RV (00:06): Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well-known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. Something truly amazing just happened this week, which is that we had our 24th Brand Builders Group client become a national bestselling author. That means that they had hit the Wall Street Journal and or USA today, or Publishers Weekly, or one of the real major national bestseller lists. Not only that, but we had two clients that hit the New York Times bestseller list. We’ve had the eight that has happened eight times in the last 12 months. RV (01:01): So we know something about becoming a bestselling author, and I myself hit the New York Times bestseller list when I was 29. I wanna share with you some of the most popular misconceptions that people have about what it means to become a bestselling author and how you become one. So the first misconception that I think every author has, and I think a lot of people in the industry have, is exactly how you become a bestseller. Most people think that publicity and PR is what sells books. People think that it is social media and pr and that for authors, that’s their entire strategy. And when they come to us, they go, well, we hired a PR firm and you know, we’re, we’re gonna do some contests on social, and that’s what they think sells books. And I hate to burst your bubble, but PR and social media don’t sell a lot of books, not typically, and not for most authors. RV (02:00): And we have authors like our clients, we have pretty famous clients. It’s very normal that one of our clients gets on Good Morning America or The Today Show or some other national television show. And even on those national television shows, they might move a few hundred units, maybe 700 to a thousand units, even if you get that Hail Mary Miracle Dream come true shot on like national television, typically it’s not even gonna add up to around a thousand units. But to hit a New York Times bestseller list, you’re gonna need at least 10,000 units typically. And to even hit the USA today or the Wall Street Journal is usually several thousand units sold inside of a week. In fact, we have a whole data science team that is a part of Brand Builders Group that all we do is study and deconstruct and analyze these bestseller lists to understand what does it really take to get there? RV (02:51): And that’s part of why our clients are hitting it. But the misconception is that PR and social is gonna get you there. And here’s the, here’s the real secret. It’s not online strategy that sells books. It’s offline strategy, it’s offline relationships, it’s offline stages. It’s humans that you have a, a deep relationship with. It’s the people who already know you and love you, getting behind you and supporting you and telling all of their people in their communities and sometimes buying books for their people in their communities and, and creating opportunities for stages for you to be on. And that’s something that we talk about in our training, but social media and PR is not what’s gonna get you there. The second misconception that authors have about what it means to become a bestselling author is they don’t understand how much it depends on a team. RV (03:42): In fact, the way that we say this at Brand Builders Group is there is no such thing as a bestselling author. There is only such a thing as a bestselling team. You need a team because you need a lot of people to rally together to pull this off, right? Even though Rory is a New York Times bestselling author, the truth is, I’ve only gotten there because I’ve had lots and lots of people support me and help me and be on that journey. So you need literary agents, typically, and publishers, and you need graphic designers, and you need social media, and you do need email, and you need speakers program managers, and, and you need strategists, right? And that’s part of what we do, is we quarterback and control the whole strategy to pull this together to really, really make it happen. Because the part that everyone misses is selling the book. RV (04:33): Writers write editors, edit publishers, publish distributors, distribute retailers, retail, and nobody actually sells the book. And that’s what our team at Brand Builders Group does. We have strategies for how to sell books, how to actually get people to pull out their credit card and buy books in a way that makes the bestseller list tick. So that your hard earned sales get registered and counted and hopefully report in the most optimized way so that you can get the dream of becoming a bestseller. But you need a team. You need, you need to enroll everyone around you. Hitting the bestseller list is not about tricks. It’s not about hacks. It’s not about gimmicks. And it certainly is not about buying your own books to get on the list. What it is about is taking every relational asset you have and pointing them all in one direction at one moment to create a huge spark so that you move the most books possible and get that, you know, that big dream of becoming a bestseller. RV (05:36): And that leads me to the fourth misconception that people have about becoming a bestseller, which is, what does it mean when you actually become a bestseller? Well, here’s what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you’re gonna get a call from a producer to host your own television show, or that emails are gonna flood into your inbox with invites to go speak around the globe for tens of thousands of dollars. It doesn’t work like that in many ways. The day after you become a bestseller, your life will look no different than it did the day before. So it’s not some magic pill or secret sauce that suddenly makes your life easy. But what it does do is it opens doors, it makes things possible, it gets you in front of more people. I mean, think about it this way, if you are a podcast host and you get pitches several of our clients at Brand Builders Group are some of the biggest podcast hosts in the world. RV (06:34): Louis Howes, ed Millet, Amy Porterfield, Jasmine Starr, right? People like this, they have huge podcasts. And just imagine that they get pitched every day, people wanting to come on their show. They don’t have time to read all the books, they don’t have time to watch all the videos. They don’t have time to learn about every person who wants to come on the show. So what they typically are gonna do, either literally or at at least metaphorically, is they’re gonna divide the list into two piles. There’s gonna be a no list, the automatic no list, which is gonna be a big pile that grows really fast. It’s just the automatic nous list. Then there’s gonna be another list, which is, we’ll give ’em a second look. We’ll give them a bigger chance. We’ll spend more time. And if you are a bestselling author, there’s a much higher chance that you will go from the no list to the maybe list. RV (07:26): And that’s where it starts. The same is true for speaking on the biggest stages in the world. I personally have spoken at several of the biggest speaking events in the world. That is an amazing honor. Many times that happens because people are looking at lots of speakers and they look at all of these different things. There’s all of these different, what academic criteria do they have and how big is their following? And what is their message and how good are they on, on stage? And how funny are they? And all these things. So it’s one notch on the belt, but especially if you’re gonna be paid a lot of money, if someone’s gonna pay you a lot of money to come speak, that means somebody’s job is on the line. Somebody is recommending to say, we should hire this speaker and we should pay them this money. RV (08:11): Well, it’s a lot easier to justify if we go, they have all of these credentials, right? They meet all of this criteria to justify getting a higher fee. Becoming a bestselling author is one of those things. It’s one of the most, the biggest pieces of notoriety and credibility that there is. So it does open doors it does open relationships. We, we hosted an event this summer where I, I coed this with my, my good friend Donald Miller and Mike Mcal and John Rulon and some of my other friends. And we hosted an event, and the event was free to come to, but here was the catch. You had to be a New York Times bestselling author or someone who had sold a million copies of a book to get invited to the party, right? So that opens doors, it opens relationships. So it’s just one more thing that, that, that really gets you a chance to, to get in the second look pile, to get in the maybe pile to get in the separate yourself from everyone else pile. RV (09:09): But what matters more than anything else is realizing this bestseller lists. Don’t change lives, but books do. Bestseller lists don’t change lives, but books really do. If you become a bestseller, it’s maybe gonna open some doors. It’s gonna do some really great things. But what really matters more than a bestseller title is getting a lot of people to read your book. Making a difference in the world, having your ideas spread, ha having, having your concepts out there, improving and elevating humanity. That’s what being a bestselling author is all about. It’s not about just some silly title or some vein recognition, and it’s not just about getting more opportunity for yourself. Those are small games to play. The big game to play is to go, how do I get lots of people reading my book? How do I get people sharing my book? How do I get people benefiting from my book? And that has to do with first writing a great book, and second, doing everything you can in your power to let people in the world hear about it. So does being a bestselling author matter? It sure does. But what really matters is having a mission that makes a difference. Having a mission is what matters. But if you wanna become a bestselling author, you need to make sure that you don’t have these four common misconceptions.