Erik Huberman on the Harsh Truths About Launching Your Own Book

Transcript

[0:00] Eric Jorgenson: So, I think the right place to start is like the very beginning of the book thing. How did you decide to write a book in the first place?

[0:03] Erik Huberman: Yeah, actually, I wrote a full, I guess, proposal and book synopsis for a completely different book years ago. And then it was basically about, it was called Greedless, about how to be successful without being greedy. And I realized as I finished the whole project that I wasn't successful enough to be preaching that. And so, I decided to shelve it and say like, maybe later in life, I'll come back. And I also didn't really like how it turned out. And so, then I was at a party, and I met this guy at a friend's party that was, he had seen Hawke Media before. We were about six years into business. And he goes, well, have you ever thought about writing a book? I'm like, yeah, but I kind of shelved it. And he's like, well, if you wrote a book now, what would it be about? I'm like, honestly, we have this whole marketing methodology that we've been using for the entirety that's worked really well. I'd probably distill it down. He goes, why don't you do it? I can help, I can put it together with you, I have a great ghost-writing methodology, et cetera. What do you think? And I'm like, yeah, it's an idea. And then frankly, as we talked about it, I reached out to Tucker and said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this. What would it cost with you guys? And I think he said, it'd be 50, but you could probably do it for 35 because we have a marketing agency, so I might not need some of the marketing services. And I'm like, what the hell? This other guy just told me he’d do it for three grand a month, I'll just use him. And so, I went down the path of building the whole strategy myself, which I've learned a few, I shouldn't even say I've learned, I've experienced a few times in my life where I'm like, I can do this so much cheaper, and then I end up spending ten times the amount of money. I did that with my wedding when I fired my wedding planner, I did it with my book, and I'm trying not to do it when I build my new house. But it's a continual learning experience of like you try to piece together this stuff, because like by nature, I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm like putting together, well, you're making a margin on that, so I can probably put it together cheaper, but then you realize all the things I decided to spend money on that weren't necessary, again, just giving you the actual number, let's say, again, let's say Tucker had actually done it, and Scribe had done it for 50 grand, I ended up spending 350 grand, and I promise I could have done all of that with Scribe for that 50. The amount I put into it that ended up being a waste was significant.

[2:10] Eric Jorgenson: Were you overpaying? Were you paying for stuff you didn't need? Like, how did you waste 300 grand?

[2:15] Erik Huberman: Yeah, it was hiring a bunch of service providers to help me promote it, to help me market the book, to help me do things that were- there's a lot of con artists in this space, and they took a bunch of money and did not execute. Somewhere between one of my book marketing companies and my publisher, they miscategorized the book, so we became ineligible for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, even though we would have made it on book sales. They called it a multi-level marketing book. It has nothing on multi-level marketing in it, and that is just like a dirty word in the industry where it had nothing to do with multi-level marketing, but it was just some amateur doing that. I didn't catch it. And so, we got the USA Today bestseller, which is just based on merit alone. So we sold the books. We should have had Wall Street Journal, but they weren't going to put a multi-level marketing book on it. New York Times is more editorial, as you know more than anyone. And so who knows what would happen there. So that was one example of I paid someone a ton of money to market it that just completely killed the opportunities of getting the accolades that would have come with that, did a bunch of things to try to earn, in terms of what I was trying to do was invest in the marketing potential to get New York Times or Wall Street Journal. So, by the way, a great PR firm that did do a good job, but without the right pipes to actually benefit from all that PR, so then we didn't end up getting all the benefits. So again, we still sold a lot of books and still continue to, but missed a lot of the benefits we could have had with this book because we had a piecemeal team of like recommendations from other friends that have launched their book, some of which I went back to and said, why did you recommend this person? They're like, actually, I never worked with them; I just heard they were good. I'm like, well, Jesus. Okay. There was a lot of those kinds of things that I think this goes with a lot of things. It's the same reason, frankly, my business and the marketing agency, people hire us. It's like, yeah, you can go hire someone off the street to run your marketing, but chances are you're going to spend a bunch of bad dollars on things that don't work. And that's what we ended up doing on the book side. So, being connected with the whole team there, I've said it over and over again, like I will scream from the rooftops, if I ever did this again, or in hindsight, I would have hired Scribe in a heartbeat. I'm not being paid to do this. It was more just a voluntary, a cautionary tale to anyone else out there doing it. What you guys do and what you charge is so valuable and so worth it, that going and trying to do this yourself, it's the reason a lot of best sellers come back to Scribe and do their next book with Scribe. You guys do a great job.

[4:32] Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, thank you. We get a lot of repeat customers, because once people, I had this experience as an author, like once I went through the maze once with Scribe, I understand how the process works, and it's not scary anymore. Now I'm like, oh shit, I'm going to publish- I can't wait to publish my next book. I understand how the whole journey feels. And it's demystified. It's interesting you use the example of building a house because I use that all the time. I'm like, anybody can build their own house. If you want to spend a lot of time on YouTube, make some mistakes, be willing to waste some money, and just probably end up with a worse product, frankly, but if you want it done right, if you want to hire an expert, the price up front is bigger, but you know what you're going to get, then like what your math in a spreadsheet is and what you think you can get away with spending.

[5:15] Erik Huberman: Right. That's I think the key there though. It's the same thing as the house. Like, oh, well, if I don't hire all this labor, again, I'm going through that process right now too. And it's like, oh, well, the labor costs, whatever it is, let's just say for round numbers, let's say it's $200,000 in labor costs. Well, I can just do it myself. Yeah, but what is that worth to you and how is that going to work out is a really big problem. And that's what I learned here. And again, thankfully, I have the book here, ended up with a great product. We have a great book. It did end up working out, but I spent seven times the money for the same result. And when I say same result, you talk about like you can't wait to do the next one because it was demystified, I have no intention of doing the next one for a long time. Like I have, sincerely, PTSD from launching this thing because of all the headaches and all this stuff and everything that goes into launching a book, which is a lot, and then finding out that they miscategorized it and all that work was for nothing. And those kinds of things that you're like, yeah, I'm not excited. There's not an emotional side of me that's like, I want to do this again, this was awesome. It's like, that was one of the roughest things I ever went through while trying to run a business. I didn't have good partners. I had some, I should say. The guy that originally pushed me to write the book, he ended up being basically my writing partner on it. He was great on that piece. But then he said he was going to take the marketing over, didn't do much there. We had a great publicist that I've hired for other things since named Heidi Krupp. She's awesome for getting out there and built a good relationship with her. But then I hired, I don't want to name them because I don't want to disparage them, but a couple book marketing companies that did a horrible job. And by the way, my publisher, who did a hybrid publishing deal, I didn't get a single check from them for like 13 months. So, it was like we sold 12 or 13,000 copies in the first month, and they just held it and held it and held it. And I was like- and again, thankfully, like good thing to know, probably, unless you build a really big bestseller, you're probably not going to make money on a book. But it would have been nice to get the money I did make. And finally we got it, but it was just like at that point, it was like, what the fuck? It was ridiculous.

[7:19] Eric Jorgenson: And that's an incredibly successful book. If you truly fully self-published that, like Scribe’s model, you'd get a lot of money out of that, especially if you did that the first month. You'd be approaching break even by now, I think.

[7:31] Erik Huberman: Yeah. We've sold, I think, 30,000 copies at this point.

[7:33] Eric Jorgenson: That's incredible. Congrats. It is just like building a house in that you think writing a book is like two big- it's writing and publishing. There's actually like ten different disciplines and all these little checklist items that take experience and expertise and you’ve got to know- We've done it 2,000 times. This team knows how to run this process. But the writers who are floating around and trying to sell writing are like, no, no, no, I got you, I got you, I got you. But then at the end, you're sitting there with a Word document being like, well, now what? Like where am I going to take this thing? How do I get this thing published? Who do I trust to run the next part of the relay?

[8:03] Erik Huberman: Well, and I think it's important to say because, again, the purpose of this, as far as- I have a giant group of friends that are all New York Times bestsellers. I have a network of people that know how this works. So I'm saying I've made all these mistakes with the right network, not sitting there with a Word document going, what do I do now, with a team of people of names that you would all know that have written amazing books and constantly keep writing that I could show, I showed them my whole launch plan, I told them who I was working with, like I had a great community of people that signed off on everything I was doing. And still this all happened, let alone like not having that.

[8:39] Eric Jorgenson: So, let's talk about some of the good stuff. So, what happened after you published that book? Was it a boon to business? Did it attract the right people, open doors?

[8:48] Erik Huberman: So, I think timing's really important, like it is in anything. We launched the book in March of ’22, just as the interest rates started skyrocketing and everyone was cutting marketing and trying to cut back on growth. So, the timing was a little rough there. So, I would have expected it to drive more, but I also didn't do it because I thought it was going to be some quick boost. I thought it'd be a good long-term credibility tool. And what it did that I didn't foresee is now every client, every employee, every partner we give a copy of the book to, and now we're all speaking the same language. So, it became the Hawke Media Bible. And in that way, like I spoke at the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce today to the board of like 20 people, and they asked me to come speak on marketing and how they can learn about marketing and help the community and all that, and I brought them all a copy of the book. And so now they all- and I already got a text today because the other fun thing is it's a 145 minute read. So it's a two hour read, just over a two hour read. And the nice thing about that is it’s a quick modern marketing 101 thing that now it's like, it's a calling card. It's a business card. It's something that became really easy. And with the USA Today bestseller logo on it, it's the credibility, the third-party validation that we want, which by the way, a third of the book is about building trust and using third-party validation. So the fact that we can throw that USA Today logo on it, which the hope was Wall Street Journal and all that too, it really just gives that credibility. We got Keith Ferrazzi to write the foreword. It's got enough of that that when we send this to someone, it's real. It's not like- because frankly, everybody knows you can self-publish whatever book you want these days and just go on Amazon and do that. We needed to go a step above that, but not go all the way to like getting a book deal with Random House or something. And I didn't care about it up front or any of that. I even said if I were to go approach that, I would just take that and put it into the marketing anyways. This wasn't about making money to me, it was about building credibility in this space. And that, I would say it did that in a lot of ways.

[10:38] Eric Jorgenson: You're just beginning to see the dividends from this thing. We're only a little more than two years out. I like to say books are like a tailwind, a multiplier effect on everything else you ever do. Hopefully, it makes hiring easier, it makes sales easier, it makes alignment easier.

[10:53] Erik Huberman: Well, it's also like I go to a conference, and I'll ask to do a book signing. And all of a sudden, I've got the entire conference lining up at my desk to get my book, and now I get those connections and everything too. It's definitely a tool more than an end, so to speak.

[11:10] Eric Jorgenson: I'm so glad to hear that, man. I'm happy that worked out for you, even though it was insanely expensive.

[11:16] Erik Huberman: Yeah, 100%. And I do believe, like I look at it, similar to what you just said, I look at it as a decade-long investment. And do I believe that over the next eight years and the past two, will it have been worth the investment? Yeah. But I just had this conversation with another tool we're working on buying. I'm like, we have the money. It doesn't mean I just want to waste the money. So I wasted a lot of money. Will I make a return on that money anyways? Yeah. Would I have made a much greater return if I had just done it this way? Yes.

[11:44] Eric Jorgenson: So it was still a good ROI, you feel like you'll still get a good ROI on a $350,000 investment when you could have spent 50 to get the same thing?

[11:52] Erik Huberman: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right.

[11:55] Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I hear so many times from people, if you have the right mindset, a book is the single greatest marketing investment you can make.

[12:05] Erik Huberman: Yeah, and again, I think the other thing I haven't seen yet is, in our industry, ’22 to now has been a slowdown. There's going to be an upswing at some point in terms of people are going to want to grow again and grow faster again. Whenever that happens, I'm really curious to see what I can do with the book at that point because it really has become synonymous with modern marketing 101. I've got it in NYU, I've got it in schools. The long tail of this starts to become really powerful in an environment when everyone starts looking for growth again and trying to figure out how to grow fast.

[12:36] Eric Jorgenson: So what was the story of the book's development? Did it change through the creative process? You had this whole book before that you ended up shelving.

[12:44] Erik Huberman: So, this book was, the writing process, how we did it, and I don't know, honestly I don't know your guys' writing process, but this was the easiest thing in the world. It wasn't the writing process that was hard, it was everything else. So, the process was go write an outline, which this was, I gave this talk that is this book, like how to do marketing, like hundreds of times. So to write an outline on it was very easy. And then we got on Zoom, and we recorded 15 30-minute Zoom calls, so seven and a half hours, each one was a chapter. And I had the outline in front of me, and then I just riffed on, oh, Facebook marketing, yeah, these are the things you’ve got to do, da, da, da, and stuff I do every day, so it wasn't like I had to like really do- And then what I would do is on that call, I would say, hey, go find- like on that, I forgot the word we used, but we'd be like, let's go find a supporting stat for that, let's go find evidence of that. I knew these things anecdotally, but let's go actually get the credible support for that. And then we'd have someone, at the time, AI wasn't there yet, so we had someone in the Philippines transcribe what I said. And then my writing partner edited it, then I edited it. And when he edited it, he would go get that supporting stat. So by the time I got it, it was actually a pretty good rough draft. I'd fix a few things that were either misheard or miswritten or I miss said a little bit. And then we were good. We had a book. And then we went to the publisher, they edited it. But it wasn't that- the content was pretty easy to put together because it started with I already knew, I could have already spoken this book from scratch on a whim whenever. I could have spent two and a half hours talking about marketing, no problem.

[14:22] Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's so important for people to understand that you never actually have to confront the blank page. Like if you're an expert who gets paid for your expertise, you have it in you and you just need somebody to ask the right questions and guide you through this process in such a way that each individual step is so easy. It's stuff you do every day. Just surround yourself with the experts in the crafts that you need.

[14:43] Erik Huberman: That's, I'd say, if you want to get the most value out of the book, you want to write a book that's about an expertise you already have because now I get asked to go speak all over the place about marketing, and it's like, if I walk in the room and don't know what I'm talking about, that's going to be a short-lived kind of path. So instead, I do actually know everything in the book. I do actually speak to this. I'll even forget whether certain things are in the book or not that I talk about and they'll be like, did I put that in there? Yeah, I did. Okay, cool. So, it just all meshes together, and so that's where it became really easy. And again, if I was going to do this again, it would be because I've now mastered a new subject that I really want to proliferate. That's stuff that I think about, but it hasn't come to fruition yet. And we also have talked about like the second edition and updating it to how marketing has updated, maybe every five years or something.

[15:32] Eric Jorgenson: Okay, so given everything that you've gone through and just like the inkling of an idea about doing this again, what have you learned? What would you do differently?

[15:40] Erik Huberman: Sincerely, hire Scribe. And that's why we're here. I volunteered to be here to say this is a thing.

[15:47] Eric Jorgenson: But besides that?

[15:49] Erik Huberman: Yeah. I'd probably do a little bit more to build an audience to pre-launch it to that is focused on wanting to buy the book. We have a huge audience at Hawke Media. I've built a decent audience, but they're not necessarily there to buy my book. And so, I'd probably focus on building more of an- people that buy, it's like they talk about this a lot in the book marketing world, people that buy books buy books. And I forgot, there's some small portion of society that actually buys books. So, just because they're in my audience doesn't mean that any of them read books. And so, figuring out more of how to build that correlation, and again, not hire any of the people that said they were book marketing firms that could get me on these different lists and stuff.

[16:27] Eric Jorgenson: What were the highs and lows of the publishing process through that whole journey?

[16:32] Erik Huberman: I mean, getting the first order of your book, like getting the first box is always, I think every author is like, this is the best moment ever because you put the work in and then it's real. Especially, I don't even have my second book, but it being my first and being like, and I don't know that there'll be a second, just holding it in your hand, you're like, holy shit. My first book signing where friends and family and people showed up, we did it at my bookstore, like down the street from my house. That was super cool. And it was, again, ’22, like we were remote. There was no office. COVID was still kind of a thing in California. It was an interesting time to launch it. So that was cool. Being on the Drew Barrymore show, being on the Adam Carolla show, doing the book tour was fun, but exhausting. I was still running a company, I was still doing other things, like that is so tiring. One of our partners just did their own book tour for their newest book, and she's like, I'm going out of town for a week, and then I'll talk to you after. I'm like, sounds good, I get it. So, I have not done anything more exhausting than launching a book, and I've built a 250 person business from scratch, bootstrapped the past 10 years. And launching the book was, again, the most stressful, hardest period from like the grind of it, getting out all the time, being on the road, doing those things in a way that's not financially rewarding. So, it's like it's nice to get book sales and get your name out there, but it's not like you're making a ton of money and like going home and being like, well, I'm tired, but wow, look at what I just brought in. Like, nope. I don't know that the Drew Barrymore Show sold any books, to be honest. When I looked at the numbers, I'm like, I don't know if that really moved the needle at all. And I was on like primetime live TV. Like that should have done something. I think still a really cool clip to have, and it was a really cool episode and made some cool connections. But in hindsight, it was like that- I had higher expectations of what that should all do for the book and for my business and everything than it did. But now I've learned along the way, like we have a TV show now, like literally have a show on Hulu and A&E helping Cedric the Entertainer and Anthony Anderson launch their barbecue brand. We have the book on the show. Yeah, that's done nothing either. It's a great Facebook ad that we've taken clips out of, but actually being on TV regularly didn't do much for it either. So, it's those things that you think are these like lightning in a bottle moments sometimes are minuscule amounts of momentum. It's more about that long tail build off of it.

[18:57] Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's really fascinating because the things that happen are so surprising and inexplicable. Unexpected good things I'm sure happened as a result of your book.

[19:09] Erik Huberman: Oh yeah. And things that I don't even know happened.

[19:12] Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, exactly.

[19:12] Erik Huberman: Yeah, exactly. There's probably people that have reached out, even like, I don't know if the TV show, for example, if they saw the book launch, went, wait, we should grab this guy. They already knew of me, but they're like, oh, now he's got the book too, and look at him on TV. Like, let's grab him. We've never had that conversation, but totally possible that played a part. These things lead to other things for sure, and there's a lot of intangibles. Marketing is an art and a science, that's important.

[19:35] Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and you see like responses and actions on a conscious and a subconscious level. The author and authority sharing that like same root word and the credibility that comes with it, even for people who never even cracked the book or buy it or anything, just like this is the guy with the book.

[19:52] Erik Huberman: Yep, exactly. And that still holds.

[19:57] Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's so weird. Exactly as you said, like knowing that anybody can publish anything on Amazon these days doesn't change the fact that there's still like a thousand year old tradition of prestige arbitrage, like this is the medium for the most important messages.

[20:12] Erik Huberman: It's memorialized. And that was an interesting other part of the book when I launched it. I don't really get nervous, but I'm like shit, did I say anything in there that I'm going to get in trouble over? And sure enough, if you look on Amazon, the bad reviews, there was a point where I launched my first e-commerce company, and I told TechCrunch we had raised money, even though I didn't, because I knew that they were right about us. And I told them, I said in the book, sometimes you have to be a little scrappy. Some people really don't like that. They're like, this book promotes being dishonest to be successful and da da da. I'm like, I mean, I get it, but I'm like, it was this funny thing of like, that's what you took out of that book? Okay. And it's also, we live in an outrage culture where everyone's looking for the thing to be angry about, so you can't really avoid it. But definitely, there was a moment before I launched where I'm like, I wonder what's going to catch that people are going to want to hate me for. And that was the thing, which thankfully- and the first day, my favorite review to date, I immediately got a one-star review on Amazon that said, I don't get it, it's just Modern Marketing 101. No, you got it. And I was on a radio show like the next day, and I mentioned it. I think the guy might have heard it because he deleted his review, which annoyed me because I wanted to screenshot it and make it an ad of like one star, I don't get it, it's just modern marketing 101, and just be like, this guy gets it. But that was one of the fun ones. But yeah, you definitely- I don't get stage fright. I don't really worry. I'm on podcasts and things all the time. But with the book, it's so memorialized that I was like, it felt a little bit more impactful with like I hope I can stand behind what was in there. After editing it and writing it and rewriting it, I was like, I think I know everything in there now.

[21:53] Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, yeah. Oh, there's so much and you go through so many different versions by the time it comes out. So, you put out a crazy effort launch, you went on all these press tours, you got all this attention. Have you kept up the drumbeat of doing something for your book every week over the past two years?

[22:11] Erik Huberman: Not at all. No. I do something for Hawke Media. We talk about the book. No, the book, it's something we're talking about, like hopefully, my hope for my book is it's timeless in the sense that we can start marketing it again today and do a new promotion for it, and it'll just pick up where we left off. But we have so many other things we're promoting here that it's like it's not always about the book. But it's something we've talked about. How do we- To me, it's the same way I look at someone building their personal brand versus their company brand. Like there's certain things a person can do that a company can't do. And that's why I've always built my brand and been out there. Same thing with a book. There's certain things a book can do that other things can't. And so a good example is, do you know the Milken Global Summit? It gets a lot of press. Yeah, so I go to that every year. And two years ago, I walked in the bookstore. I was like, how do I get a book in here? And they're like, hey, here's our card, da, da, da. I'm like, okay, cool. I hit them up. They never responded, never responded. So I walked in this past year and said, hey, I reached out to you guys to get my book in. I never heard from anyone. They're like, do you have any on you? I'm like, I've got a box in my car. They're like, bring them in. Okay, put my book in the Milken Global Summit, which just for those that don't know, it’s like one of the biggest, like the biggest finance people, the biggest politicians, presidents, heads of state, et cetera, all come together for a few days in Beverly Hills. And my book is front and center sitting on the shelf during this event the whole time because I was just like, can I get this on the shelf? They're like, yeah, sure. And I always have a box in my trunk, it's just like default now. I was like, all right, I went and grabbed the box of 36 books and put it on their shelf, and I got to carry my book in the Milken Conference. And people picked it up, bought it, et cetera, and it was like, they just did it on consignment, it was great. So, and honestly, I don’t care about the couple hundred bucks, or more than that, but like the 500 bucks that I was going to make, it was about like, can I get my book in the hands of the people that are patrolling this, or even have my logo sitting in front of everybody that's going to walk by this? And so that happened at South By, that happened at a lot of the other conferences. So that's been one way I’ve used it. Again, the book signing thing where you open doors that wouldn't normally be open because you have the book.

[24:17] Eric Jorgenson: That is an incredible story. I love that. Just marched into the conference with a box of books under your arm.

[24:23] Erik Huberman: I don't know if you can tell, I usually dress like this. You have to wear a suit at this conference. So I'm like carrying a giant cardboard box, wearing a suit, walking in, it was perfect.

[24:31] Eric Jorgenson: And you get to do your own merchandising, which is exactly the position you want to be in. That's beautiful.

[24:36] Erik Huberman: Exactly, yeah.

[24:36] Eric Jorgenson: Okay, awesome. Well, let's put an end cap on this. Let's summarize your experience one more time of like you knew you wanted to come and write a book. You knew a book could build your business. Where did you take it from there?

[24:50] Erik Huberman: Yeah, I knew I wanted to create a book and really distill down our marketing methodology and really put it into what became our company's Bible. And I sought out different sort of resources to build that book, and there was this very transparent, very put together upfront cost with Scribe versus I can probably put this together for cheaper, that it ended up costing me seven times as much money to get the same product and same result. So thankfully, it still was a great result and what I wanted, but I could have saved literally six sevenths of the money and just gone with Scribe and probably not lost as much sleep over it.

[25:29] Eric Jorgenson: I'm sorry for your harrowing experience, but I'm so glad that book worked out for you. And I'm happy to hear that you're still like feeling really good about the whole experience, just author to author. I appreciate you being our very first non-customer testimonial. You're the man.

[25:43] Erik Huberman: No problem.

[25:43] Eric Jorgenson: Thank you for that. Appreciate you, Erik. Thanks so much for sharing your story. I think a lot of authors are going to pick up your playbook and run with it.

[25:51] Erik Huberman: Love it. All right, well, thanks for having me, man. Let me know if I can be helpful.