Chandler Bolt [00:00:03] Hey, Chandler over here. And joining me today is Nate Hambrick. Nate is a publishing strategist at self-publishing dot com, where he creates blueprints for authors to write, publish and market their books effectively. He’s also the author of Crush Your Kryptonite. Which fun fact? Yeah, there it is. If you’re watching the YouTube version, you can see it. But that book was number. It was number one in its category as a number one bestseller for 135 days straight, which is fun fact. And over the years, Nate has had one on one conversations with aspiring authors, oftentimes as they’re getting started and deciding, hey, do I do this? Do I not? Or self-publishing that can do or not get this 2931 calls and by the time you’re listening to this is probably a lot more than that. And so he helps people kind of get clear on their goals, take the next step. And he’s been the reason why, Gosh, at this point, definitely hundreds of people have published their book is because they first talk with Nate. So today what we want to talk about is really a couple of things. So obviously he’s had a lot of success with his book. So we’re going to talk about that, how he did it behind the scenes and not just write a lot, but long term success and the book still selling. Then my thought, which is I think that’s something that’s unique to Nate that not a lot of authors can say. So we’re gonna talk about that. But then we’re also going to talk about on the tail end 20 and 31 conversations, one on one with authors. Like what are the things that you can learn from that Nate has seen with those folks that you can either avoid, emulate or just kind of learn from that experience. So that’s what we’ll be talking about today. Nate, welcome. Great to have you here.
Nate Hambrick [00:01:44] Thanks so much. I’m pumped to get to hang out with you.
Chandler Bolt [00:01:48] So let’s start with this. Why did you decide to write your book Crasher Kryptonite? So I actually maybe two parter. Why did you decide to write the book? And then why do you think it’s sold so well?
Nate Hambrick [00:01:58] Yes. So I like many authors, I don’t even think you know this. Chandler, I wanted to write Crash Your Kryptonite at like 19, maybe 19 and a half. I was a sophomore in college, and I said, You know what? There’s so many other, you know, students at the time beside me that if they just got rid of the one or two things that are horrible habits that are keeping them average, they would like this world on fire. And so I actually had the title of Crash Your Kryptonite, I believe I was 19, maybe 20 at the latest. And I did what most authors do where I had tomorrow’s syndrome, where I said, you know what? I’m definitely going to write that book tomorrow. And then you know how it is tomorrow turns into next week, which is next year. There’s always that next thing. And then after it was probably seven, eight years later, I had one friend publish a book and then a second friend publish a book and then a third. And then by the time my fourth friend was publishing a book, I said, Nate, you’re such an idiot. Your books literally about crushing your kryptonite and you still haven’t published the darn thing. Go get help. And so I got help. And it’s funny how much faster stuff happens whenever you have somebody that’s done this a thousand times that can just coach you through the process. There’s so many things I didn’t even know I needed to know. And probably even more than that, just knowing that I was going to talk to my coach on Tuesday was just like such a motivation to get it done. Because if it’s not urgent, right, you can talk about writing the book forever and just never get it done. That’s kind of how that that’s the origin story of crushed Your kryptonite. And then with that, I think the reason it’s just done so well, I mean, it is something that people can resonate with. I didn’t market test a lot. This is one of eight covers. I market tested it with over 600 people and out of the eight covers, 297 of them picked this cover. Oh, by the way, this was not my favorite cover. And so I had that ego check where I could either do the thing I want to do or do the thing I know that’s going to work. And so there’s a lot of things that went into the success. But I think just, you know, getting help from the right people that had done ten times that I was trying to do and then calling my shot, I told all my friends, Hey, this is going to be the number one business consulting and PR book on Amazon every day for 90 days. And then I just came up with the plan. I hit it, and then by the time I hit day 91, I was like, You know what? I’m as well just keep going for a little bit longer. So that’s how I got it.
Chandler Bolt [00:04:24] So commitment to the goal, having a clear goal, getting help and working. Obviously working with your coach itself, not come with a. Remind me, did you already started writing the book before you started working here, or did you write it? You start writing it afterwards.
Nate Hambrick [00:04:41] So it would be a generous statement to say that I started writing the book.
Chandler Bolt [00:04:45] Yeah, I read the.
Nate Hambrick [00:04:46] Book, but it was awful. I’m pretty sure nothing that I had written made the final cut. Obviously, you know, the concepts ended up in the book. But yeah, I started, you know, the first couple chapters, I guess I started, you know, at 19. I didn’t publish till I was 29, so. The ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff draft was started eight years prior.
Chandler Bolt [00:05:09] Got it. Now, obviously the book’s doing really well now and consistently selling and all that good stuff. Did you like did you have a strong watch? Was it kind of a normal launch and you feel like were you separated is on the long tail and continue to market it? What was that process like?
Nate Hambrick [00:05:26] Yeah. So I think the main difference between my book and a lot of other authors is they’ll have a really, really killer launch for ten days. And even though that’s great, right, and they get to brag about their friend, brag to their friends about how successful they were bragging about ten days of success, like nobody cares. You know, it’s the one hit wonder. I call it the Billy Ray Cyrus, Right? He had the one song when her parents were young and nobody cares. Right? Versus having a launch that’s just really, really consistent. And so all of the stuff that I did, like, I created virtually nothing. All of the gold that I did in my launch, my marketing plan and all that I stole from somebody else. Like I took that knowledge from somebody that knew that it would work. The difference is, is instead of doing ten days of that, so doing 30 days of that, I mapped out the entire 90 days of what I was going to do. And so what that did for me and what this does for a lot of authors is it gives you the power back, right? I heard this yesterday. I actually had a podcast that a guy said, Hope is a bad marketing strategy.
Chandler Bolt [00:06:30] You laughed.
Nate Hambrick [00:06:31] So hard. It’s a business strategy. It’s a bad marketing strategy. It’s a bad everything strategy. So if you’re like, Hey, I’ve got a really good plan for ten days. I hope I hope my book does really, really well. I will promise you it will not. But if you have a long enough strategy, I’m a firm believer that if you have a long enough strategy, you commit to the process and the investment of what it’s going to take. There’s like a 99% chance that you will hit it. I don’t think there’s really any luck. Now, for some people there is luck, but I just I don’t believe in relying on luck like but a strategy together, go make it happen and you’ll be amazed what you can accomplish.
Chandler Bolt [00:07:13] Hmm. That’s really good. Now, you talked about that 90 day plan when you published the book. What did that look like? And I feel like either you just said it or I’ve heard you say it before, is like you were intentional about I’m going to do one thing every day to market the book. But what if that kind of 90 day plan look like and anything practical that that people listening to, they could say, Oh, cool, I’m going to integrate this in my 90 day plan.
Nate Hambrick [00:07:38] Yeah. So for people that work with self-publishing dot com, I actually put it all together in a tool. I spent like 200 hours putting together this beautiful tool that I call the number one for 101 days marketing tool that literally walks through every single day like just the simple day by day stuff that I did myself. But if I were to really boil it down to two things, I believe that selling anything, selling cars, selling books, doesn’t matter what you’re selling, can be boiled down to two principles credibility and visibility. Right. If you are credible and if you are visible, you’re going to sell a lot of whatever it is you’re selling. Okay. Now, there are lots of different ways that you can be credible. There are lots of different ways that you can be visible. The way that I sell books is different from a lot of the other authors that I respect. They sell it in a different way. That’s okay. But I really I think for a lot of authors, just simplifying the process is very, very helpful because they get lost in all these like a cost strategies and all of these like you watch these YouTube videos on on marketing and you can just get lost in the sauce. And although they’re really, really helpful and don’t get me wrong, I definitely implement those tools to improve my conversion rate so I am profitable. That’s not why I’m selling books. I’m selling books because I look credible and I’m very, very visible. And so to answer your question, during those 90 days, every single week, I just had a review goal and for most weeks it was 15 reviews that week. So about two a day. And whenever I simplify that, it becomes a lot easier. So all I had to do was, you know, let’s say ask five five of my friends at the beginning for review. Follow up with a simple as that is something anybody can do, right? And if you don’t have that many friends, ask acquaintances. I had a rule, you know, I pull out my cell phone if I can remember their face. They were getting a text from me asking me for asking them for a review. I had people from high school, college, all of that. And so because I just broke it down to bite sized chunks, you know, you do 15 reviews every single week for a couple of months. Boom, You’ve got a few hundred reviews now and then. You know, everything kind of builds on itself because you have reviews. Now you can sell more books, and when you sell more books, you can get more reviews, you look more credible. So it really is about a momentum game, just doing something small. It’s all small stuff, but you do it every day and it leads you to wonderful places.
Chandler Bolt [00:10:07] Consistency. That’s great. That’s really great. And I would back up to second in case people missed that or don’t know. So a course is Amazon cost of sales. It’s advertising term when you’re down in your ads and we’ll talk about that a little bit later when we talk about ads. So you touched on reviews. That was one of the thing I wanted to talk about because you you’ve done a really great job of this. And, you know, side note, you know, you just gave a talk at our online challenge that we just did. It was one of the most people freaking loved it. It was like one of the Eagles favorite sessions. And Nate’s giving a talk and author of Change Live. So Gravity Gravity Gift for Author Vintage Live if you haven’t already, Author Advantage Mlive.com. We’ll talk about that later. But you touched on kind of that that that credibility invisibility principle in that training and reviews and ads were kind of the two buckets you were really talking a lot about. Obviously, you’ve done a great job with reviews, you know, looking right now as we record this interview, over 440 ratings and reviews on the book. You talked about the 15 review per week strategy. Anything else that you did that worked well to get more reviews?
Nate Hambrick [00:11:18] Yeah. I mean, there’s there’s a couple different things. The first place that you want to go to for reviews are friends and family. So just ask as many people as you know and then just follow up with them. I turn it into a game and so I use a name generator. You can just go to Google and just type in the generator and I’ll send up funny names, kind of teasing them for why they haven’t left me reviews. And it kind of just makes the process a little bit more fun. So I’m not breathing down my friend’s necks and bothering them for reviews because your friends want to help you. They just, you know, they overthink the process. So the first place that you go to get reviews is going to be with other friends. The second place is with other authors. I think this is the easiest place to get a review because if you say, Hey Nate, will you give me a review? I will 100% get you a review in the timeframe. I told you I would take it to the bank. There’s no you don’t need to follow up with me, you know. I’ll give it hundreds of reviews. Zero follow up required. I’m going to get you a review. Right. And so I just ask a lot of authors and this is something, you know, is a great reminder. I’ve gotten 67 reviews in the last four weeks. The vast majority of those came from other authors of just saying, Hey, I see you’re launching. You want to help me out with a review, I’ll help you out. Two zero Follow up required super painless. You just do it. And it’s just the boring legwork. So that’s the second place. And then the third place is with review sites and there are a couple of different review sites I like publish just because it’s, you know, there’s great accountability. You give somebody review, they’ll find a different author that hasn’t that you didn’t review to review your book that way everything’s Amazon compliant and you just do it. So getting reviews is just boring work, but it works. And I’m actually inspired by a guy named Ed, my lab. I actually know one of the guys that was a part of his launch team, and what Ed did is he literally got like 800 people in one conference room to get him reviews on his book, The Most Impressive, Spectacular launch I’ve ever heard Of. And if you go to his book, you can see roughly 1800 reviews on his book within like 7 to 10 days. And so it’s really boring work, right? Or in his case, expensive, right? He had to rent the conference building. He had to convince the thousand 800 people to show up to do this thing because this.
Chandler Bolt [00:13:36] Was in person. This wasn’t virtual.
Nate Hambrick [00:13:38] Yeah, it was in person. Yeah. This is, what, four or five months ago? Something like that. Probably seven months. But you get the point. But at the end of the day, you know, his book had well over 2000 reviews within a couple of weeks. And his book is absolutely killing it. But it’s because he did the boring work. He invested in it. He came up with the plan and then you just executed on it. So getting this is not rocket science, right? There’s no magic to it. It’s just doing things that should probably work and then doing them consistently all the time, forever. And that’s the hardest part. And that’s one of the lessons that I learned from one of my heroes, you know, personally, actually, my Gawker is I realize, Oh, wait, this guy’s still asking people for reviews. And his books been out for three years like he’s doing. Forget about the 90 days. Try the 900 days with my Gawker. And there is a reason that he’s doing so well.
Chandler Bolt [00:14:35] Yeah, that’s really great. I want to talk about book sales overall. What are so many questions I could ask Sammy? Maybe go with this? I guess just for starters, big picture, what was what has been the two or three things that you’ve seen that sold the most copies of your book?
Nate Hambrick [00:14:55] Yeah, I’d say. Well, book promo sites. Book promo sites are my bread and butter. I do a lot of different strategies. I would say I do a few strategies a lot. So I’ll do Amazon ads. I’ll do podcasts like this one. You know, I’ve done a couple live events and that kind of thing, but the easiest place in my opinion is going to be through book promo sites, primarily book club. I love book club, depending on your genre. They’ve got over 10 million subscribers and they have over 10 million fiction readers just on book club. I don’t know the exact number for business books. It’s over 2 million though, so that’s 2 million authors that I can target with my book that want to hear about people like me. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. And so, yeah, I mean, I sold several thousand copies on book, but just like that. And so that’s my favorite place to market being definitely try, you know, try Amazon ads definitely recommend that, especially for your hardcovers and your paperbacks, do podcasts, you know, make sure that you’re branded well. So get A-plus content if you don’t know what A-plus content is. For those of you listening, it’s these big, beautiful images that you can put on your Amazon page that make you look professional. There’s lots of things like that. Obviously, Echo’s important, so it’s impossible for me to say one thing, but it really does come back to credibility and visibility. So if you’re asking, how do I make my book visible? Really, really, really good SEO, right? Keyword and category research. Knowing exactly where all my competitors are and how many books they’re selling on any given day, and then just driving a ton of traffic to them. And that’s that’s really the key to it.
Chandler Bolt [00:16:35] Hmm. So let’s unpack the book, promo sites and ads. And this is something I feel like people really resonated with from your training with the Challenge Group the other week is, So what are the types of ads that you’re running? What’s the difference between an ad and a promo site? Yeah, maybe. Let’s start there and then we can unpack it further.
Nate Hambrick [00:16:55] Okay. So when we talk about ads, I would think about, you know, Facebook ads. You can sell books there. Amazon ads is the number one place you’ll sell books because. Like you say in your Ted Ted talk, people have their credit card on file. So it’s an easy sale. So Amazon ads, Facebook ads, you can do YouTube ads, especially for authors that are using their book to sell some sort of course or business. A lot of the big, you know, real estate investor guys do that. So that’s kind of the ad side of things. And then book promo sites, there’s a whole bunch of different book promo sites, their email marketing. So these promo sites vary from anywhere from 100,000 book subscribers to book club, which is, I’m going to guess 14 million subscribers, something like that. Most of them, you just pay a flat fee and they’ll just send out a blast of your book. So those are really, really great, especially if you don’t know how to do advertising or you’ve never run Google AdWords or anything like that, you literally just pay them and it gets you a pretty decent return for your money. My favorite one, though, is Bookbag, because they are so massive. Instead of just sending out an email blast, you can actually pick who you’re going to market to. And there’s two ways that you can market, whether it’s Bookbag or Amazon or Facebook or whatever. If we if you are doing an actual marketing ad strategy, there’s two main ways that you can do it. You can either cast a really wide net and just send your ad to everybody knowing that, you know, a fraction of 1% of those people will click on your ad or you can do the sniper approach and go after a specific buyer that is body specific product. I recommend doing both. Okay. So the way that I think about, you know, casting a wide net, right? If you’re driving down the highway, you see that McDonald’s billboard, you see that Coca-Cola billboard and you’re driving down the highway and you think to yourself, why is Coca-Cola spending millions of dollars to tell me about a product that I clearly already know about? The reason they’re doing that is because it keeps their product top of mind. So it’s subconscious, right? Nobody’s like veering off the highway right then.
Chandler Bolt [00:19:03] Yeah.
Nate Hambrick [00:19:05] Right. If that’s you, then fine, Maybe it’s 2:00 in the morning. But most people don’t do that. But two weeks later, they’re at the grocery store, they’re picking up drinks, they put a coke in their cart, and they have no idea that it’s because some marketing nerd marketed to two weeks ago on IE 35. And so with that, you could just market to a broad group of people. So both on Amazon ads and book club, you can market to giant categories. Like I could just send this to 2 million people that read business books. And typically my conversion rate is about 3% of 1%. So I think it’s one out of 34,000 people click on my ad. So we’re talking about like the tiniest fraction of a percent, but it’s a very cheap way to show this book to 5 million people. Just really, really cheap. A couple hundred bucks done with the niche marketing. I can specifically go after certain people that have bought certain products, and that’s where you have to develop a skill set, right? This is where you start to have to learn the skill set because you can’t just target anybody. But if you realize that, hey, there’s this specific self-help author, this is sort of Christian author, fantasy author, whomever, that they have an audience that’s really engaged with my product. Your conversion rate can be a lot higher, typically about 3%. So it’s about 100 times higher of the click through rate. My highest targeting campaigns are somewhere around 8 to 10%. So if I can find an author where 8 to 10% of them click on my ad, I’m going to be insanely profitable. And the more profitable you are, the more you can afford to sell your book. And that was kind of a shift in my mind, is I think a lot of people, myself included, think that you sell a ton of books and then you make money. And though that is true, really the name of the game is figuring out how to afford to market your book enough so you can sell enough books to make a ton of money. And so you really do want to have a profitable ad campaign because until you do, you’re going to be forking out money hand over fist and you really can’t sell books for very long, like you’re going to have to give up or just call it a really expensive hobby. And I can tell you like it’s way more fun when you’re selling books, so you know you’re out to build that skill set, get yourself some way somehow, and then you have a war chest of funds that you can just throw into the marketplace to sell more books.
Chandler Bolt [00:21:40] Hmm. That’s great. I heard Perry Marshall talk about one time that your first thousand dollars that you spend in online advertising is is investing in your education. And I think a lot of people are like, if it’s their first 100 or the first 300 is like, oh, it didn’t work. Okay, I guess it doesn’t work. But that that feeling of, okay, I’m paying for an education and then I’m going to learn and kind of dial in this strategy. So I guess for you, can you speak to that? How long did it take to where you feel like it’s where you felt like it was? You were really comfortable with it and it was starting to work.
Nate Hambrick [00:22:13] Well, I got help. So like I mentioned earlier, like I stole all of the best strategies. So I already felt pretty darn confident that what I was going to do was going to work, not because I had personally done it, but because I was implementing the strategies of people that had gone before me. So I was pretty confident that it was going to work. But there is still a learning curve, right? I would say to the to the Perry Marshall quote. Perry’s lucky was just a thousand. It’s probably way better. Right? Like, that is a.
Chandler Bolt [00:22:42] That is a.
Nate Hambrick [00:22:43] Optimistic number. But but you can learn from other people and so you can steal what they’ve got and then figure it out from there. I would say it probably took me about 45 to 60 days, so probably a month and a half, two months before I really felt confident that I could call my shot with all of these ads. Right. Because my first started the way I was keeping myself. Number one is I’d run six ad campaigns knowing that three of them were going to be total flops. But I was just running enough to make it work. After a while, though, you want to start tightening up that budget and making sure that you’re really winning. And so I’d say probably a month and a half, two months, I started to gain my, you know, my sea legs. But ultimately, I never stopped learning. And that’s the thing that I’ve learned about from a lot of people that have mastery in any group is the masters are the ones that keep learning the fastest for the longest. And a lot of times you can see your hero and think, Wow, you’re a thousand times further ahead than me, so you’ve got it figured out. But the reality is, is most likely they’re a thousand times ahead of you and they’re learning at a quicker rate than you are. And so you never stop learning. And so I’m working on two new books right now, and I am developing my marketing strategy six months out. I am learning all sorts of new techniques for Facebook ads, for influencers, things that I didn’t do last time. I’m going to add it to my current strategies because I want to, you know, I want to ten x what I did last time. So even though, you know, it’s great to say, oh, it was number one on Amazon and business consulting and PR for 135 days, that is not the finish line. That’s my ground like that. That’s the threshold. What am I actually capable of? Right. And I don’t know the answer to that. Right. I’m still you know, I’m still figuring that out. But I want to do much better than I did last time.
Chandler Bolt [00:24:36] Hmm. That’s great. I love that mentality. So let’s switch gears just a little bit. And I want to talk about get super practical about people who want to take the next steps with their books. And so obviously, I mentioned this at the top. You’ve talked to 2009 and 31 people doing a publishing consultation call. So, hey, what are your goals for your book? What are your challenges with your book, your next steps? How can we help? Right. And so I kind of hit the starting point. So maybe people are listening to this or watching this. They’re thinking about booking a call with you or with us to talk about their book. Maybe they’ve already booked a call and they’re watching or listening to this kind of in the interim, or they’re just in the process trying to trying to figure out how to make take next step. So I want to walk through kind of some of the things that you’ve learned in the trenches on those calls that will hopefully be helpful with for people. So I guess the first thing. What’s the biggest thing that you’ve seen that keeps people from getting started with their book or keeps people from on that call being like, All right, I’m going to commit to this book today. Right now, we’re moving forward.
Nate Hambrick [00:25:37] I think, you know, pre-commitment jitters, they’re a real thing and I can’t judge anybody. Like I told myself, I was going to commit to my book for eight years, so it’s just a natural human thing. But the more books that I read, I read a lot of self-help books last year, I read 60 plus self-help books. And the more books that I read and the more life that I lived, the more that I realized that unhappiest whenever I just decide I’m going to do the thing and just commit to it. And so I think the biggest thing that holds people back is they do what I used to do where I told myself, I’ll do this tomorrow, okay, I’m 100% going to do this. Like I’m going to do this tomorrow. And that never works or rarely works, right? You know, technically it works because eight years later, boom, I actually started making progress and done it. But the reality is, is, you know, publishing Crash or Kryptonite was one of the best decisions I ever made. I wish I’d done that at 19. I really do. You know, and whether it’s 19 or 20, like, I think I’d be much further ahead. So don’t do what I did. Get help now. And if you’ve been thinking about doing a book or if you’ve been trying to do a book for at least a couple of months and you don’t have something that you’re absolutely pumped about, you need help. Right. Everything is rocket science the first time you try it. Books are no exception. Okay. I’m not going to get this level result by yourself. I would not have had a hundredth of the result I had if I tried to do it myself. Impossible. No amount of Google searches, no amount of YouTube videos would have gotten me this result. The only way that I got that is by booking a ton of coaching sessions with coaches that knew what they were doing. So that would be the main thing. If that’s actually important to you, you have to get to that spot where you draw the line in the sand and you say, I’m doing it. Or flip side. You draw the line in the sand and say, I’m not doing it. Well, that’s totally fine, right? 98% of society does not publish a book and so not publish a book. That’s fine. But I would encourage whomever is listening to this tonight. Trick yourself into thinking that you’re definitely going to do it someday. They never comes.
Chandler Bolt [00:27:50] Yeah, Maybe some days, maybe never. And that’s been the thing that I’m sure you’ve seen play out, because so often, I mean, people with confidence, Oh, I’m definitely doing this. I’m either going to do it by myself or I’m going to. Trust me, I’m going to come back in three months. They never do. And so it’s either you’re making a decision or you’re not. Either you’re committing to yourself and to this book or you’re not. Right. And no decision is a decision. It’s just a decision not to. So if you’re putting it off, you’re making a decision not to do it. And so I think that’s just what’s so important about the work that we do. The calls that you do, webinars, all that is it serves as a catalyst to say, let’s go. Yeah, you already like by the time someone’s talking to you, it’s like they’ve Googled something, they’ve watched a Facebook and they’ve they’ve read a blogpost, they’ve opted into something, they got an email, they went to a webinar, they watched the webinar, they booked, they listened to the podcast. Like by the time you’re there, it’s like, okay, dude, this book is obviously important to you and you’ve just jumped through about 30 hoops to even get on this call. And so I love that kind of encouragement to commit to the next step. Couple other questions on kind of biggest takeaway from this class. How how do you help people kind of nudge them to actually make a decision? What does that look like? And what would be the encouragement for people who are currently sitting in that indecision about their book?
Nate Hambrick [00:29:26] Love it. Really. That’s. That’s the only way that I had found to be effective. To help people cross the finish line is to love them through that decision. Because you’re right, they jump through a ton of hoops and some of these people, like, I signed somebody up, we’re working with her. I think her name’s Sandy. And she told me on the call, she’s like, Mate, I’ve been thinking about writing this book for 71 years. She’s literally 91 years old and she’s finally getting her book done. And the only way that I’ve found to help people through that scary decision to commit to their book is to love them through that. And one of the questions that I ask frequently when people are like, you know, I just I’m definitely going to do it, but is I just awesome? Like, hey, like, let’s say hypothetically that we did get general today. Let’s say hypothetically that we did book you with a coach and and we helped you through the process. And six months later you’re holding that first copy of your book in your hands and you’re helping hundreds, if not thousands of people with your book. Would there be any chance you look back on today and regret that? And then I just let them sit in the awkwardness for a while. Right. That is my way of loving them through that. Because the reality is, is I can’t convince anybody to do something they don’t want to do. It’s 100% impossible. What I can do is help them make the decision that they’ve tricked themselves into thinking they’re going to make but haven’t. And that’s actually really, really, really important to me. Mm hmm. That’s something that I talk about a lot. And pressure kryptonite, because this isn’t a book challenge. This is a life challenge. Right. We live in the most prosperous, one of the most prosperous nations in the world. Right? We can do all sorts of things. We can follow our passions. We can build our own businesses. There’s all these things that we can do. And yet most people don’t, because they’ve tricked themselves into thinking they’ll do it later. And so. I feel a lot of conviction around that because I can think back to at least ten times throughout my life. You know, out of the ten biggest achievements that I’ve done in my life, the ten things that are most worthwhile. Ten out of ten of them involve somebody asking me a very similar question, like, Nate, if you did this right. And at this time, this was the. The end result like. How do you feel about that? And I’m so thankful for that because if I didn’t have those people to love me through that. I wouldn’t be where I’m at. Like I wouldn’t I wouldn’t have the life that I have. I don’t think I’d be nearly as happier as fulfilled. And so I love helping people through that awkward conversation because somebody did that to me a whole bunch of times. And I’m sure I’m positive, you know, a thousand more times throughout my life. I need those people to help me do the stuff that I want to do otherwise, you know? Check back with me. In ten years, I’ll be the same neighbor that I am today, and I want that.
Chandler Bolt [00:32:27] Hmm. That’s really good. What? You know, you’ve been working with this for a while now, and so I think the coolest part about that is that you get to see people at the start of their journey. But then you’ve been around long enough to see it come full circle and see people have success with their books. What have you seen as like the one or two commonalities of our most successful authors that you’ve worked with or helped or helped get started? All that good stuff.
Nate Hambrick [00:32:51] Yeah. So one of the biggest things so number one is just being really, really coachable and willing to learn and willing to lay their ego down for the thing that’ll work. Right. I talked about that a little bit earlier with the cover design, right? I can publish with the cover I love or I could publish with the cover that’s going to sell, right? And that’s a real tough thing to do as an artist, and it’s very easy to take it personally. Same thing with ad campaigns. My favorite ad campaigns did not work. My least favorite ad campaigns worked splendidly well. And so at some point you just either go with it or you just quit. You quit while you’re ahead. So coachable is definitely a big thing. But with that kind of, you know, 1.1.2 is the authors that tend to succeed the most are willing to get their book to the point where it’s a desirable product. A lot of times as authors, doesn’t matter the genre we go where we write the book that we want. And that’s great, right? If you want to write the book that you want, that’s fine. But if your end goal is I want to help as many people as possible, you really have to write the book that they want. And I’m not telling you to sell out right, just so that you can create something that people will buy. I’m saying position what you have to market to create something desirable that somebody wants, because here’s a firm belief of mine. Your book is only helpful if somebody reads it. And so being able to to get to that spot, I think is is really, really helpful. And I think through some of the authors that I’ve brought in into self-publishing dot com that have done really, really amazing massive things I think of you know, Nick Spears, right. He had a leadership book. There’s roughly 800000 to 1 million leadership books on Amazon. And so we had to have that conversation. Oh, okay. Mac, you’ve got a leadership book. I know that you have good stuff to share. You know, you have good stuff to share. You sound like 1 million leadership authors. Why should people buy your book? And then really being able to, you know, dig deep into that until we came up with a unique selling proposition for his book. That’s why he’s so successful. That’s why he’s been able to build the business. That’s why he’s got these giant JumboTrons of his face now, is because he created something that actually helped somebody. And then he scaled it and he did all the other things that we talked about.
Chandler Bolt [00:35:15] MM That’s really, really good. I will go to Lightning Round here. What do you feel like is the flipside common traits of our least successful authors or people that you talk to that just never end up doing anything with their book?
Nate Hambrick [00:35:30] People that don’t do anything with the book that they publish are people that just don’t publish.
Chandler Bolt [00:35:34] They just don’t even publish.
Nate Hambrick [00:35:36] It’s the tomorrow syndrome. It’s Hey, mate, I’m definitely 100% going to do this. I mean, you guys are you guys. You’re the man. Like, we’re definitely going to do this. You’ll definitely hear from me on Tuesday. You tell them four times and they just they go in whatever, you know, don’t put off for tomorrow. What you should have done yesterday, Don’t do it. Just get the help. If it’s important to you, do it. If it’s not important to you, don’t do it with that. Just set yourself up for success. And so with our authors, the reason we are so successful with getting people not just publish, but publish really well is because they know that they’re talking to their coach on Tuesday, then the next Thursday or whatever it is. And so when they have that friendly accountability, you know, your chance of publishing goes from basically zero to, you know, 90, 95% as you have a process and it’s just a lot easier. And so we can lean on the people that have done it before, get the friendly accountability, surround yourself with the community and you’ll have a lot more fun doing it as well as you’ll get a much better result that you’re happy with.
Chandler Bolt [00:36:44] That’s good. That’s really good. Well, guys, if you want to chat with me about your book, take some next steps and see how we can help with that book. Go to self-publishing dot com forward slash Nate. So again, that’s self-publishing dot com for slash Nate book a call there. This is only if you’re serious about your book you’re ready to roll you want to get some help you want to talk to me and get started then that that call should be really helpful for you. So Nate, who’s the type of person that should book that call? And then how can they make sure that they get the most out of that call?
Nate Hambrick [00:37:17] Yeah. So the person that should book this call is somebody that is actually serious about doing this book. We’ve talked about it four times on this session. So if you’ve watched this whole YouTube video and you don’t know if that’s you, it’s not you. But if you are serious about making this a now conversation, I would love to talk to you. I actually really love it. Like I love those 2931 conversations were awesome, so I’m excited to get to 2932. So book a session with me and then with that, like, you know, you will have to invest time, so make sure that you’re ready to invest the time and then financially you will have to invest somewhere in the ballpark of 6 to 12 grand to do this. Well, okay, There’s no shortcut in this, right? You look at any of your favorite authors, they didn’t get there by accident. They didn’t get there by trying to do this themselves for free, like they invested heavily in the success of their book. You’re going to have to do something similar. So make sure that time, make sure that you’re prepared to make the financial investment and then, yeah, leave. Leave the rest up to me. I would love to help you. So whether you just started writing your book or whether you’ve published a book and you sold five copies and you’re like, Shoot, I should have gotten help earlier, book a session with me and I’d love to help you get unstuck.
Chandler Bolt [00:38:39] Go. That’s awesome. Well, guys, book a call with Nate self-publishing dot com forward slash, Nate and Nate. Where can people go to buy the book? Remind us the name of the book work where they can find it. All that good stuff.
Nate Hambrick [00:38:54] Yeah. So the book’s called Crush Your Kryptonite. My biggest claim to fame is that if you go to Amazon and type in Nate, it just auto fills. That’s that’s my one achievement in life is Amazon knows who I am. So if you don’t know how to spell my name. Amazons. Gods. Yeah. So definitely crush your kryptonite. Obviously, I’m 100% biased, but I think the book is awesome, and I think it’ll change your life, so. Shameless plug for crusher Kryptonite. Go check it out.
Chandler Bolt [00:39:22] Cool. All right, guys, If you find this episode helpful, I’ll do three things right now. Number one, grab a copy of the book, Trash your Kryptonite. Number two, book a call with Nate. If that’s a fit self-publishing icon, forward slash Nate and the number three. Nate’s going to mention this earlier. He’s going to be speaking at author Advantage Live. That’s our three day virtual event. He’s unpacking a lot of the concepts that that he talked about here and kind of using his personal experience to show you how to take the next steps with your book. So you don’t want to miss it. It’s going to be amazing. Prices are going up soon on tickets and the V, the event’s coming up real quick. All right. So grab a ticket author advantage live dot com. Nate, this is awesome, man. Thank you so much.
Nate Hambrick [00:40:05] Thanks so much for having me!