Eddy Arriola’s It’s All About Relationships Sold Out His Childhood Bookstore on Launch Night
Eddy Arriola is an entrepreneur who started and sold a bank, sits on company boards, and advises CEOs. At 53, he decided the hardest and most meaningful thing he could do next was not to start another company, but to write a book. When the invite for his launch went out, the Miami bookstore he had loved since before he could drive sold out its 175 seats within an hour.
The Book He Had Wanted to Write Since Before He Could Drive
Arriola loves books. When he first got his driver’s license, the first place he drove was not a stadium or a party, but Books & Books, the independent bookstore that has been a fixture in Miami since 1982. For years he pictured himself sitting in that store as an author. What he did not have yet was the book.
He knew he wanted to write about leadership and relationships. Looking back on his career, he credited his breakthroughs not to being the smartest person in the room or having the best strategy, but to having the right relationships. Advising CEOs and boards, he kept seeing the same thing: people rarely got stuck on strategy or capital, they got stuck on people. He saw a gap on the shelf between books about networking and books about leadership, and set out to write about leading through relationships.
“The selfish reason is I want to write a book because I want to see my name on the spine of a book and have it on a shelf and I want to show it to my kids and grandkids.”
— Eddy Arriola, Entrepreneur, CEO Advisor & Author
The selfless reason was the CEO he used to be at 35, stuck on the same problems he now had decades of experience solving. He wanted to put that experience into pages a reader could open, read a few, and walk away able to repair a relationship or move a company forward.
Why He Chose Scribe Media
Arriola did not shop a long list of options. Friends who had worked with Scribe told him the same thing: call these people, you will like the process, you will like the team, this is a no-brainer. He came in with realistic expectations and a clear picture of what he wanted, and over about six months the Scribe team helped him narrow a sprawling idea into a focused book. He is candid that he did not expect how much a professional team would change the work.
“Scribe had amazing editors that helped me. The right person was there at the right stage.”
— Eddy Arriola, Entrepreneur, CEO Advisor & Author
The model itself was part of the draw. The book was still his, and he chose the cover, but he had a world-class cover designer working from real demographic and marketing research. As he puts it, there is one name on the front of a book and a hundred in the back. He liked the team so much that he named them in his acknowledgments and has since referred other authors to Scribe, several of whom have already hit their own launch dates.
The Launch: A Sold-Out Night at Books & Books
When Scribe asked Arriola to picture his champagne moment, the thing that would make all the solitary hours worth it, the answer was obvious. He wanted to stand in the front of a room at Books & Books, the store that was one of his personal heroes, and talk about books and ideas as an author. So he emailed the owner, a friend he had made over years of being a customer, and asked for a signing. The owner’s reply was immediate: Eddy has a long-term relationship with our store, whatever he wants, make it happen.
The invite went out and the room sold out within an hour. When the RSVPs hit the venue’s 175-person capacity, the owner offered to move the event to a bigger space. Arriola said no. His dream had a specific address, and it was that store. On launch night the house was packed with friends, and the man he asked to join him on stage for the fireside chat was not one of the famous names blurbed on his back cover. It was his high school history teacher, who woke at four in the morning and drove in from Macon, Georgia, to be there.
“When that night came, we had a packed house and friends were there. It was just really one of the best moments of my life, to be quite frank.”
— Eddy Arriola, Entrepreneur, CEO Advisor & Author
What Readers Did With the Book
The book found readers Arriola never pictured on his vision board. An older reader bought seven copies and asked for each to be signed for his grandchildren, because he wanted them to know his success came from relationships. A donor to Cornell’s defending national-champion men’s lacrosse team ordered fifty copies, personalized to every player on the roster, so the team would remember that what lasts is not the trophy but the bond with the forty-nine other guys in the locker room.
A man messaged him on LinkedIn to say Arriola had given him his first job nearly thirty years ago, had just bought the book, and wanted to say thank you. And a client who bought copies for all of his own employees discovered, live, that his name was in the acknowledgments, and nearly cried. Barely a month after release, the stories coming back were already far more than Arriola expected.
His Advice, and the Long Game Ahead
Arriola offers two pieces of advice to anyone sitting on a book. First, keep your butt in the seat, because it is a marathon with hard days and boring days, and the only thing that matters is finding a process that keeps you writing. Second, know that writing is lonely but making a book is not. There are coaches, editors, proofreaders, and designers whose whole job is to help you carry everything that is not the writing itself.
He is not chasing an overnight bestseller. He set specific, realistic goals and committed to working the book for a hundred weeks, a little something every week, because he loves being around books and connecting with people. At 53, he gets to redefine himself, and he cannot wait for the summer in Maine when someone asks what he does and he answers, for the first time, that he is a writer.
“I so enjoyed working with Scribe and I look forward to the next book and working with [Scribe] on that.”
— Eddy Arriola, Entrepreneur, CEO Advisor & Author
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