works with Steven Pressfield and Shawn Coyne at Black Irish Publishing.
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SHOW NOTES
[03:46] Tim talks about the vulnerability of being critiqued live on The Story Grid podcast with Editor Shawn Coyne
[09:38] How to build the right audience, and the benefits of learning in public for accountability
[12:12] How a successful book launch always starts with a good plan
[12:23] What went wrong with The Threshing's launch, and the things Tim did right to market The Sand and Sea (280,000-word epic fantasy)
[15:38] Why it's harder to get people to read a book than buy one, and what Tim and his team did to sell The Sand and Sea
[19:38] Building an email list as the number one marketing tactic sell and promote your book
[23:51] The importance of building a habit and why being consistent is better than doing one big push on anything that you do
[26:22] Tim's advice for those who are trying to build their email list, and why you should treat the process as an adventure. Plus how to get your first 100 subscribers.
[30:56] The value of being consistent in whatever you do
[32:25] Tim's definition of marketing
[34:07] The story behind Tim's memoir, Running Down a Dream, the dream he was running down and how it's evolved over time
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QUOTES FROM TIM GRAHL
“If you see any books that are still selling ten years after they came out, it's not because the publishing house did an amazing job marketing the book ten years ago. I think of it as a rocketship. If you turn off the engine when it's halfway out of that atmosphere, it's going to crash down to earth every single time. So if you can just get it out of the atmosphere, now we can see if it's going to live on its own. And that's how I think of marketing a book is the job of the publisher / author is to get that book out of the atmosphere. And the goal is to get 10,000 people to read the book. At that point, you find out if the book's going to fly on its own because, again, I can force 10,000. I can't force a million or five hundred thousand or a hundred thousand.”
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RESOURCES
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Mentioned books of Tim Grahl:
Other books mentioned:
Others:
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CREDITS
Production by Victoria Spooner. Artwork by Emma Winterschladen
[Intro] Matt: Hello, and welcome to season one of the London Writers' Salon podcast. I'm Matt.
Parul: And I'm Parul. And each week, we sit down with a writer that we admire to talk about the craft of writing and the arts of building a successful and sustainable writing career.
Matt: These interviews are recorded live with our global writing community. If you would like to join us for the next recording or write with us at our daily Writers' Hour writing sessions, head to londonwriterssalon.com for more information.
In this episode, we interviewed marketer, writer, entrepreneur Tim Grahl. Over the last decade, Tim has worked with lots of authors like Dan Pink, Ramit Sethi, Pamela Slim, Dan and Chip Heath, and so many others that you've heard of, and has helped them launch these books to the top of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other bestseller lists. Tim's also the author of Your First 1000 Copies, which is literally a book that does that. [It] helps you sell your first 1000 copies of your book.
And he's written Running Down A Dream, a memoir about the ups and downs of businesses. Most recently, Tim took on the challenge of writing a young adult book called The Threshing, which he documented live very bravely with editor Shawn Coyne on the Story Grid podcast. It's had over several million downloads.
It’s super interesting to listen to. He's also the architect behind the hugely successful Story Grid, a world and writing community.
Parul: And we had Tim on our podcast. Of course, we had to ask him about the practicalities of promoting books. So we talk about Tim's philosophy for promoting his and other writers' books.
Tim explained how it was the first year of publishing and not the first week, but he felt it was important for a book's launch. And we go a little deeper into exactly how Tim has promoted his latest book, how he thinks writers can get copies and read it and why every single writer should still be using email lists to promote their book.
We also talk about his earlier books, including Running Down A Dream, in which he shared some very personal moments. And we asked him about writing about difficult moments. And he said he realized that he needed to write from the scar and not the open wound.
Matt: We certainly didn't expect an interview about marketing to go so deep into spiritual and emotional matters, but it really did. And it was all the better for it. Tim was a super honest guy, super vulnerable. We really learned a lot. This is a pragmatic holistic look at how we can both promote our work, make progress in our writing and do it in a way that feels authentic to us. We hope you enjoy this interview. Let's dig in.
Parul: Tim, Thank you so much for taking [the] time to be here with us today. We're honoured to have you.
Tim: Yeah, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to it.
Matt: Thanks so much, Tim. I've been studying your work for a while. It's been extremely helpful for me. So back in 2013, a friend and I, we published a book called Tales of Iceland about our trip around Iceland, and yours was one of the first I picked up when I was trying to figure out how to sell it. Just to thank you [and] to kick this off.
And it's really nice to actually speak to you and meet you in, I guess, close to person as possible right now.
Tim: That's right.
Matt: Yeah. One of the things that's really intriguing is the podcast that you do with Shawn Coyne, a Story Grid podcast, and in particular, you were being coached, which sometimes it seemed to border on therapy on writing this book publicly.
So you're writing the book publicly, getting feedback publicly on why a book—that you had never written in that genre before. It's a very vulnerable experience. I'd love to know what that experience was like, going through that, knowing that thousands of people were listening to your vulnerability.
Tim: I didn't really understand what I was signing up for when we first started. I just wanted to get Shawn to teach me how to write.
That was the goal. We had like a very tenuous connection. He had purchased one of my courses before when he came out with The Story Grid, and I read it. I've read a bunch of the other books out there. ‘Story’ by Robert McKee, which is a great book, ‘Save the Cat’, [and] several different others. And when I read The Story Grid, I'm like, okay, this is it. This is what I'm looking for. And so I reached out to him, got him on the phone. We talked for a while, and then he gave me all this really great advice. And I thought, well, let me try to do what I do for him, which is marketing and platform building. So I just asked him what he was doing to promote The Story Grid.
And, you know, he'd been blogging for a while but was getting kind of tired of it. So I said, well, what if we started a podcast where I just would ask you all my idiot beginner questions, and you would just answer them. And I was like, I'll take care of everything. I'll edit it. I'll publish it. I'll put it online.
All you have to do is show up for an hour a week and answer my questions. And he's like, "Yeah, let's give it a try." And we decided to start with ten episodes, you know, at any time, either of us could call it quits. And again, my goal was just like, I really wanted to learn how to write fiction. I wanted to become a better writer.
I really was impressed with The Story Grid and everything that he had created in that. And of course, he had been working with Steven Pressfield for years, and I love Steven Pressfield's writing. I think there was two sides to it. One is I didn't think anybody would ever actually listen, I didn't—at that point, I wasn't his partner in Story Grid or anything. So I didn't care if anybody listened. It was just a way to get them on the phone. And then I didn't think I was that bad at writing. I didn't really think through the fact that my writing was going to get torn apart on this podcast. The very first time I sent him writing, it was somewhere around episode eight or ten or something, and we've done almost 200 episodes.
Now we got on the phone, and he's like, "I got some notes on your writing. How do you want to do this?" I was like, "Well, pretend like nobody's listening and you just give me feedback," and he had this long pause, and he's like, "Are you sure?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah, it'd be fine," and so we get on, and he just spends an hour just—I only wrote one scene, and it wasn't that long.
When he sent me his notes after the call, his notes were like three times as long as the scene that I wrote. And at one point, I had like pushed back from my desk, and it was just like sitting with my face in my hands, listening to him, talk about everything I did wrong in my scene. Every time I wanted to kind of pull back from it, it just felt like, well, everybody feels this way about their writing, and everybody feels protective, and everybody feels like not great when people talk about how bad their writing is. I just want it to be the stand-in for that. And so, I always tried to ask whatever question came to mind. And in fact, whenever I would feel that pushback in myself, I was just like, "Oh, don't ask that. You'll look like an idiot." I'm like, "Well, this is the question that needs to be asked because this is a question everybody's afraid to ask," because I'm not the only one.
One of the reviews of the podcast on iTunes was, "Shawn is great, but Tim is dim." And [it] was basically just like Tim is an idiot, and I don't understand why Shawn is spending time giving him advice, you know. I knew I was getting access to something with Shawn that literally nobody else could get access to.
And so I just tried to always show up and just be honest and tell the truth and take the advice because the rules for the podcast were we weren't allowed to talk about my writing unless we were recording the podcast, and he could never give me feedback outside of the podcast. I never wanted something to happen behind the scenes that everybody needed to hear. I've worked behind the scenes with so many different people. And so many times, people whitewashed the public version of what they tell. And then when people like me come along and they hear it, or they read it or whatever, they feel like there's something wrong with them because it's so hard or they make all these mistakes.
So I wanted to make sure that I didn't do that to other people so that if they came along and they listened, they would hear all of the nasty stuff that goes into it and all the hard stuff that goes into it. I mean, I wrote an entire manuscript and he had me throw that away and start with just one scene.
And I had to write that scene like five or six times before he thought it was good enough for me to write scene two of the book. So it's been hard, but also it's been really, really rewarding. And I feel like it's kept me honest and it's kept me writing. It's been a great journey, and I'm really, really happy that I did it.
Parul: And some context about the last time I spoke to you, Tim. I think you had 2 million downloads of the Story Grid podcast full-stop, and I believe Shawn has a three-year waitlist now for his editorial services.
Tim: Yeah, if he takes an editing job, I'll be mad. I need him doing other things. Yeah, it's been really way more popular than we thought. I mean, we really—he didn't think much would come of it. And again, I wasn't thinking like, you know, I have a whole business I was running that had nothing to do with this. I wasn't looking for this to turn into anything, but it grew quicker than anything else that I've done.
Matt: That's interesting. Maybe this is a segue to talking about book marketing and launching things, because essentially what you were doing is learning in public is us as writers and thinking about the writers in the room here. How much would you recommend some sort of practice in audience-building technique, whether it's them doing a podcast going through that messiness that you did or something else documenting their journey? Is that something that other people can take on board?
Tim: So we're talking about marketing; I think it's really important that you think about the type of audience that you're trying to build. So one of the mistakes a lot of writers make is—let's take me for example and I—well, this is my mistake, right? So I have this YA thriller, and I built this entire audience around one book marketing with my book marketing company, and then Story Grid, which is how to write. Well, those are not YA thriller readers.
So when we try to market the book to them, they don't necessarily buy the book because it's the wrong audience. If you're writing romance novels, you don't want to start a podcast about what it's like writing romance novels because you're building an audience of writers, not readers. And although, you know, writers do read books, they don't necessarily read your books.
And if they're not coming to you for your books or something along those lines, that's going to cause long-term trouble. So that caveat aside, I do think learning in public is a great way. It builds an audience around the thing that you're learning. But it also holds you accountable. Like there were so many times I was like finishing up my scene the night before I had to record the podcast, and I probably wouldn't have finished the scene if I didn't have the podcast.
So there's also this level [of] holding an accountability. Like if you decide I'm going to blog twice a week, it's like, well, you've now signed up to write 104 blog posts and you've got to kind of stick to that. So I'd like the learning in public for the accountability and the building the audience. And I've seen fiction writers do this too.
Max Barry—when he wrote the Machine Man—wrote the entire first draft publicly. You could sign up for his email list, and every day you'd get a new page of the novel as he wrote it. So you got the entire first draft since you were on a—I think it was daily. When he came out with the book, those were the people that ended up buying the final version of the book.
So I do think it is. And any time you can integrate two things where, like, you're marketing thing, isn't a totally different set of a to-do list items as the creating of the thing. You get more done that way.
Parul: Right. This leads me to an article that you've written on your website, the book marketing, you've got a framework around that.
You have a system around that, and we have proof that you've done this successfully. You've launched bestsellers to the New York Times bestseller list. And you said that there are two things that you've learnt in book marketing. One is that anyone can run a successful book launch, and two [is] that a successful book launch always starts with a good plan.
I wonder if you could talk us through how you have done that either for an author that you've worked with or maybe how you would do that retrospectively for your YA novel.
Tim: I think the biggest thing that is important when it comes to marketing is having a plan and thinking about the plan long enough in advance that you can actually do something about it.
So if I look at my novel, The Threshing, I did basically everything wrong with it. I didn't spend enough time on it. We made no plans on really how to launch it. We were so just weighted down with starting the publishing house and all the other to-dos that we just kind of put it out into the world. It's sold, I think we're at almost a thousand copies now, so it's fine, but it's not great. It has 19 reviews on the US Amazon, so not good there. And then let's fast forward to the book we just came out within June, which is The Sand Sea. It's this 280,000-word epic fantasy. And we're like, okay, let's actually do something about this.
And so we decided, okay. You know, the hardest thing to do, especially with a book like this, a 280,000 words, 752 epic fantasy novel. It's actually easier to sell a copy than to get somebody to read it. You know, I can talk somebody into giving me ten bucks to download a Kindle version of the book, but talking somebody into spending two weeks of their life to read it is a totally different thing.
So we decided to do was to give away ebook copies to anybody that would download it. And we said, "Hey, if you, you can get a free ebook copy and art copy and advanced reader copy, all you're going to do is agree to leave an honest review when the book comes out." You can put it on Goodreads, Amazon, wherever, and we didn't even actually care about the reviews.
We just wanted to give people a deadline for reading the book. So we ended up giving away 2,500 copies of the book. We have over 250 reviews on the US Amazon right now. Uh, I think we're at like 170, 180 on Goodreads. It's selling really well. And because it has this kind of base-level audience, and then the author is actually doing some promotion for it as well.
And we've done some more promotion for it as well. We're already at like 600 or 700 copies sold, and it's only been out a few weeks or a couple of weeks, and it's expensive. It's $35 for the hardback. I have an audience, although it's not for fiction. This author has zero audience. And so the difference is we had a plan, and we started executing the plan ahead of time.
We made plans months ahead of time. If we're going to do this, then we're going to do this, then we're going to do this, and you start seeing it pay off. I also think it's important that authors understand that the launch of their book is not the first week that it's out. It's the first year that it's out, especially if you're a new author and you don't have this huge audience you're going to launch your book to, if you look at your book launch as the first week or month that it's out, you're probably going to be disappointed and kind of disgruntled with the whole process.
But if you think, wait, the first year is what—I've got to put in a lot of work to promote my book for the first year. That's a totally different way of looking at it. And again, we're doing some different things with the Sand and Sea to make sure that we keep this going for a year. So you can just see having a plan, executing the plan instead of just like, oh, I've got this book, and you just put out.
Parul: So it's consistency. [It] sounds like it's persistence over a set period of time. What sort of things did you consider for Sand and Sea? And how did you decide?
Tim: I can't remember if it was Shawn or Steve who was the first one to tell this to me. And it really just clicked into place of like, it's harder to get somebody to read a book than buy a book.
Let's say we have this crazy, outrageous goal of selling a thousand or a million copies of The Sand and Sea. So there is no way to force that. Like, you know, I could probably force 10,000 copies, right. I could buy a bunch of advertising. I could do a ton of promotion. I could do a ton of like push, push, push, push, push, and maybe get to 10,000 copies, which is great, but if you have a goal of a million copies, you have to look at it differently, which is, there is no way that I can directly sell a million copies. I don't have enough money. I don't have enough time, and it's going to take a long time. So combine that with a—it's easier to get somebody to buy a book than read a book.
And so what we're doing is we're going to everybody that left a review on Goodreads that was four or five stars, and we're messaging them through Goodreads. We're going to thank them for reviewing a copy. And then we're going to offer to send them a free hardcover version of the book, which I have right here.
[I] wasn't planning on promoting it, but I mean, this is a giant book, you know, and it's got like maps on the inside and stuff. And so, um—
Parul: Looks like a weapon.
Tim: It would hold your door open, at least. And so we're going to send everybody not just one copy, but two copies. And we're going to say, "Here's one for you and one for a friend."
And then we want them to give that to a friend because you're much more likely to read a book that a friend recommends. That's what we're going to be doing. Then the author is doing a bunch of podcast interviews. He's doing basically any podcast interview you could get his hands on; he's working his own network.
He's pretty well connected to promote the book, just trying to build this long-term fan base because the other thing is that that's a first book of a series. So if we have all of these people that we know have read and liked the first book, those are the first people we're going to be able to market the second book too as well.
Those are the kind of things we're doing. Our goal is to give away a book to anybody we think will read it because if you read it and like it, you'll keep telling people. And that's the only way you can sell that many copies—is word of mouth over a long period of time.
Matt: This seems to be an approach that you've taken with your book Running Down a Dream.
I know Steve Pressfield's books, this idea of giving books away for free. It sounds like it's playing the long game, not the week, the month or even the year. You're talking about potential like the Ryan Holiday perennial bestseller type stuff.
Tim: The War of Art has sold more copies every year that it's been out than the year before. It's sold well over a million copies now. The first year it came out, it's still less than 9,000 copies. The War of Art is Steve's bestselling book. But if you look at all of his nonfiction, that's the numbers I can see. Almost all of his nonfiction are exactly the same, or each book sells a little bit more than the year before, a little bit more than the year before. I have a good friend whose book The Personal MBA is coming out with the 10-year anniversary edition this year.
So it's been out ten years. It's sold well over 500,000 copies. It's never hit a New York Times bestseller list. It's never hit a Wall Street Journal list, but it just sells month after month after month after month after month. And so he's way outsold most of the people that you see sitting on the New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller lists because he has a perennial bestseller.
Parul: It's really interesting hearing exactly the steps that you're doing. And I recognize that it really depends on your audience and where they might be and having to sort of hustle or take a bet on different tactics. I'm curious. Across all the different books that you've worked on, are there any that stand to mind as being particularly fruitful, that have worked really well, and that might even still be something that writers could consider aside from this idea of giving away books?
Tim: You mean tactics for selling?
Parul: Yeah. Tactics for marketing.
Tim: Yeah. The number one thing every author should be doing is building an email list. I mean, it's not even close if you compare it to any of the other things out there, Instagram, Twitter, blogging, podcasting. If you would take these authors that have these platforms where they're like on all the social media and all have an email list and a blog and a pod, they're doing everything, and you put it in one bucket their email list, and you put in the other bucket their blog, their podcasts, their Instagram, their Twitter, their Facebook, their advertising, everything else. And you said, "Pick one of these. Which one will sell the most books for you?" We would pick the one with just the email list in it. I have a couple [of] articles on my website booklaunch.com, where I go into the actual stats on this.
Like I dive into like studies they've done on how engaged people are with the mediums, how likely they are to respond. And even the worst-performing email list outperform almost everything else. Even now. I've literally been saying this for a decade now. I keep thinking like something's going to come along and dethrone email lists, and I'm all for it because I don't, like, own stock and email list or something, you know. It is just the most consistent long-term. It just sells more than anything else.
When it comes to building an author platform, author marketing, everything should be driving towards an email list. So the only reason to have a website is to get people on an email list. The only reason to do podcasts is to get people onto an email list. The only reason to do anything is to get people on an email list because that is the thing that you will not just sell your next book, but the next one and the next one and the next one. Like I worked with authors for years. With the time I worked with them, they came out with three and four books, and they just sold consistently because we had an email list to promote it to. They would have popular blogs or— well, in fact, just the other day, somebody with a 3.7 million followers on Twitter promoted one of my client's books.
Like full-on promotion. "Hey, here's this book. You should go buy it." It sold about 50 copies for 3.7 million followers.
Parul: Wow. That's fascinating.
Tim: And that is pretty consistent across the board. Like, that's probably the biggest Twitter account that's ever promoted a book I've been working on, but I've had really big ones in the past.
I've worked with authors that have had 150,000 Twitter followers. We do some—a big push on Twitter. It sells maybe a hundred copies. It just does not translate into book sales like in email list.
Parul: Right. I remember sitting next to you in Nashville. I think I was asking you about Instagram. We got to talking, and you were explaining to me that you don't spend too much time on Instagram, but you do one thing, which is to message people. And you were telling me a story about trying to get—I think it was Running Down a Dream—into Taylor Swift's hands for that. I think it was like you'd messaged her, her guitarist or her bassist.
Tim: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I got connected to her guitarist. He lives here in Nashville, and we've exchanged a bunch of messages and, um, nothing ever really came of it.
I have a friend who has a middle-grade series and his marketing has been—because he started with no email list, no platform, no anything. And his marketing has been exclusively Instagram, but not posting on Instagram. It's messaging people on Instagram and getting stay-at-home moms, homeschooled parents, other people in that world to run giveaways of his book on Instagram.
So I always tell people like, is it easier to get one person with 20,000 followers to promote your book or try to build your own following of 20,000 people? It's so much easier to get ten people with 20,000 followers each to promote your book for you than it is to try to build your own following of—what would that be? 200,000 people. So it works, but I look at it more as a one-to-one connection than a one to many. The goal is to not build some huge following that's going to then end up buying your books. It's a way of connecting with people that would otherwise be hard to connect with.
Parul: And this is, and again, the impression I got from when we talked the last time is it's just about—it's not about dedicating your life to it, but just finding gaps in your time to message people, but being consistent, continuing to do that.
Tim: A friend of mine named James Clear came out with this book called Atomic Habits like I don't know, a year or two ago, and I'm finally getting around to reading it. Just in the first chapter, he's talking about the power of tiny habits of these little things that we just do over and over and over and how they have way more effect than any kind of one big push on anything.
You know, an example would be, you know, you could hire the best guitar teacher in the world and have him live with you for a week. And you would still be a shitty guitar player at the end of the week. But if you just practice 10 minutes a day for three years, you're going to be a pretty good guitar player at the end of three years. You hear this in writing all the time.
Like I write at least 500 words a day, 500 words a day. It's not much. Most days, it takes me 20, 25 minutes. And yet I can write what is that? One hundred fifty plus thousand words a year just doing that. And so I think it's the same thing with marketing of like findings—you know, my buddy that did the grade series that was called The Amazing Scrolls of Wonder or something like that.
And he would just every night sit on his couch while watching TV and message people through Instagram. He'd get people that he needed to send books to. He had them stacked behind his desk at work, and he would literally just turn around during his lunch break, pack books, drop them off at the post office on the way home.
So it was like he had a full-time job, kids, friends, normal life, and it was just like a little bit every day, a little bit every day. That's what I try to talk to people about in marketing, but again, just anything which is just doing a little, and it allows you to learn because marketing is a learned skill just like playing the guitar or writing.
Like it's something you get better at over time and gets easier over time. So you just have to keep going, keep going. If you decide, like, okay, I'm going to market my book for the first month that it's out, and then I'm going to go back and write my book. Like nothing's ever going to happen. It'd be better to spend an hour a week doing something forever than it would be dedicating a month of your life to it.
Matt: So, Tim, I'd like to go a little bit back to the email list. And this was back in 2013. You were beating this drum in your first 1000 copies. So it's interesting that even over seven years, that advice has really aged well, and it's still around. And I guess maybe some people might be thinking, how do I build that email list?
And in particular, I'm wondering, because a lot of the examples in the book are around nonfiction, can a fiction writer do the same thing? And any advice you might have on how someone might generously and not spammy build their email list.
Tim: So the approach that I encourage writers to take with their email list or their blog or anything—it goes back to this quote or this thing that Hugh MacLeod talked about, who's a cartoonist and an author, and I heard it probably 10, 15 years ago. "Treat it like an adventure, an adventure we're sharing." So to me, it's this idea of like, you're not spamming people. You're inviting them to come along and walk beside you on this adventure. And what I also always say is, like, you're trying to find people that are nerds about the same thing that you're a nerd about.
From there, a really easy way to get your first hundred subscribers—so, first of all, I recommend signing up for ConvertKit. They have a free plan for up to a thousand subscribers. They're who I use for email marketing. There's lots of services out there, so find one that works for you. If you don't know where to start, start with ConvertKit. The easiest way to get your first hundred subscribers is just go on Facebook, open up your list of friends and then message every single person. Not group message. Like literally message one person at a time saying, hey, I'm starting an email list talking about insert topic, your fiction, romance, novels, sci-fi novels, whatever it is. Can I add you to the list? If so, what's the best email address for you? and then they'll send you their email address, and you just copy and paste it.
So I've been giving this advice for years. One time I was, uh—went to this workshop. A friend of mine was running, and I was speaking there. At one of the breaks, before I spoke, this guy came up to me, and we're talking, and he's like, "Yeah, I got like my first 500 subscribers to my email list. I just sat on my couch, got on my phone and just message one person at a time through Facebook and invited them."
And I'm like, "Oh, that's awesome." I was like, "So you've heard me give that advice." He's like, "Uh, no, I just kinda thought of it." I was like, oh, well, okay. It still works, you know? Uh, so that's the best way. And you get, you know, people that know you on the list, which is good. And then the way that I think of it is if you put yourself in the shoes of a fan of the type of fiction that you write, what do you like? What other books do you read? What other movies do you watch? What kind of websites do you pay attention to? What would you be interested in getting? That's the kind of stuff you should be sending out to your email list.
A very simple way to get started would be [to] pick a book in your genre that you write in, and once a month, send out a review of a book that you've read in your genre. So the way that I talk about this—a simple way would be put the review on your blog, then email the review out to your email list and post it on social media. So I just talked about how social media was a waste of time. So why would you post it on social media?
Well, the reason is so that you can tag the author of the book that you just put a review on your blog, and you can shoot them an email and say, "Hey, I loved your book. I just put a review up on my blog. I hope it gets you some sales." They're likely to share it. If not, they're at least going to like the fact that you put their review up. You send out content that people that come across it, if they start following you, they're going to actually be interested in your book because you're posting stuff that's like similar, right?
So you can see how that's different than if I write ten tips about how to be a writer, and then I try to sell them my romance novel. Those things don't go together. But if I'm posting one or two reviews of romance novels, and I build my following based on that, I'm now building a following of people that are interested in what I'm about to come out with. Those are like a simple way to get started, where you get your first hundred people by inviting your friends, and then you just start writing one review a month. That's 12 times a year. You have to write something and send it out to your email list and send it out to the person that wrote the book. It'll take—I did the math—it'll take at most eight hours a month. You're starting to get something going.
Matt: I'll just echo what you were saying. When I started my blog, and I was trying to build an email list, I did something very similar, and it's like clockwork. It works. Uh, you know, I wrote a post around Chris Guillebeau's book and what it meant to me on a travel I was doing. He retweeted it out, email subscribers, same thing, Tim Ferris, same thing, Ryan Holiday.
So yeah, as someone who's experienced that. [I] just want to echo in [a] sense. There's so much truth in that.
Tim: I really think it's the consistency like we've been talking about. I had a friend here in Nashville who—he wanted to test this one time. He's like, "I think if you do something every day for a year, you can build a following, no matter what it is."
So every day, he took a picture of his finger with a different background behind it. And he would, like, draw pictures on his finger. He would take a picture of his finger with like the landscape of Nashville or something behind it, posted it once a day, and he built up this huge following on Instagram, literally taking pictures of his finger every day.
If he had done that once, nothing would have happened, but he did it every day, every day, every day, something that probably took him five minutes a day. And so I really think it's that short consistency. Just keep on doing it, make it a part of your life and really approach it in that—what is that? I always forget how to—the Bhagavad Gita, where they talk about [how] you have a right to the work, but not the spoils of the work, something like that. And so you really have to look at it as like, I'm just going to do this and try to get better at it. And if it doesn't work for the first month or the first six months, it's okay. I'm just going to keep going and keep learning, and eventually, something will come along.
Parul: What I really like about this is also the approach and value. So not just spamming people with information, but actually trying to think of what they want. And I suspect that sits behind a lot of how you approach the multiple things you've launched.
Tim: Yeah. I think it's important. You know, when I talk to writers, and they talk about how they hate marketing, I'm like, well, then you have the wrong definition of marketing because my definition of marketing is [to] create long-lasting connections with people and be relentlessly helpful. Somebody's on my email list that I just described. And they love romance novels.
And once a month or twice a month, they get an email with a review of a novel they might like. Like I'm being helpful to them by sending them that information. That's not spammy. And so then, by the time I have a book to come out with, they see that I'm here to help them. And then I say, "Hey, you're going to love my book too. You should buy a copy." They're much more likely to buy a copy. The people that are on Facebook driving you insane begging you to buy a copy of your book, they're doing something. It's not marketing, but it's something else. I always say I want to be a writer, not somebody that wrote a book once. So I'm always doing things that are building something that will help me long-term. The most long-term selfish thing I can do is to be as helpful as possible to everybody around me because then that builds up this audience of people that just want to help me write back.
Matt: That's great. I think the idea of becoming a writer, not just one who—someone who wrote something once, I think leads into [a] segue. We want to talk about your career as a writer too, Tim. Parul, do you want to kick us off with this one?
Parul: Yeah. So I was looking up this title, Running Down a Dream and saw that it came from Tom Petty's song about driving into the great wide open with nothing but glorious possibility in his past. That phrase has really stuck with me. Just to give us a little context to those who haven't read the book, can you talk us through the dream that you were running down or still running down and has the dream evolved since you wrote that book?
Tim: So Running Down a Dream is the hardest book for me to talk about because, first of all, it started as I wanted to write a how-to manual for Steven Pressfield's book, The War of Art.
So I had all these little tools that I created to help me overcome creative resistance, get my writing done, build a business, do all the things that we're scared to do. And, uh, I wrote an entire manuscript. One of my good friends, Jeff Goins, will read it and was like, "Hey, this is a great collection of blog posts, but it's not a book."
And then I showed it to Shawn, and Shawn agreed with Jeff and said that this is a book people will read half of, put on their bookshelf and immediately forget that they ever read, which is not what you're going for when you're writing something. I started writing this book, and, uh, Sean was like, "You have to put yourself into the book. You have to tell your own stories. You have to be vulnerable, do all these things." So the book shifted into this story that started with the point—I kept trying to start the book at the moment that I quit my job to pursue my dreams through, you know, lots of figuring this out over months and months and months, all documented on the podcast.
I realised the start of the book was not when I quit my job. It was six months later when I ran out of money and couldn't buy groceries and couldn't pay the mortgage. And I had a wife that was staying home with our six-month-old son. And so I ended up starting the book there. I taught all the same tools.
But I realised that every tool that I would—that I was teaching, I learned through a really painful experience. And what I realised writing down—writing Running Down a Dream was that people would not trust me, would not trust what I had to teach them if I wouldn't first tell them how I learned it and the truth of how I learned it.
And so that's kind of what it became—I'm going to ruin the book for everybody. So I started out asking the question, what's wrong with me? How do I, you know, I'm broken, and I need to be fixed. I have all these, you know, fucked up ways of doing things that's holding me back, and I need to fix all these things so that I can finally achieve my dreams.
And I had all these really specific dreams. You know, Shawn always says that every book needs to have a surprising but inevitable ending, right? So that you get to the end of the book or the movie or whatever, and you realise this was the only way the movie could end, and yet it surprised me. So the surprising but inevitable end of Running Down a Dream was that lo and behold, I was never broken.
I had everything I needed all the way back at the beginning. And that the real goal, the real dream, is having a dream to run after in the first place. Uh, I learned all these things along the way that helped me pursue my dream. But mostly, it was just helping me realise that the dream was having a dream in the first place.
You know, for me, the thing that I'm running after, the physical manifestation of what I'm trying to build, so like right now, we're trying to build Story Grid publishing. You know, I have these goals of what we want to create with it and the stream of what it's going to be, but I always hold the understanding that the dream is already happening because I have a dream to run down. And if I'm waiting for some future thing that's going to finally make me feel like I'm something or since I'm talking to writers here, you know, I've worked with the New York Times bestselling authors that have sold millions of copies of their book.
And they're no happier than you are right now. It is satisfying for about 24 hours, and then it mostly just—I've seen it break writers to become a New York Times bestseller. Like they can't write anything ever again. To me, the dream has shifted, uh, in the fact of like, I want to enjoy the run because that's the actual satisfying part—is having a dream to run down in the first place. So it's this constant kind of mental gymnastics of you have to have a dream to run down, but then you have to enjoy the running. Otherwise, once you get there, you'll realise you wasted all your time trying to get to some magical point in the future.
Parul: I love that.
Matt: Yeah. And thank you for that, Tim. And thank you for that book. Reading that when it came out a couple of years ago, it was shocking how vulnerable you chose to be with it. Um, but in a great way, because it really enables you to put yourself in where you are because obviously, we all have those feelings at times in our life.
And I was listening to a podcast with you and Joanna Penn, and you mentioned this idea of kind of being weary of not working your shit out publicly on the page versus having the distance to say, "Okay, I've processed this." Do you have any tips? Because if we're trying to write from a—about a lived experience, like how do we know if we haven't fully processed this personally yet? We're trying to get our therapy out versus we have a little distance, and maybe we're ready to share that with. Do you have any tips or ideas on that?
Tim: So this is something I'm still learning. I heard a quote. I should probably try to figure out who said it, but it was, um, "You should write from your scars, not your wounds." So I have a very religious background that I left about four years ago. I've tried to write about it several times, and I realised I'm still writing from a place where I haven't totally healed from everything that happened to me.
There was this moment where I was like into a manuscript like I was writing it. I was working on it regularly, and I was travelling somewhere. It was in Portland, Oregon, where there—you know, religion isn't as deeply entrenched as it is here in the south. I was riding with a buddy, and we stopped and I looked over, and I saw a church of the denomination religion that I grew up in.
And my first thought was I should burn that place down. And I thought, okay, I'm still angry. I'm still wounded. I'm not going to write about this for now. Now I can write about it, but I'm not writing about it publicly. That's not for me to share yet because I'm not past it enough so that I can look back and actually learn something I'm still in the middle of it.
I think people make the mistake of sharing things a little too early when they haven't learned anything yet. And then it forces them to pretend like they learned something, and they can't sit in the mess of what has happened to them. And so, most of what I wrote about in Running Down a Dream had happened to me years before, some of it a decade before the book came out. I had learned a lot from it.
I had healed from it. And again, [at] the ending of the book, I tell this story of a golden Buddha, and it was kind of the turning point in the book. And that was something that I had—that had changed my life, but I had sat with long enough that I could see what it was doing. I had a friend who—him and his wife had this public persona.
They got separated for a year. They got back together. And literally, a month later, they were hosting a marriage workshop because they were constantly doing everything in public. And I'm like, it's just dangerous. You don't even know what you've learned yet from the process because it was so excruciating.
You know, what I always say is like the insight isn't the work. The work is sitting with the insight long enough that it can change you. There's this term called—God, I don't know how much we can go into this, but, uh, cause I could talk about this alone for hours. There's this term called "spiritual bypassing".
And I think it happens a lot where people bypass the actual work by relying on, uh, some spiritual notion, right? So in the religion I was raised in, it was like, well, you know, God's in control. So, you know, whatever. You know, God has a plan for my life so I don't have to do anything. I'm going to wait around for God to fix things.
But I see it all over the place. Even people that aren't in religion or spirituals. They have some way of skipping over the really shitty part of sitting in the devastation of whatever has happened to you. I think you have to get some distance on the devastation. I think you have to let it heal. I think if it's still triggering you emotionally where you get angry, or you get really sad—again, like I have a scar on my knee from a motorcycle wreck when I was 15, and it's still kind of numb and it's even still light if I push on it, like, I can kinda feel it, and then it makes me remember the pain and what it was like, but like, it doesn't hurt to touch it, and you know, it doesn't hold me back in life. It doesn't have any hold over me anymore. It's just a scar. And I think those are what's better to write from than a bleeding wound.
I hesitate because I'm sure there is writing that is from the bleeding wounds that has changed people's lives and so on and so forth. But I think, for the most part, the most helpful writing is writing from the scars and not the open wounds.
Parul: That really resonates. That's really thought-provoking. I can see from the comment that a lot of people are finding value in what you're saying.
Matt: I love that metaphor, Tim. Thanks for sharing and being so open with us too. I mean, this is a—well, whenever that wound turns into a scar, it sounds like a book we might need to read.
Tim: Yeah.
Matt: We probably have time for a couple more questions. We definitely want to dig into the publishing stuff, the work you're doing with Story Grid. But before we go there, I was wondering if there's anything else—
Parul: There's one question I have for those of you who don't know, I run a Story Grid Showrunner Podcast, which is talking about the Story Grid methodology, and both you and Shawn gave me advice, and the other editors I do it with. Advice on just showing up. Like almost not worrying too much about the audience doing it, taking joy from it. Um, and I can see that you've applied that to a lot of what you've done. When do you know when to give up, though? The times that we take on projects that maybe don't have any reaction or don't get us the reaction or following that we're looking for?
What's your philosophy on continuing on something, whether it's a writing project or a business project?
Tim: This is an age-old question that I see come up on a regular basis. And it's because there is no answer to it. I mean, Seth Godin wrote a book called The Dip that talks about this. Like, how do you know when you're in a dip and how do you know when you're in a—I don't know what his metaphor was like, I've read it so long ago, but how do you know when you're in a dip before you get back up?
And how do you know when you're like just in a black hole? There's a couple of different things I think about. So one is I really—Derek Sivers is, uh, he started CD Baby. He wrote a book called Anything You Want. And he actually just came out with a book called Hell Yeah or No, but it was based on this blog post he wrote called Hell Yeah or No.
And it's this idea of like uh, if I can't say hell yeah to it, I'm going to say no to it. It's okay to stop doing something. I think so many of us stick with things because it's what we've always done, or we feel embarrassed to quit or whatever. And so I think in most things, it's probably—you hear the advice from writers all the time that if you can quit writing, you probably should.
So I kind of liked that idea of like, I just mostly want to work on things that I like working on. You know, if I have to force myself to do something from the beginning, uh, that's not a good sign. Right over here is about $800 in pod—no, it's more than that. Probably like $1,200 in podcast equipment that I bought [at] the beginning of last year to start a podcast called Running Down a Dream where I was going to promote this book and interview people and become the next Joe Rogan who's like the most popular podcaster. I did eight episodes, and then I quit, and I haven't touched that equipment. in a year. That was a little embarrassing, [I] felt a little stupid for spending all that money upfront. [I] definitely shouldn't have done that. [I] felt bad because people like started wanting to be on the podcast.
And I'm like, "No, I'm not doing that anymore." But like, I was like four episodes in I'm like, I don't—I'm like sitting interviewing people, and I'm like, "I don't think I like this." And then by like the eighth one, I'm like, "I don't like doing this. I'm not doing this anymore." So I've been doing CrossFit for like 11 years. Eight out of ten times, I go to class. I like it. I look forward to it. And then two out of ten times, I really don't want to go. But that's a pretty good ratio. I know that like if today I don't enjoy it, I'll probably enjoy it tomorrow. You know, anything worth doing is hard.
You know, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about, you know, what kind of shit sandwiches do you like eating? If you don't mind the really shitty parts of it, most of the time, you're probably onto the right track. But if you keep having to force yourself to do something for weeks and months, and it's just getting harder and harder and harder, I don't think that it's worth doing. You know, if you go back through the podcast and listen to me writing The Threshing, most of the time, I was enjoying the process. It was hard, and, you know, I didn't like rewriting a scene over and over and over, but there was only a couple of times where I was like, "I want to quit. This is stupid. I don't want to do this anymore. This is too hard." Most of the time, it was great. I enjoyed it. You know, even now, as I write my 500 words a day, eight out of ten times, I look forward to it. Two out of ten times, I kind of force myself through it.
And the more things that you quit, the more it opens up space for other things. So I love quitting things that I hate doing and just trusting that something else will come along, and usually, something better is right around the corner when I quit something that I know I need to quit.
Parul: I love that answer. I love the idea of trying to work out how much joy versus pain we get from something and allowing space for the next thing.
Matt: Thanks, Tim. Let's talk about Story Grid. Building and publishing business, can you share with us your and Shawn's vision and mission for Story Grid? What you're trying to do there.
Tim: Story Grid is, on one hand, a methodology of analyzing your writing to find the places where it doesn't work, so you can fix them to make the book work.
And then the kind of drive behind it is we believe that the goal is to level up your craft to become a better writer. The goal is to not sell a certain amount of copies or to have some kind of commercial success, or get your friends to think you're an amazing writer. Again, this comes back to that, like, why am I doing this?
And we want to provide a space for writers to do that. So then Story Grid Publishing came out of that of, well, we're telling all these people that they should just focus on their craft and levelling up their craft above any kind of commercial success. And yet there's really no place that you can do that.
Traditional publishing is mostly a train wreck for new writers. I think self-publishing is wonderful, and I think as many writers as [they] want to do it should. But it's also the equivalent of starting a new business, a new small business. And literally today, an old high school friend, she finished writing a book. She reached out to me and like was asking me about publishing.
And before I know it, I'd written her like a 2000-word email, just trying to explain what she was getting herself into. We wanted to create a publishing house that was a meritocracy that was focused on publishing books that work and their genre that are at the top of their genre. And our belief is that over the long term, those books will outsell the traditional publishing model of throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what works or what sticks.
So that's what we started with public, uh, Story Grid Publishing. Uh, so to even submit your work to us, you have to do probably 20 to 30 hours worth of work on your manuscript, um, doing spreadsheets and Foolscaps and grids and all this crazy stuff. We just want to put out work that's at the top of his genre.
And then, for me on the marketing side, what I get out of it is I don't believe that writers should be in charge of their marketing. I think it should be a joint effort between the publishing house and the writer. I've worked with every major publisher, and 99% of the marketing onus is on the author unless you're Stephen King or some established writer, it's on you.
But I think marketing is such a different skill set than writing. It's like learning to play golf and learning to play the guitar. It's like they do not compliment each other. And it's like saying in order to do one, you have to do the other. And so, I wanted to start a publishing house that built an audience around the publishing house so that we could give a book a chance without the author having to bring their own audience to it.
Obviously, we want the author to do their own market, but we don't want to require it. That's kind of one of my goals with it is I would love for us to provide that where if a writer comes to us and we publish their work, we get their book out for them, and they can focus on writing the next book. We're not quite there yet.
We're getting there pretty quickly, but we're not quite there yet. And we just want to give a place for writers to become the kind of writer they want to be. And then if they want to publish with us great, if not, you know, we wish them the best, but it's really just a place where we can publish a writing that's at the top of its genre.
Parul: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan and actually, we have a few people here who are using some of the free resources as well, just within the publishing—within Story Grid website.
Matt: Thanks. And I guess, where do you see publishing going over the next five to 10 years? Do you have any sense? I mean, is it what you would say kind of continue with self-publishing is something to be reckoned with or anything else that you guys are betting on?
Tim: I mean, our biggest bet is that better writing will sell better over a longer period of time. If you see any books that are still selling ten years after they came out, it's not because the publishing house did an amazing job marketing the book ten years ago.
I think of it as a rocketship. If you turn off the engine when it's halfway out of that atmosphere, it's going to crash down to earth every single time. So if you can just get it out of the atmosphere, now we can see if it's going to live on its own. And that's how I think of marketing a book is the job of the publisher slash author is to get that book out of the atmosphere.
And the goal is to get 10,000 people to read the book. At that point, you find out if the book's going to fly on its own because, again, I can force 10,000. I can't force a million or five hundred thousand or a hundred thousand. I mean, I talked about Atomic Habits, you know, that's sold over a million copies now. It's only—it hasn't been out that long. I think a couple of years, I can't remember.
James Clear has a pretty big audience, but the only reason it sold a million copies is because it's a great book that people tell other people about. What we want to do is publish really great work that if you read it, you'll tell three other people that they need to read it.
That's how we think books grow. We want to publish perennial bestsellers. We're not chasing any major bestseller list. As far as we're traditional or we're publishing in general is going, I don't know. I don't care anymore. Because it's like, you now have every option available to you. You can go after traditional publishing, and there's routes for that.
And there's good times to do that. I'm not saying it's never the way to go. And then you have on the other end of the spectrum self-publishing, where you can literally upload a word document to Amazon, and they'll be for sale. There are now companies and people and services and software that does literally everything in between that spectrum.
And I would say we're somewhere in the middle, you know. What I think is great is that writers can do whatever the hell they want now. They can publish their book for free. You can be like Cory Doctorow, where you just give your books away. You can sell your books, you can sell them. You can get books printed for 2.50 a piece and delivered into your garage and sell them from your garage.
Like you can do whatever you want. And so I just see more of that where all I care about is the writer. So I don't really care what happens to publishing. I mostly care that the writer has the options that they want to have. And I think that that's going to keep happening where you have, you know, all the options out on the table in front of your view, and you get to pick the one that's best for you.
Matt: Tim, thank you so much. This has really been, uh, a treat to meet you. It's close to in the flesh as possible, but yeah.
Tim: Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Parul. Thanks, everybody, for showing up. This was great. I had a good time.
[Outro] Parul: Thank you for tuning into the London Writers' Salon podcast. If you'd like to join these weekly interviews live for the chance to ask our guest writers your burning questions. Well, you can become a member at londonwriterssalon.com forward slash pound membership. You'll get access to our library of salon interviews and workshops, our private online community, where you'll find world-class resources on the craft of writing and find creative friends.
Honestly, we think it's the best writing community in the world, and we would love for you to join us.
Matt: And if you're a writer struggling to find time to write like so many of us, you're welcome to join our free virtual hour-long, silent writing sprints called the Writers' Hour. We hold them four times every Monday to Friday.
And all you need is something to write with, a hot drink to cheers us with, and the desire to write. We think it's the world's best virtual co-writing space for writers, creatives, and, frankly, anyone who just needs to get something done. You can sign up for free at writershour.com, and we hope to see you there until we write again. Cheers, everyone.