0:00
But when I got back the first renderings of the cover art, just clearly not going to work.
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And so what I said was, "Well, I'll pay for them.
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You can take it out of my advance.
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I will pay for a new cover to make this better."
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And that's exactly what happened. I'm not an illustrator.
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I'm not a graphic designer.
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I just asked the uncomfortable question.
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Nothing I just described as rocket [music] science.
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My instinct told me that I was doing the right thing by pushing back.
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But then the tests, the audience tests themselves revealed simple process improvements can make a huge difference in how a book finishes up.
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And mine won by a country mile.
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My friend and partner Jimmy Sony, the CEO and editor and chief of Infinite Books, is back on Infinite Loops.
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We had a great conversation about what we're trying to do that's a bit different than other publishing companies, but we also got a sneak look at his new book, which I'm very excited about. Enjoy.
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[music] Jimmy Sony before we became partners in Infinite Books.
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I discovered you through your own books.
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Now, I started with Claude Shannon because it turns out when I found that book, I was kind of like, what?
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Somebody else loves Claude Shannon like I do?
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And of course it's a great book.
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But I want to start today with Founders.
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>> Uh I I went on to read Founders, which I I think is an amazing book. >> Yeah.
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>> And but I want to do it a little different.
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I want to talk through what would we do differently with founders >> at Infinite Books.
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People are going to be listening.
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Some people may be new to the podcast, right?
1:37
So it's probably worth me just saying.
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worth me just saying. um a few in 2022 I published a book called the founders was all about the origin story of PayPal and the the basic idea of the book was that you have this small group of people some are household names right you've got Elon Musk Peter Teal Reed Hoffman etc
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and they all work together at one place at one time and that one time is not a 10 it's a four-year period 1998 to 2002 all of these people the founders of YouTube the founders of Yelp, the founders of LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, the creators of Founders Fund, the first money into all these things. This group
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This group has a combined net worth that is larger than the GDP of New Zealand.
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And they all and only about, you know, 200 of them work together in this one place at one address at one time.
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And my basic I basically like chanced into the story because I just asked the question, well, hold on.
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Like what was in the water?
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like what was going on there?
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Like how do I get some of that right mainlined into me?
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And it turned out that for a number of reasons, nobody had really gone and done that deep look at that period of their lives.
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It makes like perfect logical sense.
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If you are interested in Elon, you're interested in rockets and cars.
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If you're interested in Peter, you maybe you're interested in the Teal Fellowship and his investments and these other things he's doing.
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But if you go back like in so many ways, the most interesting period of their lives was this 1998 to 2002 period when they were building PayPal and they create what becomes known as the PayPal mafia and just nobody had gone back and asked them. I mean that's the truth.
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The truth of this was just not that I had any kind of special access or or anything or that I had covered tech for 25 years. I just was curious.
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I just said, "Wait, this seems to be an important narrow slice of time in which a bunch of talent is in one place."
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Kind of like where the American founding, right, or the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or, you know, Xerox Park or Apple during its early years, that kind of thing. >> Bell Labs. >> Bell Labs.
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You sort of think to yourself, okay, that doesn't happen by accident.
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There's a there might be part of it that's accidental, but there's a part of it that's actually cultural.
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Something's in the water.
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What are they doing differently?
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So I wanted to go and answer that and I basically spent like five years on this crazy wild goose chase tracking all these people down, the people you know and the people you don't and just aggressively ask them questions about what they did, what they learned, what they saw.
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And the end result of that was this book, The Founders, which was published by Simon and Schustster in 2022.
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And you're asking me the question, what would we have done differently at Infinite Books, which is you are in my venture?
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>> I mean, we would have done everything differently.
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like there's not a part of it that we wouldn't approach have approached differently.
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Um, in fact, a lot of what we're doing at Infinite Books comes out of both the good and the bad of that last Simon and Schustster experience where, you know, as an author, a lot of times you feel like you're you're on your own.
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And there were so many things that I did that we'll get into to make that book better that I now I'm like, well, we'll just build that into our process.
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there's like no point in, you know, in not trying to do better to try to build a better mousetrap.
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And then it's funny also because some of the lessons from the book itself are kind of in infused into infinite books, right?
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There's all these kind of like entrepreneurial lessons that come out of the founders and we're we're in a similar place with the book business, right?
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We are David taking on Goliath in some ways.
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I don't actually think it's that competitive a business.
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It's one of the nice things about books is that they're not zero sum, >> right?
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But we are a David working to sort of change this system.
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And again, I have good things to say about the people at Simon and Schustster.
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So, this is said with a lot of respect.
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They gave me a chance to do the book, but the cover art was an issue.
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Uh, when I got back the first renderings of the cover art, they had created some concepts that were just clearly not going to work.
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And then they had created some concepts that where they had taken Getty images of the people I just named, the famous ones, and basically just put them on the cover.
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The problem with that, well, there's a few problems with that.
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One, it kind of looks boring, right?
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Two, they're all men, right?
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And in in this day and age, and in a company that had significant female people at the heart of the story, like, I shouldn't have to be the one to say, "Hey, this might be a problem."
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And I wrote about and interviewed many women who are at the heart of the story.
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and you're putting only men on the cover.
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And I remember throwing a flag on the play and saying, "This is crazy."
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And the response I got back, which was dispiriting, was, "Well, the women aren't a part of the Getty archive or like we don't have publicly available photos of them, so there's nothing we can do because we can't pay for rights to those photos because there are none."
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And I said to myself, "Well, that's just not accept.
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Like, that's not a good enough answer, right?
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There are clearly photos of these people. They're human people.
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They have photos somewhere."
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And so I had seen a different book cover where someone had done something where they illustrated the the faces like they took them and they made them into cartoons effectively. >> Yeah.
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>> And I said, "Well, could we do that?"
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Because I've got images of these women and images of other people, by the way, who are not famous, who are men, who are part of the story.
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Could we just get an illustrator to do the work?
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And the response I got back was that they had already spent the budget buying the images from Getty for the other people, Elon and Peter, etc.
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And so it was not going to work unless like like the budget was gone.
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And so what I said was, "Well, I'll pay for them.
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You can take it out of my advance.
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I will pay out of my advance, which was modest, for a new cover to make this better."
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And that's exactly what happened.
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I was build for the illustrations for these I'm not even sure I've shared the story with you.
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I was build for these illustrations that were done and we did a few different rounds of them.
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They took it out of my advance and we designed a new cover.
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And then I did something else that we've been doing at Infinite Books, which is I AB tested my cover art against all the other cover art that I had been sent.
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And mine won by a country mile.
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And so I knew I was my instinct told me that I was doing the right thing by pushing back.
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But then the tests, the audience tests themselves revealed one, people wanted faces, and two, they want a mix of faces.
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They want a world, a world that looks like what the company was, which was a bunch of different kinds of people.
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and it worked and it was accurate.
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And I think that's one of the areas where simple process, what we've learned, what I've learned doing infinite books now for a while is simple process improvements can make a huge difference in how a book finishes up.
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But if you're in a big system where process improvements are frowned upon, it's very hard to do them.
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Nothing I just described is rocket science, right?
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Like I like I'm not an illustrator.
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I'm not a graphic designer.
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I just ask the uncomfortable question.
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And that's a big part of I think what we're trying to do at Infinite Books is just ask a question at every stage about how something can be done a little bit better. >> Yeah.
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And it's so funny you and I, one of the reasons we clicked so quickly was even though I was publishing my books like 20 years ago, we had identical experiences.
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The story about What Works on Wall Street, same thing. >> Wow.
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They did a cover that was dog [ __ ] It was horrible.
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You know, my wife is a pretty famous street photographer and obviously a great visual eye.
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She looked at it when we got it and she's like, "Oh, this is completely unacceptable." >> Right? >> But it was too late.
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And so when the book took off with with the bad cover, um so they immediately wanted a second edition, a third edition.
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And they did the same thing.
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They used the same cover because they wanted to rush the second one out because it was selling really well.
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Then when we got to the third edition, which was a pretty significant rewrite, Missy was just like, "There's no way I'm allowing that cover."
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She designed the third edition's cover of What Works on Wall Street. >> I have no idea. >> Yeah. >> Wow.
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>> And literally they were so [snorts and clears throat] opposed.
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No, no, no, you know, no.
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This is this just isn't done this way.
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>> And then of course it like all of the emails you finally got a nice cover. [laughter] >> Yeah.
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>> But let's talk about AB testing.
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>> The on this on this point by the way and it relates to the AB testing.
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People might ask themselves, well why does it matter so much?
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Like why does this level of rigor matter?
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Why does why does the audience's opinion or a perspective reader's opinion about the cover matter?
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Isn't the publisher the one making these kinds of judgments?
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And what I would argue is that was a plausible theory in an era where most book buying happened in bookstores because you already had buyer's intent, right?
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So, we can borrow language from like the the world of commerce and marketing. >> Sure.
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>> You have buyer's intent.
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You have somebody that's standing in front of the book holding the book. >> Yep. >> Looking at it.
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Even then, by the way, they're going to make snap judgments based on the cover.
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Whether we like it or not, people judge books based on their cover.
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But that window is a lot bigger.
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You've probably got, I don't know, 15 to seconds to a minute, maybe two minutes.
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Somebody flips through the book, but they're already in a store.
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They've got their credit card with them.
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They're thinking about buying a book.
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They went into a bookstore in the first place. Very high buyer intent.
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If we are clicking through on an email link in the middle of a workday and somebody goes to Amazon, I've probably got 3 to 15 seconds, right? Maybe that.
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>> Y >> and it's where their eyes going to go.
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They're going to go to the cover, maybe a couple of the reviews, maybe they scroll down, maybe they look at the customer reviews.
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That window is very unforgivingly short.
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And so given that, if you can gain even a little bit of advantage with a cover that's more eye-catching, it's a huge advantage statistically because most book buying happens online.
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And I think that's the difference.
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The difference is we're thinking a lot about our audience is people who are bored and clicking right at work on their phones, at home.
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They click through, they look at a cover, they make a snap decision.
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We don't have the luxury of 2 minutes in the bookstore anymore, >> right?
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We're still going to offer books in bookstores. We'll get that done.
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But the plain fact is that most of our audience is buying it online.
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So, we have to be very thoughtful about the cover.
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The other thing I was going to say is you you can also get rapid feedback.
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This is to the point of AB testing.
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In in the past, Tim Ferrris tells this great story about 4-hour work week, which I'm sure many people have heard.
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He AB tested his cover in an actual bookstore.
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And what he did was he printed out book covers for his book and put them on hardcover books that were not his book.
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And he sat and watched what people responded to on the bookshelf.
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And that way he knew what was going to work.
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And then he went with the cover that worked for like that worked from his AB test.
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Now that's a physical in-person AB test.
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In an hour you and I have gotten responses from 50, 100, 200 people, maybe 50 closer to 50 to say this cover is better than this cover.
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And it regularly challenges our team's intuitions about what is and isn't going to work. And that's the point.
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The point is the window is smaller and the data is easier to get than ever before.
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So why why wouldn't you get why wouldn't you get the data?
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Like why wouldn't you want it?
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Even if you disagreed with everything an audience said, wouldn't you want to know what the audience thinks?
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>> And that's a central tenant of everything we do at Ocean Ventures, right?
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You always have to challenge your assumptions.
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We had a book recently where all of us preferred one particular kind of cover.
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The AB testing was absolutely clear >> and you have to swallow your pride and understand that you are not the god of cover design.
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You got to let the audience understand or give you feedback as to what they're going to respond to.
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It might not be what you are going to respond to but when it it overwhelms it's just better data >> and and I would also make the point you said you know our audience anyone trying to sell books is selling to an audience what is it 80% of books bought online. >> Yeah.
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More than 80 in some categories it's more than 90. Yeah. Right. So it's not even close. No.
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>> And and I think that's that's one one kind of critical thing is >> you don't have to go with what the audience says. >> Right. Right. Exactly.
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>> We're collecting information to see what the audience says, but there have also been times when we're testing something and it comes back and it's not quite clear.
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In which case, like, all right, great.
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The the, you know, the umpire gets to make the call at the plate.
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And if we have a call at the plate, we're the umpires. We get to make the call.
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But when, for example, with a book we have coming out in May called Dispatches from Grief, we had an artistic cover, call it the artistic cover, and a version of several versions of a cover that was more designoriented, much more heavy on like let's try to have a metaphor or an image or a painting.
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>> And then we had a cover that is the mother that lost the daughter and the daughter herself, uh, Danielle and Miranda.
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It was a selfie that Danielle took and we we used that as a oh let's let's see if the selfie cover notches a few votes.
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It didn't just notch a few votes.
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It won lights out every time.
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By the way, much to the frustration of our team. >> Yeah.
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>> So when we ran that test, what was so interesting is everybody on the team did not think the selfie cover would win.
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Did not want it to win and it won.
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So when it won the first round, we went back and we said, "Okay, let's expand the sample size and expand it from 50 people to 200 people.
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Maybe if we get a bigger sample, it'll change it.
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No, it actually it veered the other direction.
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We had a higher percentage in the 200 person sample.
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Then we were like, well, maybe we screwed up and it should be black and white for the design covers or this kind of color.
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We ran we ran seven different cover design tests over the course of I would say 6 months and every single test came back with the selfie cover winning and we went against what our team wanted because we knew that's what the audience needed. >> Yeah.
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And you know, obviously if an author felt very strongly about a particular cover, it's their book.
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But we would be remiss if we did not give them that data.
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If we did not say, "We love that, too.
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We love this artistic look, but the the public vastly prefers this one."
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And and it just as I'm listening to you, it's like this is like one of the easiest things for a legacy publisher to copy. Yeah.
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>> Why aren't they copying? >> Yeah.
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And by the way, they should like anything that we say they should freely copy. Yeah.
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And more importantly, and I hope there are authors listening, authors who have traditional publishing contracts should understand that they have the ability to do exactly what we are doing in so many ways to push a publisher a little bit further than they might be comfortable. Right.
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It used to be that if you did this in the industry, I'm sure you got tagged with this label.
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You were called the problem author. >> Oh, yeah.
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I definitely called from my first book and that's like the best.
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>> The world needs more problem authors, right?
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It actually because that's the only way that an industry like this is going to shift and is going to change and there by the way are editors who want to embrace these things.
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What's funny is every time I sent one of these AB tests along, the the editor I was working with was really impressed, was really happy.
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Their anxiety came in sending that AB test to the graphic design department >> because that was the place where science wasn't welcome among the group of artists.
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But we should just be frank about we're in the business of selling books.
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If there's a way to sell books, significantly more books, you'd want to embrace that.
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The other thing is the reason that this test works is because it's really cumbersome to go run tests inside a bookstore to have like five different versions of a cover.
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It's just confusing and a a person buying a book isn't going to expect that online.
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They can see a bunch of covers, respond exactly, click, click, give some commentary.
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That is a natural Amazon style behavior.
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They're looking at something on a screen, right?
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And so that is it's also we're meeting the buyer where they're at and then we're running our design process where the buyer is at as opposed to doing it in a black box and then sending it out into the world assuming we knew exactly what the audience wanted.
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We don't have to assume anymore.
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Why wouldn't you run this test?
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These aren't expensive tests to run.
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>> And and that's also another central part of our business model, which is it seems to me that many of the legacy publishers are still orienting themselves to the world of atoms, the world of things, bookstores, etc.
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We we are in a digital world.
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Now, >> the other thing I would mention is you and I are both natural entrepreneurs and a lot of book authors aren't right.
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A lot of them would love to see everything we're doing but feel uncomfortable doing it themselves, etc.
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And and so I think when you get entrepreneurial authors, you kind of see, well, this is what the world could look like, >> right?
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and and now we're extending that and we're saying Mr.
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author who's not entrepreneurial or missauthor who's not entrepreneurial, don't worry.
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>> We we'll get you covered there.
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>> Which kind of leads into and let me take a moment and say I've said this to you many times and so I owe my career to my books.
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Literally >> McGra Hill took a chance on me.
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Broadway took a chance on me. I'm incredibly grateful.
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But and and the other thing, we both love books, >> right?
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>> We would let them use our techniques if it meant they could sell more books, >> right? >> Exactly.
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>> But but this sort of institutional reticence to adopt anything that like just best business practices, it just blows my mind a bit. No. >> Yeah.
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I've thought about it a lot because I have wonderful relationships with the people who worked on my books, particularly the editors, and there are some things that book publishers, traditional book publishers do that are that is still world class.
19:52
I I think it's honestly if we if we were get to get down to it, a lot of it is probably just pressure in terms of the number of books that you have to publish and the amount of time you have to really >> invest in a particular project because we're keeping our list small especially at the outset of our operation so that we have time to invest in every single book.
20:16
>> Yeah, >> that takes energy. It takes resources.
20:18
takes countless texts and calls and emails with authors, countless texts and calls and emails with publishing, you know, parts of the publishing ecosystem and it's just really hard to do that if you are publishing thousands of books a year, right?
20:30
So, I I I generally try to give people a lot of grace when it comes to like mistakes they've made or like things that aren't working in the system.
20:37
I tend not to assume it's malice.
20:39
I tend to assume it's something else.
20:40
In this case, I think it's time famine.
20:42
So I think it is actually just that the sheer volume of stuff that a graphic designer has to do in that current system is such that they don't have time to run seven AB tests on a given cover, right?
20:55
which makes sense except that part of that is like a chicken and egg problem because it it's because you're publishing so many books and not getting as much as you could from each one from a profit perspective that you're then in a situation where you can't run 7A test or it becomes a little bit of a of a of a of a again a chicken and egg problem like you you can't fix one without the other.
21:15
I think that's a big part of it.
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I think the other thing is you also have to be on guard about prestige businesses. >> Yeah. >> Right.
21:22
about any business where there's too much prestige baked in as the end goal.
21:27
So books are notoriously a prestige business. Totally right.
21:31
It's based in New York, a prestigious town.
21:34
It has big prizes called the Pulitzer, the National Book Award that has a lot of prestige.
21:38
People go to parties, they they have a kind of air about them if they are an author >> that that is in excess with the actual thing itself. Right.
21:47
In prestige businesses, it becomes very hard.
21:49
I think you'd know more about this than I would.
21:52
It becomes very hard to say the emperor has no clothes or you're doing this wrong or could we try doing it better? Let's be nice.
21:59
Could we try doing this better or differently? It becomes very hard.
22:02
It's especially hard if you're the author because you are and have been historically the lowest on the totem pole of where the of like we are mighty publisher. Here is your contract. Take what we give you. Go off and do your work.
22:15
Don't ask us any questions. That's the model.
22:17
That's how you and I were treated, right?
22:19
you are a lowly author, go off and do your work.
22:20
But today, authors come with million person Instagram accounts that are bigger than their publishers.
22:27
Authors come with email lists that are 250,000 people strong, a million people strong.
22:31
They have more reach than their publisher.
22:35
So, for the first time, that power dynamic has shifted, right?
22:37
And publishers don't know what to do with it.
22:41
But actually, what's funny is authors don't know that they have this power.
22:45
That's why I'm telling authors, if they're listening, be a problem author. push the limits on this.
22:48
There are options for you that there have never been before. >> Yeah.
22:53
And we kind of took Charlie Munger's advice uh invert. Always invert.
22:57
And so we we do exactly that.
23:01
The author can have vastly higher royalties.
23:03
But that is primarily because of technology.
23:06
All of the things that we are doing at Infinite Books is if it can be automated, it gets automated.
23:15
marketing especially that there are so many it's it's like the lowest hanging fruit and it it just I marvel at the fact that like other people aren't doing this.
23:29
It's it's not like it's some secret.
23:32
>> No, I think I think part of it is, you know, if you also think about the way that some of the biggest books emerge, it's because somebody has gotten a very big contract and that's where the marketing dollars flow. >> Yep.
23:44
And so you have a marketer who is understandably under duress in their business and they're like, "Well, look, I've got a I've got 25 books coming out next week.
23:52
Three of them got million-dollar advances.
23:54
I really got to put all the chips on the million-dollar advances and I'm going to focus there."
24:01
But what that does is for the 22 that didn't get the high advance, you're kind it's kind of slim pickings.
24:05
You're going to have to do everything yourself.
24:07
By the way, this is the other thing.
24:08
You you made a comment about entrepreneurial authors.
24:11
a an author in 2025 is by definition an entrepreneurial author.
24:16
You can be a bad entrepreneurial author, right?
24:18
You can be a great one, but you have to be somewhere on that spectrum because you're not going to get the kind of support from a traditional publisher that you think.
24:25
This is one of the funny things when authors sit around and joke.
24:29
The joke is just how little you actually get from a marketing perspective from your publisher.
24:33
Like you don't you're not actually like supported.
24:36
It's a little bit of just like here's what we've got and the best we can do.
24:40
Meanwhile, you have like rockstar marketer authors who are coming in looking at the system, scratching their heads and going, "Wait, really? That's it? That's all this is?" Right?
24:46
And and I have had to actually work with and coach other authors to do things themselves that they thought the publisher was going to handle or to hire resources that they thought the publisher was going to hire.
25:01
And it's in very rare cases that you get the royal treatment.
25:03
And I would say even when you get the royal treatment, trust but verify. >> Yeah.
25:07
and I experienced both, right?
25:07
So, my first book was published in 94, I think, uh, Invest Like the Best.
25:14
Uh, got a $5,000 advance from McGraill for it.
25:20
And I'm like, when when when I had the meeting with my editor about marketing, um, she was like, "Well, maybe you can talk to the marketers about that."
25:26
And the the big thing was, "Yeah, no, you got a $5,000 advance.
25:31
We we published thousands of books." And I'm like, "Okay." Okay. So, I did it myself. I hired a PR agent.
25:38
I did all of that >> and it was kind of brutal, right?
25:41
But then I also had the experience with How to Retire Rich, which I got a huge advance for.
25:47
The biggest advance for a personal finance book given up until that time in the late 90s where like if you were writing about investing or personal finance and you were doing it well, like they were it was a bidding war. It was crazy.
26:02
And then I saw the massive attention like at the sales conference where all of their people who, you know, go to the bookstores and talk about the fall or spring list. >> Yeah.
26:15
>> It was me and a couple other speakers and then they I had a satellite radio tour here in Manhattan.
26:20
Uh and but it lasted >> two weeks.
26:26
>> Two weeks >> and then it was over.
26:27
And you know, I think I've already told the story in the past about I got an opportunity to be on Oprah Winfrey.
26:33
My agent called the publisher and was like, "Prince some books.
26:37
He's going to be on Oprah."
26:37
And their response was, "Yeah, no. We've moved on.
26:42
We made back our advance. We're happy.
26:44
We've made money on this book."
26:46
And I was literally dumbruck because I watched as the book I was on Oprah for all of five minutes, by the way. >> Right.
26:56
But five minutes on Oprah.
26:56
That's that's what that's every author's dream at that time, >> right?
27:00
So for all of five minutes and so I was a big junkie of Amazon back then which was relatively new.
27:04
I I after I left and uh I went back to you didn't have mobile so you had to go back to your hotel with the hookedin wire and I went to Amazon number one sold out and I just thought to myself how many copies didn't get sold?
27:21
The idea that the author is the lowest part of the totem pole just makes no sense in today's world.
27:31
>> I think that's a big that's the other big difference in 2025 versus earlier eras is there has to be a fundamental respect for an author's intuition about their audience and for an author's understanding of who their reader is.
27:48
Because with the digital world being what it is, the author probably has that, right?
27:53
So, it used to be you'd like write a book kind of in like a like a silo, right?
27:57
You you didn't have the ability to get all this like very fast feedback from friends.
28:01
You couldn't tweet things.
28:03
You couldn't put things on Substack.
28:04
You couldn't post about stuff and then see what was coming back.
28:08
Authors have all of that now, but it's out of keeping with the level of respect that they get from publishers for that knowledge, right?
28:15
for that kind of information.
28:16
And so like a great example, it's like, you know, there are certain books where one substack is more powerful than a review from the New York Times. Yep. Right.
28:25
And there's not the same level of shifting internally to think, well, should we focus on this?
28:32
Should we focus on YouTube?
28:32
Should we focus on Tik Tok? Where should we focus?
28:35
Some of that is starting to change, but but I think that the the big difference is like authors come armed with more knowledge than they know or appreciate and honestly sometimes more more knowledge about their audience than the publisher has.
28:46
But the publisher's whole business is that's that's cute like like stay where you were at, right?
28:52
But it in our business and one example is with this this particular grief book, every one of those AB tests that we ran we sent straight to the author. >> Yep. >> Right away. There were two emails.
29:03
One was to our team and one was to the author because we thought it was important to let them in on the process by which we design covers and because they actually have something valuable to add, right?
29:14
And that's that isn't and it isn't the case that like they get a veto or we get a veto.
29:18
There doesn't need to be the process now, right?
29:20
Like they simply should have access to the same data that we should.
29:24
If we showed up with the selfie cover and just presented it to the author as the finished product, the author could justifiably have said, "Well, hold on.
29:32
What about all the other design covers you were talking about?
29:34
Instead, we guided them through the many, many months of diligence and work and testing and surveys and arguments about the cover until we came to a good place.
29:45
>> And that's also how you avoid this stuff about well, an author and a publisher hate each other. They're at loggerheads.
29:51
I never want to be in a situation where we are at loggerheads with an author, right?
29:54
The differences in this field can almost always be worked out over time.
29:59
And I I think that that's like that that little bit of like, oh, there goes the publisher again, or oh, there goes the problem author again.
30:04
That stuff can be can be designed out of a publishing system.
30:09
And I think we've done a pretty good job with our early projects of designing it out of our publishing system. >> Yeah.
30:14
And that goes back to the earlier comment you made about prestige industries.
30:18
They tend to be very opaque.
30:22
And they're opaque for a reason.
30:24
[laughter] You've got to have mystery.
30:24
And it builds these stories and narratives that no longer hold, >> right?
30:31
And you know, there are all sorts of things if you are an author today, it just boggles my mind that you wouldn't want to be open to all of the possibilities, right?
30:46
And you know, we I have friends who are self-published authors and fine if if that's what you want to do and are built to do that, that's great.
30:56
I don't think a lot of people are built to do that.
31:00
>> Yeah, it's an important point, a kind of avenue to go down, right?
31:02
Because you do have the option today that you didn't have years ago where if you wanted to upload a PDF to Amazon tonight and publish it tomorrow, you could get it out on Kindle.
31:12
Like self-publishing is a pretty robust ecosystem.
31:13
And so somebody listening could plausibly say,"Well, okay, Jim and Jimmy, you guys take only 30% of the royalty compared to the 90% that Simon and Schustster might take, but what am I getting for my 30?" Like, why?
31:28
You're getting a few things, and it's important to name them.
31:30
Uh, we're going to edit the book better.
31:32
We're going to market it better.
31:33
Like, we're just going to make a better product because we have editors on our team that are actively improving books.
31:37
The whole point is that the book is better.
31:39
But the [snorts] other is that there's an entire process of actually laying out proof pages, copy editing, factchecking, doing all the doing the design work, doing the AB testing, all of that that is really cumbersome and expensive for a self-published author.
31:53
Some can do it, but it's hard enough to write the book, let alone publish the book, which is why we think there's still a room there's still room for a new publisher because many people want to be guided through this experience.
32:04
And then the other thing is we benefit from every book we have done has informed every subsequent book, right?
32:11
We started our AB testing with two thoughts. >> Yeah.
32:14
>> Because we tested the subtitles.
32:14
We tested the titles and the subtitles just to see what people like got into, right?
32:19
And that informed subsequent tests for other books.
32:22
Every one of these is assembling a body of knowledge, especially with AI that we can depend on to kind of run our process more efficiently and more effectively. >> Yeah.
32:32
And you know, we're also willing, as you know, I'm writing I'm t taking my first stab at writing a fictional book.
32:40
I think it's pretty cool.
32:40
Um, and one of the things because it's me, I I'm like, yeah, let's experiment the hell out of this entire book.
32:47
Maybe there's a new way to write a book.
32:50
So, I'm embracing everything. I'm embracing AI.
32:52
I'm embracing uh writer rooms, which you participated in one.
33:00
And what let's talk about that for a minute because >> you originally I don't want to put words in your mouth but were a little like oh what the [ __ ] I got to go do a writer's room.
33:10
>> I don't know about that.
33:10
I like hanging out with you so I don't know if it was quite that reaction >> but the for all of us like it was incredibly productive. >> Oh my god.
33:20
I'd never done look so writer rooms are a Hollywood convention right?
33:24
Like it's like how they write shows and I had never done or participated in anything like that before.
33:28
I'd kind of done it around like speeches and stuff where there were groups of people involved in like editing a speech, but generally generally with writing like when you have like the more cooks in the kitchen, the meal doesn't get any better, right? And often it gets worse. >> Yeah.
33:43
This was different because you're in media res this idea like, well, what if I did the writer room now, right?
33:49
as opposed to handing everybody a 500page manuscript and saying read this and then come back to me with feedback which is very traditionally that's how traditional publishing often approaches it even if authors are doing that request for feedback themselves. >> This is cool.
34:02
You were in the middle of the project and you said no let's get everybody together now >> and and I'm going to walk you through the plot and everybody poke holes, suggest ideas, suggest examples, say things so that we can make things better.
34:16
And then even cooler was we used Notebook LLM to take certain chapters from the book and have Notebook LLM play a conversation about that chapter for the assembled group of seven or eight people so that we could hear what Notebook LLM had to say and then react and respond to that.
34:33
I I was blown away actually by how amazing it was.
34:36
And I think one is that we did it in the middle of the project, not at the end.
34:41
So you're not as attached, right? Right.
34:43
>> You're not as attached to your stuff because you're not these are not sacred cows.
34:47
The other is that we used AI to like make it okay that that there was no need to have done 20 hours of homework before the writer room, right?
34:58
To have everybody read 500 pages because we could just use AI to hear some of the high points on the plot to listen to a discussion that sounded, you know, plausibly real and then engage in a discussion ourselves.
35:10
That's just scratching the surface.
35:11
I have more to say, but I want to pause there to let you respond because you're the you're on the receiving end. You're the author. >> Yeah.
35:16
And I cannot I I thought it was going to be very valuable.
35:19
Um I it exceeded my expectations in every way because there were thing you you know when you're writing a and especially fiction like when when you're world building and creating a world and everything it you you're so deep in it you don't know your own blind spots.
35:37
you don't know like, "Oh, wait a minute.
35:41
[laughter] Maybe I've got a conflict with the villain and and the hero."
35:44
Um, and those things got highlighted immediately.
35:50
>> And and so, but the great thing there was they I looked at them just as pivot points >> and we just got so many great ideas out of that. Yeah.
36:00
I'm not going to give the story away, but one of the suggestions you had for the prologue, >> which everyone agreed was pretty good for a thriller, um, and then and then you were like, well, wait a minute, why are these people the only ones there?
36:16
Wouldn't other people be there in this kind of household?
36:18
And I'm like, of course they would be.
36:21
[laughter] >> And and then so I rewrote it that way.
36:26
And it's just so much better. >> Yeah.
36:28
And I think it's one of these things that it's not it's not usual for a publisher to want to assemble a writer's room of their own people to dissect a book because historically you have one editor that champions your book and fights for it.
36:42
And they and the author are working like a team at when it's at its best.
36:48
They're working as a team to push the book forward.
36:49
But it's not like that editor grabs every other editor and says, "Hey, let's go away for a half day and like dive into this book."
36:59
>> And I thought I was like, "That worked so well.
37:01
We're going to do that with all of our books." Yeah.
37:03
Because there is something about sitting with it for a half day or even a day and saying, "Okay, let's go through everything and everybody raise every objection, raise every idea, all of that."
37:14
>> You know, people people have done plenty of research on why that kind of group work actually makes things better.
37:18
I think it's it's almost never done with books and should be done more often.
37:23
And for us, it's just now now we've seen it pay off.
37:26
It's just a natural part of our process.
37:28
We have one scheduled in January for for our our book on David Rooney, right?
37:32
Um and I think that's like that's exactly we've learned our lesson and seen the power of it and are adapting it into our process. >> Yeah.
37:40
And it's you you can get blind spots and just be completely unaware of them.
37:45
And what the writer room does is raise all of those up really quickly.
37:50
And you know, I I'm admittingly I'm extremely experimental and I will try everything.
38:00
And I I have some friends who work in Hollywood and uh long time ago were telling me about the process of writing a TV show and I was kind of like wait a minute you it's not this guy who says written by and they're like yeah no [laughter] um and now he or she is the final say >> of course just as the author is the final say >> the author is the final say.
38:25
Um, but it's such a rewarding experience and you know, movies and TV have done pretty well by it.
38:35
>> By the way, the other the other part of it that's important and this is something to say and it's funny because we're we're so digitally first that you can almost like you can almost like wonder like well that you know how can it be I being in person mattered there.
38:50
>> It really did >> for for I think for one vitally important reason which is basically everybody was off their phones and laptops. >> Yep.
38:56
and we were actually focused on the questions you were asking us.
38:58
Here's what historically happens.
39:00
You have a PDF of a book.
39:02
You send it out to 20 of your friends.
39:05
Your friends are very busy.
39:07
They've got kids to drop off at school.
39:09
They've got doctor's appointments to get to.
39:10
They've got their own books they're working on. Yeah.
39:14
>> You know, they've got dinners. They've got meals. They've got holidays.
39:15
They've got the stuff of life.
39:16
They have their stuff of life.
39:18
Your book is about as low down on that list as it gets.
39:22
And no matter how many favors you've banked, asking a friend to read a 500page book and give you feedback is like a root canal.
39:30
Like it's it's it's it's like it's socially very costly. Yeah. Right.
39:34
You have to make those asks in ve very very carefully.
39:36
Um and and it's why even asking for blurbs is like a very delicate exercise because people just don't have time.
39:43
It gets back to time famine or people just feel like or they feel like they don't have time.
39:46
In this case, you didn't have us do 500 pages of homework, right?
39:52
And we were all together in person. Yeah.
39:54
So that when we were talking about a specific scene, everybody could actually focus on that as opposed to >> focusing on that scene in a Google doc from four different countries and 10 different time zones, right? >> Yep.
40:08
>> That made a big difference.
40:08
I didn't realize how big of a difference that would make.
40:11
Maybe that was just me being an idiot.
40:12
I haven't worked, you know, I've worked remotely for so long. I've gotten used to it.
40:15
But there was something about the team being together and being able to largely actually be off our laptops and phones and say, "Okay, chapter 4 is like this. What do we think?"
40:26
That was a big difference maker.
40:28
And it meant and it's, by the way, these are it had some cost obviously just in getting people there.
40:34
But for authors who are trying to do this on their own, if you live in a city and you've got your group, one way to approach this is just to build your own room. >> Yeah.
40:42
And on top of all that, it's fun. >> Yeah. Oh, it was a blast.
40:45
[laughter] It was a great time.
40:48
>> But I I totally agree on the in-person, right?
40:51
Like I definitely see kind of a barbell uh approach here.
40:54
Like online, most of us are screens, but I think that that is going to heighten the value of in person.
41:03
Uh especially for the reasons you just stated, right?
41:06
Like we have so many distractions in our lives and the ability to set those aside, focus all together on it.
41:15
First off, it's just fun, >> but it's enormously valuable for the author.
41:24
>> Um, and and I think for the people participating too, >> because like, oh, you know what?
41:28
And you even said, you know, I think these are going to work for non-fiction books, too. >> Oh, yeah.
41:35
Oh, I mean I mean look, I'm I'm guilty of this as much as anybody.
41:37
I when you're doing a book, you have so much that you're doing at any given time in non-fiction.
41:45
It's hard to find the time to get feedback, right?
41:48
Feedback, apart from getting feedback from your editor, it's kind of the lowest down thing on your list. Yeah.
41:54
You're sort of like um you're you're writing, you're trying to make words work on a page hard enough.
42:01
You're doing research hard enough.
42:03
You're doing interviews often, hard enough.
42:05
All this stuff is super taxing.
42:07
And generally, by the way, for most authors in 2025, you're doing it not as a full-time job.
42:10
You're doing it on the side while you're doing other stuff.
42:13
So, you have all you have such precious little time.
42:15
The idea of getting feedback from 10 different people for a book is very, very, very hard to pull off.
42:22
And so, I'll be honest about how I did it with my prior books. I paid people.
42:26
So, what I would do, I I paid editors, right? Or I paid readers.
42:30
So, I would have somebody I knew. I said, "Hey, listen. and I have this book.
42:33
Can I just pay you to go through it, make some edits, marks, comments, etc.
42:37
And I would just pay, right?
42:39
Because I knew I needed that feedback and I knew I wasn't going to get it from the publisher. Right?
42:44
>> The difference in this particular case is if we are all together, you can dive into a project and bring all of this out, whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
42:52
I actually really look forward to doing it with David's book, uh, the David Rooney book.
42:55
Um, because it's a non-fiction book.
42:57
We're going to sit there and we're going to we're going to beat the hell out of it.
43:00
We're going to say here's what works, here's what doesn't, and that's that will make a better book.
43:05
Ultimately, what's interesting is we are just trying a bunch of tools and techniques to make the product better, right?
43:10
It's not like we discovered some secret algorithm.
43:13
We're just literally like, well, what if we collected a bunch of smart people, stuck them in a room, like you were in the middle of your project, and we beat the hell out of the plot and tried to make the plot better.
43:21
That's there's no again, this is just a very it's a very classic Hollywood convention that we're applying to a fiction book.
43:25
And spoiler alert, we have discovered some pretty good secret algorithms.
43:32
>> We have we [laughter] also have secret algorithms. Also true.
43:33
We have secret algorithms. >> Yeah.
43:38
>> Because that's a big part of the marketing component, right?
43:40
Um I'm I'm a huge believer in iteration.
43:46
>> You know, if if you don't like people are so afraid of making a mistake or you know, we society has said that's bad.
43:52
On the contrary, y mistakes are portals to discovery and better ideas and better processes to to do it. Yeah.
44:01
So like one of them is the email campaign.
44:05
Y >> that we are building.
44:08
I I'm a huge believer as are you.
44:11
Somebody sends me something.
44:13
I don't know the person, right?
44:15
>> And and if it looks like it's like a mass email and hey Jim, please read this book and blurb it for me.
44:21
I'm probably not going to do that. Right. Right.
44:27
>> But we try to customize any of those campaigns to the person that's we're sending the email to. Yeah. Right.
44:34
We want to be aware of how they look at the world.
44:39
>> So, we make sure that we know what's in their substack.
44:42
We know what kind of books they've written in the past if it's an author.
44:45
And then you just keep taking times at bat. >> Right.
44:50
>> This whole two week thing just baffles me.
44:52
Yeah, it's and this grows out of both of our experiences of of marketing, right?
44:58
In my particular case, I did this book called A Mind at Play and it was about Claude Shannon. >> Great book.
45:04
[snorts] >> And Shannon I here's what I knew, right?
45:08
We can just let the cat out of the bag on on how we build certain things.
45:09
Not how but what we're building, but how we approach it.
45:16
Claude Shannon was an electrical engineer and a mathematician.
45:17
engineer and a mathematician. and he was he was a giant in those fields and also became a kind of saintly figure in the field of computer science because he did he he wrote he created the field of information theory and so you've got three fields there electrical engineering computer science and mathematics what do I know about those
45:34
fields well I'm not any one of those people but I know that you they work at universities they teach at universities and most university email addresses are publicly available so before my launch I found a bunch of tools to help me scrape university email addresses from every university in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. And I built a database of
45:55
And I built a database of about 14,000 email addresses of every computer science, electrical engineering, and math faculty member that I could find that was workable.
46:05
And then what I did was I sent I used this program.
46:11
I don't remember the name of I think it was called GMass to send individual emails to all of those names but do so in a way that didn't violate Gmail's mass email service that didn't trip that wire. >> Yeah.
46:23
>> And what it included was a really short note for me saying, "Dear Dr.
46:25
Such and Such, >> I didn't know if this would be of interest, but I just finished a book on somebody that's a giant in your field. His name is Dr. Claude Shannon.
46:33
I'm sure you're familiar with him.
46:37
I wanted to let you know about it and I'm attaching the preface in chapter 1 as a PDF in case it's of interest.
46:42
Here's the link to the book.
46:42
If there's anything you want to do with me to collaborate, etc. , I would love to.
46:45
Uh, I've become very passionate about this, as I'm sure you are. Thanks so much, Jimmy.
46:50
Something to that effect.
46:51
>> Yeah, >> I sent out 14,000 of those emails.
46:52
Not a single one got a negative response.
46:55
In fact, I had one that was really funny. One was really funny.
46:58
Somebody wrote me back and the first line terrified me.
47:01
This guy writes back, "Jimmy, I thought this was spam," and I'm like, "I'm mortified."
47:06
And then he goes, "C, but then I read the rest of your note. Dr.
47:10
Shannon is a hero of mine.
47:10
Thanks for letting me know.
47:11
I really, really appreciate it." And he signed off.
47:13
So, even somebody who thought that the note was first at first spam could respond in that way.
47:19
We have a genius on our team who his name is Jean Mark who took what I just described this very elaborate strategy of very very hyperargeting and is building a tool to do that for every other book we are publishing and to do it at scale.
47:36
So the idea is could it be spammy eye of the beholder? I don't think it is. I don't think it is.
47:45
If you're reaching out to somebody in a field with an idea you have in a way that is largely non-committal, we'll we'll let the we'll we'll parse out what is and isn't spam later, but I think the idea more more specifically is we don't believe in spray and prey marketing, >> right?
47:59
>> Like we are hyperargeting people we think will be interested in a given thing based on other patterns of behavior, based on other things they're interested in, based on where they work, based on what they do.
48:08
And people may want to quibble about that.
48:10
We think that's just good marketing.
48:12
And I would even go further.
48:15
It it is thoughtful and customized marketing.
48:18
We we are not going to send a uh an email for my book which is a fictional thriller to a non-fiction person who you know has nothing to do with the thriller category has there's no connection. Right?
48:37
If there was some kind of connection, sure.
48:41
>> But if there's no connection, the spray spray and pray that it just goes to everybody.
48:46
And and that pisses all of us off, right?
48:49
And so we want to lean into that.
48:53
We do we want people to go, "Oh my god, I love this and this new book is coming. Wow, that is so cool." >> That's right.
49:03
it it you should be and I hope you are delighted if you hear from us about a book because we've chosen it to get to you with a particular book because we know you're going to love it. Yep. >> Right.
49:12
So, if you have got like 1% annoyance and 99% delight, we've won. Yeah. Right.
49:17
Um because you we both of us, you and I are on the receiving end of countless requests for things for our time, etc.
49:24
And it's very, as you said at the beginning, it's very easy to see when somebody has actually thought about why they're reaching out to you.
49:30
And when somebody is just like a Nigerian prince telling you you should hand over your social security number, right?
49:35
Like I get enough of the Nigerian prince stuff.
49:38
It's very rare to get a good, thoughtful, tailored, customized ask for your time or your attention or your energy.
49:44
Our goal is to bring that to scale for books, which we think is imminently doable.
49:50
And if we discover it's not, then it's not.
49:51
But our early tests suggest we're knocking it out of the park because the people we're reaching out to are writing back and saying you got this is I thank you.
49:59
This is like the be thank you for letting me know, right?
50:04
Which is exactly the response that I got from faculty members who would not have otherwise known or heard about my book.
50:10
>> You you've got to pick your audience.
50:12
And what technology allows us to do is to scale that.
50:15
And um so rather than being annoying, rather than being a Nigerian prince, you are actually talking to people about things they love, >> right?
50:27
>> And so it's part of the thesis for not only Infinite Books, but all of our verticals at Oshana's Adventures is we are moving into an era of mass customization.
50:39
>> And rather than, you know, spam people or do it the old way, that's dying, right?
50:46
And if you look at some of the traditional email marketing metrics, we are so far above them that it's kind of like when Jean Mark was telling me about the click-through rate and the open rate, I'm kind of like, are you telling me the exact truth here?
51:05
Because it's, you know, orders of magnitude higher, but it's only because it's getting sent to the right people. >> Yeah.
51:12
And I think the other thing is it it is if you think about the mass customization for email, it's very hard to pull off in an elegant way.
51:19
But why it works is that we're not reaching people who are utterly disinterested in whatever we're offering, which is a lot of what I discovered, and I'm sure you found like publishers, but also PR agencies have big lists, Excel files they've assembled for many years.
51:38
they've assembled for many years. Yeah, >> they send the same notes to the same people and there's no thought put into hold on well is this person even going to want to get this email right like is this person even going to want to hear about this particular project I remember
51:56
there were there were all these lists of like the business books and they would send my book out to all everybody on the business book list and you're thinking to yourself like like what what about if that person's just had a baby or if they're busy or if they happen to know me, right? There was none of that. And There was none of that.
52:10
And so we're trying to apply a little bit of just I guess you could call it humanity, like basic humanity, right? But cast a wider net.
52:19
The other thing I think is different, and I always tell authors this um if you go do a podcast of a thousand people, there are some authors who would say a thousand people.
52:28
There are some iTunes podcast with a thousand reviews, right?
52:33
Like why would I ever do a podcast that only had a thousand listeners or 100 listeners?
52:37
One way I've heard this described is like imagine the energy it would take to get a hundred people into a room at a physical bookstore event.
52:45
It's unheard of even for famous authors.
52:47
They have a hard time getting those kinds of names, right?
52:50
Getting that that getting that volume of people into a given place.
52:53
>> We don't and I don't ever want to treat anybody's audience as anything other than sacrian. >> Yeah.
53:00
If you invite an author of ours onto a podcast or if we reach out to a podcast for an author and they say yes, we want to treat that entire time like it's encased in gold dust because that podcaster is taking time to read the book >> to interview the author.
53:13
>> But I think there's too much focus put on like well I only want to get on the tippy top podcast and I don't want to do anybody that has a thousand listeners.
53:20
And my argument to every one of our authors is going to be you can find 45 minutes to an hour to do any podcast and you never know who's listening and it is important, right?
53:28
And it doesn't mean that you just go hog wild, but it does mean every one of these hits counts.
53:33
One of the things I'm sure you saw in traditional publishing is the only hits that mattered were from mainstream tier one media publications.
53:42
>> We are thinking much more.
53:42
I mean, on on weekly calls, we ask ourselves, what's the perfect YouTube channel for this show?
53:49
If we had a dream YouTube hit, where would it be?
53:51
If we had a dream Substack post, where would it be? And we begin from there.
53:56
>> And the other thing that we are building, we're not there yet, but we have some prototypes, our dashboards for the author.
54:03
Uh, again, I I love your remark about humanity because what we're doing is how would we want to be treated, >> right?
54:11
like we're both authors, but we also big readers, both of us.
54:14
How would we like to be treated?
54:17
What would we like to be served up >> verse what annoys us?
54:23
>> And it it just baffles me that people don't think that way. >> Yeah. >> Right.
54:27
Like so in the in the dashboard, for example, for authors, I you know, why is it revolutionary that an author should be able to see where his or her book is selling?
54:38
Wh why is it revolutionary for them to like have that in as close to real time as we can make it?
54:46
Like it that's table stakes to me, right?
54:50
Maybe it's because of my background in and you know quantitative pro processes and all of that.
54:55
But the other thing is follow through.
54:59
When the dashboard gets to where it needs to get, we'll be able to see, wow, um, Jimmy's book just spiked in Omaha.
55:08
Wonder what's going on there.
55:11
And then, who in Omaha might be interested?
55:14
Can Can we talk about your new book? >> Yeah, absolutely.
55:18
>> So, I am more excited maybe for this book than Jimmy is.
55:23
>> It's called The Dow of Kobe. >> Yep.
55:25
>> Um, I am not a huge sports guy.
55:28
>> Neither am I, to be honest.
55:28
And I cannot wait for this book to be published. >> Yeah.
55:34
>> But >> let's let's let's segue to that and then I'll come back to what we'll do on the marketing side.
55:39
Tell us a little bit about the DV code. >> Yeah.
55:42
Um I mean the very short version is um and I'll just get personal for a second.
55:49
The pandemic was a very hard time for me.
55:52
I it was hard for everybody, right?
55:55
But here's my species of hard.
55:57
I had a young daughter who was before the pandemic started she was in prek and she was going to go into kindergarten and the writing was on the wall with schools in New York.
56:06
They were sending out messages saying everything is going to be fine and you're looking around the world and in 5 seconds on Twitter you're like nothing is going to be fine. Nothing.
56:13
So in the spring of 2020 and early summer of 2020 when the pandemic was just getting going, New York was hit I always say it was like hit first and worst, right?
56:23
Um, I just I knew schools were going to be a mess.
56:29
So, I built a pod school for my daughter for kindergarten.
56:31
So, for all of kindergarten, we took my my tiny Brooklyn place, kind of like got all this like Scandinavian rollaway furniture, found a group of friends, five friends, and we interviewed teachers that summer, hired a teacher, and built our own school.
56:44
I wasn't the only one to do this.
56:46
There were a lot of articles about it, but I had an experience of building a school from scratch. And I had to.
56:50
I knew iPad education for my daughter at that time as a kindergartener was never going to work.
56:55
You got 26 kids on an iPad screen, the teachers driving themselves crazy, right?
57:00
But I knew if we if we had enough enough gumption, a little bit of elbow grease, we could probably assemble a pretty good school.
57:05
It ended up exceeding our wildest expectations.
57:08
Podcast episode for a different day.
57:08
You and I can dive in education because I think we're pretty think we think pretty similarly there. >> Yeah.
57:14
>> So, we built this pod school.
57:14
I'm doing the pod school. I'm writing founders.
57:18
I'm sort of freelancing and consulting.
57:21
I'm like editing another book project that I had like from years ago.
57:23
I mean, I'm doing too much all the while.
57:25
The world is shutting down. Nothing works.
57:29
You don't know where you're going to get groceries.
57:30
You're spraying down bananas and stuff. It was crazy.
57:34
>> So, you're in the midst of all this duress and you everybody finds their own outlets like they find what's going to work for them. And it was weird.
57:40
I like stumbled on a Kobe Bryant video and this I started this habit of I would just start my day with Kobe.
57:47
start my day with Kobe. I would watch a quick YouTube video and it was it was like he was talking about kind of getting through the difficulty of I think his Achilles uh injury and rehabbing and then also just the mindset that he had and I'm not by the way I'm not the millions of people have watched
58:04
these clips but I just started like every day I started my day with Kobe which sounds so weird like I'm not I'm not an athlete it's not my thing loved basketball as a kid not a sports person but there were all these things that he was saying that applied perfectly to the process proess particularly of getting through the founders. So I start going
58:20
So I start going just a little bit deeper and I discover that Kobe unlike what many people know about him, unlike what the world knows about him, he's actually a much he's a much more varied career than people think. He won an Oscar. He won an Emmy.
58:36
He wrote, he studied he journaled for 10 years. He studied writing.
58:38
He knew about Joseph Campbell.
58:39
He was friends with creative people.
58:41
This what this is what blew my mind.
58:43
He was friendly and actually close friends with many of his creative heroes.
58:47
He could get in the door because of his his name, but he actually befriended them as an exercise in understanding what creativity was. Then you go further.
58:59
After he leaves basketball, he builds an investment company, but he also builds a creative studio called Granity Studios.
59:06
He wants Granity Studios to be the next Disney.
59:08
He publishes books under the Granny Studios imprint.
59:10
He was working on a Broadway musical under the Granity Studios imprint before he died.
59:14
He was working on movies. He did podcasts.
59:16
He did actually uh television shorts.
59:18
He did a thing with ESPN where he would break down game tape, right?
59:22
He's running 10 different creative experiments at once.
59:26
But he was a truly creative person.
59:28
That's what he cared about.
59:29
And he cared about writing because when he was in high school, he had a writing teacher, Swimman Jane.
59:33
She really inspired him to learn how to become a better writer. And he loved writing.
59:38
On the back of planes when they were flying from game to game, people said Kobe always had his nose in a book.
59:43
He was always reading, constantly absorbing information.
59:45
So, I'm I'm learning this and I'm like, I know that type of person.
59:50
[laughter] That's a nerd.
59:52
People think he's a jock. This is a nerd. This is not just a nerd.
59:55
He's like one of the world's biggest, most epic nerds.
59:59
[laughter] And it's like un It blew my mind.
1:00:01
I was like, "Nobody knows this."
1:00:03
And so, I just start finding then I found the podcast and appearances that nobody's listening to.
1:00:10
So he goes to places like the Aspen Institute or the Milin Institute or the University of uh the USC Law School.
1:00:17
He speaks in China at the TED conference.
1:00:19
He speaks here and there.
1:00:21
And I'm finding all these places where professional athletes don't go and speak. They just don't. It's not done. But he is different. He's cut differently.
1:00:30
And I start essentially like listening to these, assembling notes, kind of keeping quotes of his that I'm like, "No, this is clever. This is interesting."
1:00:37
And the outgrowth of that multi-year process that started five years ago, yeah, is now a book called The Dow of Kobe.
1:00:44
And my idea is very much modeled on a book by a mutual friend of ours, Eric Jorgensson, who wrote a wonderful book called The Almanac of Naval Ravakon. >> Yeah.
1:00:53
>> And his theory there was the same theory I had with the Dow of Kobe.
1:00:55
This assembled wisdom exists in 150 different places.
1:01:00
Somebody needs to just curate and assemble it and make it digestible.
1:01:04
And my thesis on Kobe is he is much bigger than the game of basketball.
1:01:06
But and that's why he speaks to so many people around the world.
1:01:10
It's why people have Kobe tattoos.
1:01:11
It's why these videos have millions of views.
1:01:13
People watching them are not looking to put a ball through a hoop better.
1:01:16
Many of them are just looking to get through a difficult time in their lives.
1:01:20
And he taught the world how to do that.
1:01:22
How to be creative, how to think about business, how to think about art in a very interesting and counterintuitive way.
1:01:29
And because he was so good at putting a ball through a hoop, the world missed it.
1:01:33
And I remember when you first uh we were sitting outside.
1:01:37
It was summer at my house and you told me about this and I'm like what? I I had no idea.
1:01:42
And so I started I went and watched some of those videos.
1:01:49
I'm like oh my god I am looking at as you say a polymath super nerd.
1:01:53
But what's so cool about it is he he his particular take is very interesting because it's not entirely similar to your average super nerd, right?
1:02:13
He had this other incredible talent obviously as a basketball player.
1:02:19
So I remember when I was watching it and I I had the thought he is embodied in sports but that gives him a kind of a different lens to look at all of these creative projects through >> and it's just that all of this is sitting out there unorganized >> blows my mind. >> Yeah.
1:02:42
And I think it it is it was to me it blew my mind too.
1:02:43
There were there were interviews I found with him that had a 100red views, 200 views on YouTube.
1:02:50
I these are long interviews where he's really talking about his life and creativity and process.
1:02:53
There were some that nobody ever uploaded to YouTube.
1:02:57
So I found all these interviews that were just never uploaded.
1:02:58
They were living on some random website somewhere or they were only living in their podcast form but not their YouTube form.
1:03:06
And that universe, obviously the YouTube universe is much bigger than the podcast universe.
1:03:09
A great example is he does this interview and now it'll end up on YouTube because I'm saying it.
1:03:12
He does this interview with Cal Fussman, who's famous for his interviews.
1:03:15
Cal interviews Kobe about creativity.
1:03:17
That interview never made it to YouTube, which is why it doesn't have two million views, right?
1:03:21
But there are nuggets in there about creativity and about inspiration and about just like hard work, tenacity, being a dad, all these things that Kobe brings to the surface that never never really got the audience they deserve.
1:03:33
The the other piece about this that's interesting is that um he speaks in metaphors, right?
1:03:38
So he he has a different he has a different um there's no there's no athlete I've seen that does a postgame interview the way Kobe does because he can do it in three languages and he speaks in metaphors which is extraordinary to watch.
1:03:51
So, I watched all of these postgame interviews and I got all of these nuggets from different things he was saying and there were just moments.
1:03:58
I'll give you one moment.
1:03:59
Somebody asked him a question about leadership >> and you know this is a very this is a trope of a question.
1:04:04
It's like a classic you're going to ask a about where do you see yourself?
1:04:08
What do you think about leadership?
1:04:10
Well, [laughter] >> Kobe says I had to change my leadership style during one season and the question was about how he changed his leadership style.
1:04:18
And he says that I'm paraphrasing, but this was basically the answer.
1:04:22
He says,"I learned a lesson while I was walking on the banks of the river Sen in Paris."
1:04:27
He said, 'I looked at some I was with my wife and I looked at some flowers on the banks of the river Sen and I realized that the sun hit the flowers in a certain way, but then when there was some cloud cover, the sun disappeared and the flowers could like take the nutrients gotten from the sun and metabolize them and then the sun would come back and then the sun would disappear.
1:04:49
And he said, "In that moment, I saw a metaphor for leadership."
1:04:53
He said, "That season, I had been too much like a bright sun, always on my team, never listening to them, never paying attention to what they wanted.
1:05:03
I was just always in their face.
1:05:05
I was so aggressive and I was badly disliked because I didn't actually understand what they needed."
1:05:09
He said, "When I saw those flowers, I said, "Oh, my son has to disappear for a while at different moments and then it has to come back."
1:05:17
Who the hell speaks like that?
1:05:20
[laughter] What professional athlete do you know that's talking about the banks of the river send in and some flowers?
1:05:25
I mean honestly have you ever seen an athlete and I was I regularly had this experience of he would reference Joseph Campbell in interviews with ESPN people and they're staring and I'm like okay good on you co you know that was the experience I was having and it it threw me.
1:05:39
I I just I didn't expect it.
1:05:41
you expect certain things and when it when it when it was when it would broke my expectations, I said, "Well, the world has to know about this."
1:05:48
>> And that's why I got so excited because you were telling me some of these stories and I'm like, "Wait, what?"
1:05:52
And then when I went and and watched some of those and listened, I was like, "Oh my god, this is a gold mine."
1:06:01
And what I think is cool is it, you know, obviously tragically >> he didn't get to do all of these things.
1:06:13
So I think the book too is kind of a testament to what a genius this guy actually was. >> Yeah.
1:06:19
And it and it is it is tragic. His life was cut short.
1:06:21
I always joke that this is the book he would have done.
1:06:23
He would have explained some of his principles.
1:06:25
He did it in a limited way with basketball through a book called uh Mamba mentality that was a coffee table book.
1:06:31
Um, but he never really put together a guide for the second half of his life.
1:06:35
The other reason this is a bit of a it's a it's a bittersweet story.
1:06:39
It's a tragic story is I really genuinely do think he would have been he would have built the next Disney.
1:06:43
Um, Grandity Studios was on a tear.
1:06:44
They had had successful books. They had had an Oscar. They had an Emmy.
1:06:48
They were doing all kinds of interesting work with interesting creative people.
1:06:52
And his ambition and he had studied Walt Disney, studied the life of Disney.
1:06:55
It was really to get the world to shake the image of him as a basketball player and to embrace the image of him as a writer and creative. And I love that.
1:07:04
I love people who fully are willing to shed one identity and go into another.
1:07:09
And it actually it's very interesting because one of the things that he said is his challenge >> was that he could always get a meeting because of his basketball, you know, uh uh accolades.
1:07:21
But the tough thing for him was finding people who weren't just willing to sign him on to do a project because he was Kobe Bryant the basketball player.
1:07:29
He wanted to work with people who saw him as Kobe Bryant the creative.
1:07:32
He said the great challenge in his life was that because any room he walked into, he was this guy who they knew in this one world.
1:07:36
He had to often reject partnerships, reject even investment opportunities that might have been lucrative because they didn't see him as a serious person. >> Yeah.
1:07:45
Well, your book will rectify that. Let's hope.
1:07:49
>> Um and and I think what what else is really interesting I have not I've [laughter] so I was telling my wife who is not a sports fan about the book and she's like wait what?
1:08:01
and and and immediately she's like, "Oh, I can't wait to read that book."
1:08:07
And and so it's, you know, it's one of the problems I have with labeling.
1:08:12
And we see it with authors. >> We totally do.
1:08:15
I was just getting to this.
1:08:17
>> You know, he he got put in the label of, you know, basketball superstar.
1:08:22
And that's how that's the lens people chose to look at him through incorrectly in my opinion.
1:08:27
But the same thing happens with authors, right?
1:08:30
We've been talking to authors who are bestsellers.
1:08:35
They have a real and long track record, but their publishers put them in a lane and they're like, "Nope."
1:08:43
They they have incredibly interesting projects, but nope, not that isn't the label for you. You can't do that. Talk a bit about that.
1:08:54
>> Yeah, it's been one of the most surprising things.
1:08:55
You would think success gives you a certain amount of permission and I think I'm sure I mean in every industry you'd think so but it turns out not to be true.
1:09:04
It's surprising in book publishing but you know we've been speaking to a number of authors where all they want to do is break out of the genre they've been in or to try something a little bit different.
1:09:15
One author in particular we've been in discussion with for a while.
1:09:17
You know he was a a particular kind of author in non-fiction.
1:09:20
sold many, many copies of his, hit the list, did all the traditional things, and he wrote a memoir, and his publisher said, "Well, you're not really a memoir guy, right?"
1:09:30
And his agent kind of had a similar reaction.
1:09:31
And you're thinking to yourself, like, why wouldn't you just take a flyer on this?
1:09:35
This guy made you millions of dollars.
1:09:37
Like, just take a flyer, right?
1:09:38
Maybe he is a memoir guy and you just don't know, right?
1:09:40
And it doesn't mean, by the way, that every author instinct is right.
1:09:44
The difference in this case is you've achieved a lot of success as an author.
1:09:48
You would think the publisher would give you a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, right?
1:09:53
And maybe there's limited resources and maybe there's limited time and you have to whatever the reasons, they said no to him.
1:09:59
It crushed a part of his creative life. He stuck it in a drawer.
1:10:02
He hasn't revisited it because you and I know it's also hard to be an author.
1:10:08
It's psychologically really difficult.
1:10:10
Something like that can actually lead you, no matter how much success you have, to stick it in and to believe what your agent said and what your publisher said.
1:10:17
you're not a memoir guy, right?
1:10:19
And I think that's one of the things that just like Hollywood, you know, the cultural commentary about Hollywood is it's gotten more riskaverse.
1:10:26
>> I think weirdly the publishing industry has gotten more riskaverse, but the risk is not really big risks.
1:10:30
Like these are not massively capital-intensive projects.
1:10:34
There is not a ton of capex in publishing the way there used to be, right?
1:10:38
the opex is still like there and it goes up and down and what you need, but given that the capex on a book is pretty low, you would think that publishers would encourage their authors to come to them with projects that are totally out of left field, right?
1:10:50
Uh in the on the theory that maybe this person has something to say, right?
1:10:55
That maybe this person can actually write a novel if they've been a non-fiction person or vice versa or they are a memoir guy even if they've done, you know, these other kinds of books.
1:11:04
We I one of the things we're explicitly doing is allowing and listening to authors who are coming to us with projects that are out of their swim lanes because we think like if you're successful in one area, we should at least take you seriously in this other area. >> Yeah.
1:11:18
And then, you know, let's bring it back to the marketing discussion that we were having, right?
1:11:22
So, let's say we publish the dial of Kobe um and it's doing really well, but we notice like it's skyrocketing in a very unusual place, right?
1:11:34
not in the areas where we would think and all of a sudden, you know, it's 5xing sales.
1:11:38
Let's stick with Omaha, right?
1:11:41
In Omaha, we also are building out um the ability to go directly, find podcasters, find Substack authors, find anyone who would be interested in that and then approach them.
1:11:58
Hey, uh you know, Jimmy's book is 5xing in Omaha.
1:12:00
It's something in the water. We don't know.
1:12:02
But um and but that's just going to be continuous.
1:12:08
There's there's going to be no end date on that. >> Yeah.
1:12:11
And I think this is one of the things that that publishing because again time famine, time pressure, the amount of books they have to publish, the amount of volume they're putting through the system.
1:12:18
You know, books can continue to sell in perpetuity. Yeah. Right.
1:12:22
You and I are still getting royalty checks from our books. Right.
1:12:25
And and so the idea of of a marketing window that is 2 to 3 weeks long after a book publication just doesn't make any sense, right?
1:12:31
Um, the classic example, by the way, is the founders. Yeah.
1:12:33
The day before founders debuted, Russia invaded Ukraine.
1:12:38
[laughter] >> What do you think?
1:12:40
What do you think they did for my potential news?
1:12:40
Like I was actually it was being a book party was hosted for me in DC by my friends and my friend who hosted the book party is a a big wig in the writing and political world.
1:12:51
And he came over to me and said, "Jimmy, uh, are you okay?
1:12:55
We've got a couple people here who are experts in European politics.
1:12:56
I think every on everybody's mind is the fact that Russia just invaded Ukraine.
1:13:00
would you mind if they say a few words before we get to your book event?
1:13:03
I was like, yeah, absolutely.
1:13:04
It throws everything off.
1:13:06
If I had only paid attention to the idea that the two week or three-week window for marketing and publishing is the only thing that matters, I never would have continued marketing my books later.
1:13:15
And publishers, unfortunately, are in a position where they have to move to the next book.
1:13:18
Our view is if we do a book on grief, grief is relevant six months from now.
1:13:24
It's relevant a year from now.
1:13:26
And to the extent that we can automate the marketing, we can continue to market over time and build an asset that becomes like an annuity for us and an annuity for the author. >> Yeah.
1:13:36
And it's just bad investment um methodology in my opinion.
1:13:40
Uh you know, that's the world I come from.
1:13:42
And I remember just thinking and just scratching my head and thinking this is just so stupid.
1:13:49
>> And it's one of those kind of cultural legacy things I think.
1:13:51
you know, you get back to prestige, you get back to, you know, publishing has always been run right where we're sitting.
1:13:58
And, you know, and it was basically if they weren't if the chattering classes weren't talking about it at a cocktail party >> right after debut, >> right? Yeah.
1:14:08
And >> then it ceases it ceases to matter.
1:14:12
>> It ceases to matter at all.
1:14:12
which again there are we we now have the technology the ability to put so many great people into the book market >> and it's I I think unprecedented in history you know the history of books right they they started out as novelty items that jewelers sold >> I I never knew that I didn't know that actually like they so what they would do is once the uh printing press was up and going.
1:14:44
Nobody like, "What the hell is this?"
1:14:46
And so what they would do is they would make these beautiful books and encrust them with jewels >> and they were given as gifts >> and and then of course you know good old Martin Luther and the need for Bibles in German interceded >> but like I don't think that we have ever had this kind of opportunity historically >> right >> there.
1:15:13
There are and that comes back to a question of taste, right?
1:15:15
I you know the the the one thing that cannot be automated is taste and you know authenticity, >> right?
1:15:24
>> Um and the but now our ability to find those people.
1:15:30
It's kind of like we did with the fellowships at Oshanas Ventures, right?
1:15:33
It's like there are so many incredibly talented, creative people in the world who due to whatever their geography or their background or they weren't here in the United States or they weren't in a major European city, we can find them now.
1:15:51
>> And there's so much human creativity that is being, in my opinion, wasted.
1:15:58
And that doesn't have to happen anymore. >> It doesn't.
1:15:59
And it's one of the things that our team is doing basically constantly is it it used to be that editors had more time to reach out to a promising voice and say you should really think about writing a book.
1:16:13
>> Yeah, >> we're doing more of that.
1:16:14
It there's one particular person I'm thinking of who we found a really good set of Substack commentary and posts from him and I reached out to him and he said, "Listen, I'm a fan.
1:16:25
Have you ever thought about doing a book?
1:16:26
You've got a really strong authoral voice.
1:16:28
you've got something to say, you've built an audience, you clearly know what's resonating, have you ever thought about doing a book?
1:16:34
And the entire team jumped on a on a Zoom with him and we basically helped him brainstorm a book.
1:16:39
If he does it with us would be amazing. We would love to do it.
1:16:43
But if he does it at all, good for the world, right?
1:16:45
About once to three times a day, I'm reaching out to somebody like that where I've just noticed something they're doing and I think there's a book in what they're doing.
1:16:54
And that is the way that you encourage people to create these Gutenberg era projects that still have lasting cultural value is you go find them and you say you can do this and then more importantly you build the kind of infrastructure that we're building willing to actually help. >> Yeah.
1:17:09
And that's the part that I think is is somewhat unique to us right in that um we are very willing to roll up our sleeves and and help develop a project. >> Yeah.
1:17:21
And the developmental editing, by the way, is is where a lot of the magic is.
1:17:25
Like, um, a good example, it's actually, this isn't developmental editing, but it is similar in spirit.
1:17:31
We're also reviving books. Yeah.
1:17:33
>> So, we're taking projects that were published, but that we thought kind of something somebody missed a trick somewhere.
1:17:38
We're we're trying to take those and revive them.
1:17:40
We bought a book recently, the rights to a book recently, where we're retitling it, redoing the cover, and editing the book itself.
1:17:46
And part of the magic of doing something like that is our team came together and it was our team and AI and we brainstormed and looked at all possible titles and we've come up with a short list of titles, right?
1:18:00
So we're basically gut I I describe it as we're gut renovating a book, right?
1:18:03
New title, new cover, new everything. Let's go for it.
1:18:07
And that is a different exercise than what a traditional publisher might do, right?
1:18:12
Because once a book is out the door for a traditional publisher, it's done.
1:18:15
There's no changes to be made.
1:18:17
There might be a 10th anniversary edition or a 25th anniversary edition if you're particularly good at selling, but what we're doing is saying, well, wait, there's a there's a good book here surrounded by a bunch of crap and other stuff.
1:18:29
Like, we we can get the good book out of this and put it back into the market.
1:18:32
And that itself is an exercise in just like respecting that we can learn about the audience.
1:18:38
We're testing those titles with the audience.
1:18:39
We're testing those idols with our team.
1:18:41
that is a little bit different than developmental editing or even developing new projects, but we're bringing that same focus and emphasis to it. >> Yeah.
1:18:50
And uh that book I had read it when it first came out.
1:18:53
It was marketed horribly.
1:18:55
They talk about burying the lead.
1:18:58
Like literally there was pure fire in that book.
1:19:02
Y >> but you wouldn't know it if you looked at any of the marketing for the book.
1:19:08
And after we acquired it, I went back and reread it and I'm like, "Holy shit."
1:19:14
Like, this is a real gem >> that just was handled incorrectly, >> right?
1:19:19
And you've got to ask yourself how many projects there are out there that are like that like where but for one or two things happening, you never would have heard of that author.
1:19:28
And we know those stories, right?
1:19:29
Slow Horses is the now the canonical example where the author struggled for years, didn't really see himself succeeding in literary life, but just kept writing one NPR piece and that that book took off and now he's a he's a legend and he's, you know, got all the the accolades that any author could hope for, right?
1:19:45
Boys in the boat, another classic example.
1:19:49
Book debuts, doesn't sell at all, but rowers pick it up and love it and that niche expands and out of that niche grows this book that then hits the Times list eight, nine months later.
1:19:58
There are story after story after story like this.
1:20:02
We are, I think, different in publishing in that we're actively looking for things that the market missed when they first debuted, but only because the debut window was like two weeks of focus and then nobody nobody bothered to pay attention after.
1:20:15
>> And one of the reasons I bought into this so easily was because there's a direct parallel from investing, >> right?
1:20:22
In investing, most people do very poorly because they're hyperbolic discounters of time, right?
1:20:28
So, it's because they let their emotions take over.
1:20:33
And let's say, you know, you're 40 years old, you're going to be working for at least another 25 years.
1:20:38
for at least another 25 years. and the market hits the skids and your time frame ceases to be this is for when I'm going to be 65 or 70 and it's oh my god I'm losing all my money right now and you make horrible decisions right
1:20:57
because you your perspective collapses right and one of the things that we always said was no our time horizons are infinite right and if your time horizons are infinite that the market becomes goes from being like a horribly risky thing to being like the least risky thing you could do. I would, you know,
1:21:18
I would, you know, give the example of, you know, when people panic, where do they put their money?
1:21:24
Usually in treasury, if you're in the United States, usually in US treasuries, which are is the closest thing you can find to riskless investments.
1:21:35
Well, that's true over short periods of time.
1:21:38
However, if you start back where we have data in 1927 and you take it all the way to today, what looks like the least risky investment actually is the most risky because a dollar invested back in 1928 or 27 grows to about a $1.
1:21:55
90 whereas the same dollar invested in like an S&P proxy grows to the hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
1:22:04
But you see that happening everywhere, right? It's not just investing. It's marketing of books.
1:22:10
It's the t the the time horizon.
1:22:17
It's really an arbitrage that we're doing because so many people have these short-term time horizons which are completely not optimal. >> Yeah. >> Right.
1:22:25
And it makes you make decisions that are really, really bad. >> Right.
1:22:31
I think the other thing is that for publishers, it puts so much pressure on continuing to fill the pipeline with new projects because you're never really taking full advantage of the projects you already published.
1:22:40
And so from our perspective, if we did fewer books that sold way better, the math works for us, right?
1:22:48
That means we have to be very careful about the bets we place and really overinvest on continuing to market for a long period of time.
1:22:53
But the idea is very simply that like the other way to do it is to try to publish a lot of books and hope hope that something works out.
1:23:03
And that's where a big part of this disconnect that we've been talking about in this entire conversation comes in because they're placing so many bets that our your book my book kind of like maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but we've got to move on.
1:23:17
Um our hope is that with many many months and even years of marketing in different ways, some light touch, some bigger, we can actually like make these entities profitable over a long period of time. >> Yeah.
1:23:31
And the the backup there of course is that we are building to be able to scale.
1:23:36
Um because uh you know maybe I'm insane and crazy but authors who suddenly are getting between 50 and 70% depending on their needs of the royalty um and going with a publisher who understands that if nobody knows about your book nobody's going to buy your book.
1:23:58
Y >> um I suspect that we will face that problem at some point in the future, but we will always bring what we bring right now, which is taste discrimination and you know, is this something that like we really can get behind and and believe in. >> Yeah.
1:24:17
And even now we're saying no more than we say yes because we do have a lot of pitches and we want to do a good job with the projects we have, but it's there is going to come a time when, you know, we're able to say we're able to give more yeses.
1:24:29
And when our volume becomes bigger, but even then we just talked about attention to detail, really investing in each book, that's going to matter to us.
1:24:36
I'd rather have a portfolio of 200 books that like are really on fire that like shape a cultural conversation than 2,000 books with like a handful of winners. Yeah. Right.
1:24:46
I think we'll be able to do both.
1:24:48
And uh what has surprised you the most changing hats becoming uh well we're both kind of coach players uh but from the point of view of becoming the publisher >> right >> what's surprised you in a in a positive or negative way >> um that you were like huh I never I didn't expect that >> I would have thought there'd be a lot more skepticism from agents about our business model and about what we're doing. Yeah.
1:25:15
>> So agents for, you know, for those who are listening who aren't super familiar with the book business, if you're an author, let's say from 10 years ago, you would write a proposal, you would find an agent, and that agent would get you a book deal.
1:25:24
We had I had I had thought that because we were a newer, smaller publisher, even though we're trying to do everything right, I would have thought agents would have been the first to say, "You're not quite what we're looking for." Right?
1:25:37
It turns out it's the exact opposite.
1:25:39
because we are actually having conversations with authors, because we're willing to even entertain pitches, because we're trying to do some things differently, because our royalty split is 70% in the direction of the author, 30% in the direction of the publisher.
1:25:52
It's the agents who have actually been most excited to have conversations with us.
1:25:56
I never in a million years would have anticipated that.
1:25:58
I thought we were going to get the cold shoulder from agents and we were going to have to go direct to authors and basically run like a a gorilla effort, a grassroots effort to win the business.
1:26:07
No, it's been the opposite.
1:26:08
agents are coming to us with projects and saying, "Listen, people are turning this down for stupid reasons.
1:26:14
You've got to take a look at this."
1:26:14
And we have signed, I think, like three, maybe four agented projects in addition to the ones that we've done without agents.
1:26:20
That's been the most surprising thing to me.
1:26:23
>> Yeah, that surprised me a lot as well.
1:26:26
Um, and and the the level of the enthusiasm from agents really surprised me. Yeah.
1:26:36
>> And you know, it's but then when you kind of think about it, just think of all of the projects that they've seen that they're like, "This is amazing."
1:26:47
And then for whatever reason, they can't make that sale.
1:26:50
>> And and that was another thing we leaned into, right?
1:26:53
Like that's how we approached some of our agents.
1:26:55
And um you know, it it was the magnitude was very very surprising to me. >> Yeah.
1:27:04
I think the other thing that happens if you're an author, if you're in that position, you take a project, you managed to land an agent. Wow, what a big deal.
1:27:10
Your agent's excited, your agent takes the project out to other people, they're like, "We don't know."
1:27:16
They've sent it to what, the 20 contacts on their list. That's it. The project dies.
1:27:20
How many projects are basically either finished or near finished or good proposals that just didn't get an audience because of whatever reason?
1:27:28
Like my hope is we find a bunch of diamonds in the rough and we manage to get them, polish them, publish them, make them into something.
1:27:34
It it would seem to me and in fact I know for sure that there are a bunch of authors who are sitting on projects that have a lot of promise but the industry just turned them down for not very good reasons. >> Yeah.
1:27:48
And the the final thing I want to talk about is there are other things that baffle both of us. Let's talk audiobooks.
1:27:59
I'm not a huge audiobook guy. >> My wife is.
1:28:02
She's a maniacal walker and so she listens to maybe a book uh in two days.
1:28:11
>> Um but when you when you told me about some of the stats I I was like what? Yeah.
1:28:18
So if you know you talked about this distinction between bits and atoms in this business, right?
1:28:21
That the that the business of publishing is focused on atoms physical books.
1:28:26
Twothirds of contemporary readers are reading in bits.
1:28:30
They're reading on ebooks and on audio.
1:28:33
In some categories week over week sales in audio are north of 50%.
1:28:36
My books north of 50% of my total units of sale in a given week are on audio.
1:28:42
So you have an industry that's focused on what 30 to 20 to 30% of the the actual book where of of the total units of a given book sold while more than 50% are being basically ignored. Right.
1:28:56
Audio books for a long time had basically been regarded as like the secondass citizens of books. >> Totally.
1:29:03
>> And that has to change and that's something we're trying to change um in our own ways big and small.
1:29:08
Encouraging authors to read their own books, right? That's a big part of it.
1:29:12
An author is going to get their pronunciation right.
1:29:14
They're going to get the syllables right.
1:29:15
They're going to get the stresses, the emotion, the tenor, all that stuff right.
1:29:18
We're also trying to experiment with AI. >> Yeah.
1:29:20
Like AI involved in production in audio can dramatically reduce the cost of audiobooks.
1:29:25
Cost the cost of audiobooks can still run into the into the thousands, sometimes over $10,000 to produce an audio book.
1:29:32
It shouldn't be that way anymore.
1:29:33
Like the the equipment is widely available.
1:29:35
Studios are easily accessible.
1:29:37
You don't even really need a studio these days to make high quality audio.
1:29:40
We just need a revolution in audiobooks because they are the part of the business that basically time forgot Audible 8 and you know now Spotify and others are playing in that field.
1:29:50
It just there needs to be more rethinking there.
1:29:53
We're at the early stages of doing that.
1:29:54
The other thing is that's important is the audiobook doesn't have to be a carbon copy of the actual book.
1:29:59
We're going to be experimenting with some ways in which the audiobook can be a little bit different. >> Yeah.
1:30:03
And again back to my project, it's going to be really different.
1:30:06
[laughter] So, kind of before I ask you to be emperor of the world, you you you've been with me before, uh, so you've had lots of shots on goal on being emperor of the world, right?
1:30:21
>> But like, what would, if you're sitting in 2030, >> what would you love to be saying about what happened with Infinite Books and and why?
1:30:36
like what are your north stars?
1:30:39
>> We made many of our authors millionaires.
1:30:43
>> Yeah, >> that's important.
1:30:43
Uh people don't want to talk about the commerce side of this business, but creativity is ultimately a struggle of time versus resources, right?
1:30:52
Like anybody can be creative if given enough time, but most people run out of resources.
1:30:56
Resources can be health, resources can be your age, resources can be money.
1:30:59
Money matters in the world of publishing.
1:31:01
So one northstar for me is have we made an author a millionaire?
1:31:05
Because if we have, by the way, Infinite Books has done well also.
1:31:09
But the point is that I want to be the place where we say our goal explicitly is to make millionaires out of our authors. Why?
1:31:16
Because then they keep getting to be authors. That's the whole point. The whole point.
1:31:20
It's like they could buy nice things, but most authors I know are actually kind of goofily nerdy.
1:31:25
They actually care a lot more about just having time to do their nerdy thing than about like buying a Maserati.
1:31:31
If they want to buy one, fine, go ahead.
1:31:33
But we want to make our authors millionaires.
1:31:34
The second is we want to keep the quality level of our books exceptionally high. Right?
1:31:39
You can measure that in all kinds of different ways, but we don't want to be the place where you send we don't want to be the thing that we're criticizing where if there's a book in the system and it's not a famous name, we don't care about it, it doesn't get any editing support, it doesn't get any marketing support, right?
1:31:55
That I don't want to do that.
1:31:55
So, it's sort of like we kept the quality very very very high.
1:31:58
And then the last thing is I would say we managed to find audiences in international markets in a way nobody had before.
1:32:08
You and I both know the international part of this business is broken.
1:32:11
We haven't really begun to push our push the limit on our experiments there.
1:32:16
But my view is like the reading public is much bigger than America. >> Yeah.
1:32:21
>> The market for reaching those pe the the mechanisms for reaching those people are underdeveloped.
1:32:25
So there's an undercooked process for foreign rights, foreign translations, foreign publishing.
1:32:30
I would hope that in the next five years, given where AI is, that we could crack that code, and I think we can.
1:32:37
>> And uh we're doing a special thing with my book, which I'm going to keep secret, but uh that'll that'll be a big swing.
1:32:44
Um but you're absolutely right.
1:32:44
I I think all of those are laudable.
1:32:47
And and I and I think the idea that like we have to talk about commerce >> because your point is a very valid one, right?
1:33:00
Like if we can make our authors millionaires, they get to keep writing. >> That's it.
1:33:05
>> It's [laughter] a whole thing, >> right?
1:33:06
And and it's also like it it is doing a book shouldn't be a privilege reserved for like a small clutch of people who can do it because they can afford it because they have some other means of of keeping themsel keeping the lights on.
1:33:17
like it's it's uh we're not we're not running a charity. It's a business.
1:33:22
But the idea is like we're providing incentive alignment in a way that I think is powerful because a 7030 author royalty split with no advance also means the author's got to hustle to sell.
1:33:31
We have to hustle to sell as a publisher, but so is the author.
1:33:33
But if they hustle to sell, if they work their hearts out, they should get rich doing it.
1:33:39
There's like not that that's just lo that's just logical for us. It's just intuitive. >> Totally agree.
1:33:44
And uh I'm I'm incredibly excited about what uh we're doing right now with it.
1:33:51
Um it uh I I I didn't I didn't think that I was going to love it nearly as much as I do, [laughter] but like >> Well, that's that's that's surprising.
1:34:02
>> Like like Well, I mean I you know, it was the is when you and I started talking about it and it was that recognition. Wait a minute. >> Same problems.
1:34:11
same problems that I was facing 20 years ago are still plaguing authors today.
1:34:17
That's something that is arbitrated.
1:34:19
You you can arbitrage it and you can fix it.
1:34:21
And that's what we're trying to do.
1:34:23
Well, as you know, uh having been on infinite loops in the past, we your final question is always we're going to wave a wand, make you emperor of the universe. Can't kill anyone.
1:34:35
You can't put anyone in a re-education camp.
1:34:38
But what you can do is incept people like that famous movie.
1:34:44
You can say, "We're going to give you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it and everybody alive on the planet is going to wake up whenever their tomorrow is and they're going to say, "Wow, I just had two of the greatest ideas."
1:34:57
And unlike all the other times when I never did anything about it, I'm going to start working on both of these today.
1:35:03
What are you going to accept?
1:35:06
people for in whatever line of work be a problem author, right?
1:35:10
Actually, like be the person that pushes your industry to to uh rethink how it's done things.
1:35:14
It's only problem authors that get the industry to change, right?
1:35:18
And you and I are a pair of problem authors now building a publisher, which is kind of fun.
1:35:23
And that that to me is actually really important because authors have more power than they do.
1:35:28
But people in any line of work generally have more power than they think they have.
1:35:30
So be a bit of a problem author is probably one.
1:35:35
And the second, think of the story you can't shake, right?
1:35:37
Like, like there are just some stories that you can't shake that just you keep coming back to and they bother the hell out of you.
1:35:44
And if you think hard enough about that story you can't shake, there's like a reason why.
1:35:50
Whether that comes out in the form of a documentary, a podcast, a an email you send to a friend, a book you write, a piece you write online on Substack, do something about the story you can't shake.
1:36:02
Because I do find like the things that became my books were stories that I just like could not I was so annoyed.
1:36:07
I was so annoyed that there wasn't something out there that I was like I've got to do something about this. So those are the two.
1:36:14
>> I I love the second one because that's why I'm writing the fiction book. >> There you go.
1:36:18
>> I I got a letter in real life from an interesting person and I immediately spun up a story about it which was I used to love doing fictional treatments.
1:36:31
uh never did anything with it, but I couldn't shake it for and that was 30 years ago.
1:36:36
And so what's really interesting is the story I spun up back then >> completely different. >> That's right. >> Of course.
1:36:45
But it was because, you know, I just couldn't keep thinking about it.
1:36:49
I just kept thinking about it.
1:36:49
And so I'm I'm I think that's great advice.
1:36:54
Jimmy, as always, great to have you on and great to see you. This is great.