Listen now
Menu
On this episode of Don’t Write That Book, AJ Harper and Mike Michalowicz focus on how they came to write Mike’s best-selling book, Profit First, using the “reader first” method. They self-published the book as their publisher didn’t believe it could sell and wanted them to write a different book entirely. (The book went on to sell over a million copies…) AJ and Mike explain how they came to understand what their readers needed after The Pumpkin Plan as opposed to the book the publisher pitched, then set out to write that book.
In this episode, you’ll learn that a must-read book not only must be compelling, but that it must deliver on its promise. They’ll touch on using the Hero’s Journey to not only keep the reader on the page, but how it can help authors structure their books and ultimately build trust.
(You’ll even get some insider baseball knowledge on how to accurately track book sales and some of Mike’s gonzo methods for marketing!)
Be sure to sign up below for more information and to start receiving their newsletter. If you’d like to support this show, rate, subscribe and leave a review on your podcast app.
“Sometimes what works for us doesn’t work in the same way for other people. And part of your job as an author is to distill down the doable part so that the action steps and so forth, so that anyone could do it, not just you.”
– AJ
“Reader first: Everything in the book must serve the reader, not just be something you wanted to include.”
– AJ
“And (Mike) has such a massive following that it blew it out and they had to hurry up and print more books. And I love that story because to me, it speaks to the power of a book that works. It gets word of mouth, word of mouth, word of mouth, word of mouth, until even without any effort of your own, an influencer hears about it, loves it enough that decides to talk about it without even contacting you, and then you run out of books. Running out of books is, as my dad would say, a good problem.”
– AJ
The Disruptive Power of Data: “The simple hack to find out what would be disruptive is look at what the common approach is. Look at the actual data behind the results.”
– Mike
“To me, it’s the hero’s journey, and the reader is the hero. They’re going to have trials and tribulations as they go through your book. You’re the guide or the mentor. You have to navigate them through those challenges.”
– Mike
“I was in the airport…and they had something for the local meat district…showed the different cuts of meat from a cow and showed, like, the hind quarter, the flank, whatever. I was looking at that. I was like, oh, my God. What if we took a piggy bank and carved up its different components?”
– Mike
