The Publishing Performance Show

Nick Thacker - How to Become a Full-Time Author in One Year

• Teddy Smith • Episode 61

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Nick Thacker is a bestselling author in multiple genres who turned his hobby into a full-time writing career. Having written 45 books, he now helps other authors transition to full-time writing through his Book Career in a Year program.


In this episode:

  • The journey from hobby to full-time writing
  • Building a sustainable author career
  • Creating effective email marketing strategies
  • Developing multiple income streams
  • Setting realistic author goals
  • Marketing strategies for new authors
  • Building an author platform from scratch


Resources mentioned:


Book recommendations:


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[00:00:00] Teddy Smith: Welcome everybody to the publishing performance show today, I'm really happy to be joined by Nick Thacker. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about how you can become a writer in one year. Now, Nick is a really prolific writer. He's written loads and loads of books. I don't even know how many he's written.

[00:00:20] Teddy Smith: He's written so many books. I can't even count them anymore. But in this episode, we're going to be talking about how Nick can take your writing progress from being. In a full time job or just writing as a hobby to being a full time writer in a year and much, much more. So I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I enjoyed chatting to him.

[00:00:38] Teddy Smith: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the publishing performance show. I'm really happy today to be joined by Nick Thacker, who's a best selling author in multiple genres and an entrepreneur. So thank you, Nick, for joining the call today. 

[00:00:49] Nick Thacker: Well, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. 

[00:00:51] Teddy Smith: Yeah. I mean, I've been following you around the internet for quite a long time now, so it's really happy to have you on the show.

[00:00:55] Teddy Smith: Finally. 

[00:00:56] Nick Thacker: Oh, good. Yeah. No, glad to be here, man. It's a, it's a cool show. I think it's going to be fun. 

[00:01:00] Teddy Smith: Thank you. Well, let's go. Let's start just at the beginning of your writing career. So can you tell us a bit about your backgrounds and how you got into writing in the first place? 

[00:01:09] Nick Thacker: Oh, I love this story because, I'm probably the only maybe not, I wouldn't say only, but I probably one of the few authors who admits that I never wanted to be an author.

[00:01:18] Nick Thacker: I hated writing growing up. I remember in English class, you know, we would have to write essays about these books that they made us read. And I hated every single book I hated writing. And I remember my senior year of high school. I said, I'm done. I'm never going to write anything ever again. Of course, I went to college and had to write more essays, but I just, I hated it all the time.

[00:01:33] Nick Thacker: Yeah. Got into marketing, long story, but ended up in marketing doing web design sales, things like that. And, at that company, when I was doing marketing, I started writing a book and the reason I started writing a book was that my granddad had passed away and he and my dad and I had all kind of swapped novels, you know, Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, that kind of stuff.

[00:01:53] Nick Thacker: And I thought, well, this would be kind of a cool Christmas gift for my dad. The year, you know, his dad passed away to give him a book that I wrote and see. And the whole goal was to see if he would notice, right? So he'd unwrap it on Christmas day and clearly it's a book, Oh, it's hard cover. And he, you know.

[00:02:08] Nick Thacker: And this happened, I finished the book and gave it to him on Christmas day and he unwrapped it, didn't know what it was. He just saw that it said the golden crystal. And he said, Oh, cool. Thanks. You know, thanks for the book. And and then of course my mom said, look who wrote it. And so he looked down and saw who wrote it.

[00:02:24] Nick Thacker: And he was like, Oh my God, it was really cool. A book was terrible. Of course it was horrendous. I barely got through it. Is it still for sale? I remember it's still for sale. Now I've since rewritten it and re released it. It's called the Atlantis stone. which is a little bit, it's got some of that sci fi kind of fantasy element to it but it's not sci fi or fantasy.

[00:02:44] Nick Thacker: And so originally the Golden Crystal had too much of a, of a sound, you know, that's like, it just sounds too fantasy or whatever. So I, I, I got rid of some of that stuff in the book. It changed the title, covered all that stuff, re released it. It's, it's a good story. I really do like it. But originally, I remember thinking, I got stuck in the middle and what we call, and I now know is called the muddy middle.

[00:03:03] Nick Thacker: And I remember stopping looking at my wife. This is how naive I was, man. I didn't have any idea that there was a whole industry out there about writing. And I remember looking at her and going, I wonder if anyone's ever written a book about, like, how to do this, how to write a book, how to craft and, you know, outline and all that.

[00:03:20] Nick Thacker: I had no idea, you know, of course, then I got on Amazon and found a whole, you know, genre of self help craft books. I'm now competing with Stephen King. Yeah, right, yeah. And Stephen King was one of them, you know, on writing. And, um, you know, I remember I bought a stack of these things. And I just plowed through all of them.

[00:03:38] Nick Thacker: There was a few that I loved, a few that I didn't like as much. But the point was, it got me through the end of that first book. And, again, the plan was, I didn't like, I mean, I liked the writing process. I liked the creativity. I liked being able to do whatever I wanted to do. But I, I wasn't a writer, you know, I've never seen, I thought of myself as that I didn't identify as a writer and based on my experience writing this first book, I thought, yeah, I'm terrible at this.

[00:04:00] Nick Thacker: This is awful. So I'm never gonna do this again. But what happened was inevitably all of those really amazing ideas. I thought I'd had. I tried to cram into this first book and they just didn't all fit. I had research and things that I went, I'm going to make this, you know, relevant and I just couldn't do it.

[00:04:17] Nick Thacker: And so I kept all that stuff aside. I called it my swipe file because in marketing and advertising, you have a swipe file where you just kind of go back to I called it my little swipe file and I used that. About six months later, and I thought, you know, I kind of want to try this again. Maybe I can, like, craft a story and use some of the stuff I learned the first time.

[00:04:33] Nick Thacker: And, dude, that has basically been my process since then. I've written 45 of these things now. and one sweet hockey romance, I might add. That was a dare for my friends. But, uh, I've gotten to a point where I think I know what I'm doing, at least a little bit. People seem to like the books and every time I try to kill a main character, my readers get mad.

[00:04:52] Nick Thacker: So I have to keep going. So here we are. I'll never stop. 

[00:04:56] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Great. So the, so the first books you wrote, you're working in marketing at the time and you just wrote them as a hobby. What was the point when you realized, Oh, actually maybe I could make this a thing and this could be my thing. Yeah. 

[00:05:07] Nick Thacker: Easily four or five books into it.

[00:05:10] Nick Thacker: Um, okay. So my, my best selling book of all time is the Enigma Strain that is book one of a now 16 book series called the Harvey Bennett thrillers. And that book, the Enigma Strain is the third piece of fiction I ever wrote. I mean, it was the third book that I wrote. So it was the third time I tried to do this writing thing.

[00:05:26] Nick Thacker: I still didn't know what I was doing. actually the goal I set for myself in that book was to see if I could have, yeah. Kind of a multiple point of view, main character, male, female sort of thing. And of course they end up getting together, you know, spoil it that book. So everybody looks at that book and they, Oh man, you got 8, 000 reviews on that.

[00:05:41] Nick Thacker: A lot of them are five star and it just seems like it's doing really well. Yeah, it is. But the first 12 months of its existence, it made 80. Right. And so it's just one of these books that, like most of my stuff, I don't have bestsellers. I don't have books that launched to the moon and go to number one on Amazon.

[00:05:57] Nick Thacker: I have books that just slowly start earning money over time. And sure, I put advertising dollars behind them and all that, but it took a long time for me to look back and realize, Oh, shoot, these are actually making a little bit of money because they didn't make very much money. So I didn't really worry about the income.

[00:06:11] Nick Thacker: I didn't worry about making profit. I was just doing it because it was something I enjoyed. And it was very much not marketing. It was very much not my job. You know? So as a hobby, I just treated it as a hobby. I didn't have any expectation. It was probably three years, maybe four years into the whole thing.

[00:06:28] Nick Thacker: I started in 2011. Published the first book in 2012, I think. And so it was maybe four years into it when I started realizing, Oh, this actually is making a little bit of cash. And then I started kind of applying the marketing mindset to it a little bit more thinking, how can I advertise? How can I promote this?

[00:06:45] Nick Thacker: How can I get people on a mailing list? Just formalizing a lot of that. And that's when things again, didn't, you know, I wouldn't say blew up, but that's when things started really trending up, you know, I started to be able to do things, pull some levers, make real change happen, you know, the things that didn't work, I'd stopped doing things that worked.

[00:07:00] Nick Thacker: I did more of and I got to the point where I was able to quit my full time job in 2017 and I never looked back. 

[00:07:07] Teddy Smith: Yeah, amazing. I think. The way you've done it is the best because obviously you enjoyed, you started writing, you found out you enjoyed it, and you did it anyway. So even if you weren't earning money, you probably would have been doing it for fun because it was something you enjoyed and that's Precisely.

[00:07:20] Nick Thacker: Yeah, I, I, I teach authors that all the time. I try to anyway, try to tell them like, look, you see us, you see guys that are doing it and that are successful and that do make money doing it. but if you go into it with an expectation that you will have that, or you will do exactly what we're doing, you'll probably be disappointed.

[00:07:36] Nick Thacker: Yeah, that doesn't mean it's not possible to be successful. I frankly, I think if you write more books. And you just publish this as fast as you can, maintaining high quality. It's not prop. It's not possible to be successful. It's actually probable. I really believe that. I think it's probable that you will find your success, but going into it with an expectation of very clear.

[00:07:55] Nick Thacker: This is what it's going to look like. This is what it's going to be like. This is how much I'm going to make setting yourself up for failure because it is such a weird fickle industry in general. And, you know, you can't really build a career based on someone else's. It has to be your own unique thing in your own journey.

[00:08:11] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. I, I, that advice is great. Not just for authoring, but like for the whole business side of authoring as well, because I find you've got to enjoy those other parts. And there's some parts of the business, which I don't really enjoy. I don't really love social media, for example, but I find that I enjoy it more when I've got good content to put out and I've got stuff that I'm proud of.

[00:08:29] Teddy Smith: So it's kind of doing that work in the first place and enjoying that part of it. The other parts become more enjoyable as a result because yeah, I was talking 

[00:08:36] Nick Thacker: about it. Yeah, you, you can't market something that doesn't exist. So you know, you're thinking about social media, you're thinking about building a website, all that.

[00:08:43] Nick Thacker: Well, if you don't have a book, if you don't have a, a body of work to promote, there's no point in doing that other stuff, you know? And so it's always like, Hey, the most important thing and the best marketing is release the next book. Just get the next one out. Right. 

[00:08:54] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. So you're talking just now about your book, The Best Seller, that that book you said in the first year only made 80 or something like that.

[00:09:02] Teddy Smith: What was it that, what was it that flips that switch from being a book that basically didn't do anything to something that is now making lots of money? 

[00:09:11] Nick Thacker: Well, I, I mean, I got three or four books into it, you know, so it became a series for one. I think if it was a standalone book, like my first two books, they still make more than 80, maybe 500 a year, you know, um, which isn't much.

[00:09:23] Nick Thacker: I mean, that's not a career. That's, that's just cool. Right. Right. Yeah. So those first two books that are standalone, I think they could have done the same thing. Had I also gone back and rewritten them like I did and, and added to the series. But right now they're just book one of nothing, you know, and so the enigma strain is book one of, like I said, and now 16, maybe 16, I'm either working on 16 or 17.

[00:09:45] Nick Thacker: I don't know. I don't do math. I didn't become a writer. There's a lot of books in the series and it was, you know, probably wasn't until book three at the, at the least where I started really seeing some traction, seeing some sales come in. And that, that was basically my first lesson in. Yeah. Giving the readers what they want, and generally speaking, more often than not, they want more books.

[00:10:07] Nick Thacker: They don't want a standalone, they want three books, or six books, or nine books. You know, something in a series that they can latch onto and continue reading. And I, I captured something in there, there's some essence in the characters that people wanted to read on and see what they did next. I mean, I did, I did as well.

[00:10:22] Nick Thacker: I wrote these characters that I thought, hey, I want to see what they do after this. How do they become a team, you know, partners? And so I just started doing that. I think it was probably book three, the, the ice chasm after I released that one and started working on book four, where I started thinking, you know, Oh, okay, cool.

[00:10:37] Nick Thacker: This one, this one series is actually making a little bit of money. Um, but again, I mentioned, you know, it was the enigma strain that made me realize there's income potential in all of this because the enigma strain came out, even though it only did 80 in the first 12 months, having the backlist now having two other books raised the entire, the, the career.

[00:10:55] Nick Thacker: Right. And. You know, it wasn't just financial. It was people were starting to sign up to my mailing list. I offered all three of those books for free. If you signed up for my, for my list. And so early on, I was able to get a pretty decent sized list. And then I used that list to promote the next books and it just all snowballed from there.

[00:11:11] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Interesting. So it sounds like you did use a lot of your backgrounds in marketing to start promoting your books and using that experience. 

[00:11:18] Nick Thacker: Yeah. You know, the thing is, it's not very advanced marketing. It wasn't anything crazy. I wasn't doing anything anyone else. I mean, we all know the stuff now, right?

[00:11:26] Nick Thacker: We all know about mailing lists and social media and advertising, which, by the way, are the three big buckets that I have that those are the three things all authors should be doing. It's something in, the difference was I came into it with a marketing mindset. I knew that, Hey, I've written this book.

[00:11:43] Nick Thacker: I've got enough ego to, to, to assume that if it's good, if, if I think I like it, there's probably somebody out there that also likes it. And even though I'm not approaching this like a job, it is a business. And I realized that. And so I said, well, how do I market this? And for me, the answer was just get people on the mailing list.

[00:11:59] Nick Thacker: Just get them over to my. Corner of the internet. And the reason, you know, for that was early on. I wasn't trying to make money. I was trying to fight obscurity. Nobody knew who I was. So I was like, I'll give you my books if you just sign up for my list. And then if I, you know, write this other book, I can send that to you and maybe you'll buy something one day.

[00:12:16] Nick Thacker: That was literally the extent of the mindset. But what's funny is that is still the mindset. I mean, that's still what I'm trying to do. Yeah. You know, obviously it's a career, so I need to make sure I'm making some income, but I've got so many more books now I can yeah. Pull a bunch of those levers. I can give this away to get people on the list and sell them this thing over here or book one.

[00:12:34] Nick Thacker: And then I have seven books. Oh, you know, so it just becomes a lot easier to do all that marketing stuff because I have the backlist because you can't market something you don't have. 

[00:12:42] Teddy Smith: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean that quote, you just said that could be our quote card. You said the aim of the writer at first isn't to make money.

[00:12:49] Teddy Smith: It's to fight obscurity. That's such a, that's such a good concept that I think a lot of people. A lot of people get worried about these like marketing techniques that they, they say, Oh, how am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? How am I going to do ads? But you don't really need to worry about those things at first.

[00:13:02] Teddy Smith: What you should be worrying about is what you can control. You know, are you writing books? Are you doing the work? It's 

[00:13:07] Nick Thacker: so true. Yeah, 

[00:13:08] Teddy Smith: it is so true. 

[00:13:09] Nick Thacker: People you know, authors think again, they see me or someone else like, Oh, you're making X amount of dollars a year. That's where I want to be. Great. You have to write the books.

[00:13:19] Nick Thacker: And as you're doing that, Yeah, you'll start to make more sales, but really you should be focused on grabbing as many eyeballs as you can and just giving them everything that they need to become a fan of yours, because then, and only then will they part with their money for the next book. It's so hard to advertise something if they've never heard of you before, you know, they, they don't just need to know it's a good book, they need to know, oh, this is an author who knows what they're doing because the last thing we want is to buy a book, even if it's 2 and we get halfway through it and we realize the author doesn't know what they're doing, you know, and it's just like, oh, this was a waste of time.

[00:13:49] Nick Thacker: I'm not going to finish it. Right? So, yeah, you got to That kind of rapport in the industry, you have to have a little bit of, you know, a cloud even that doesn't mean you have to be super well known and have big branding campaigns. It just means you have to write more books and when you start to do that and give that book away because they don't know who you are, then over the course of years, people will say, Oh no, I know that name.

[00:14:11] Nick Thacker: I'm going to go buy that next book or I'm on his list. I heard about that book. I'm going to go grab it. And you start to make real money there. But that, that goal has never changed for me. Yeah. I want to make money, but the way to make money, right. Is to find more people to give my books to. 

[00:14:24] Teddy Smith: Hmm. Yeah, definitely.

[00:14:25] Teddy Smith: Well, everyone's, unless you're already famous or you've got reputation or you're writing about something, you know, a lot about everyone starts at zero and you've got to build that reputation. You're the first person on your mailing list. That's the first step. And I think, I think JK Rowling said when she first started writing, her dream was just to have someone recognize her name when she paid with credit card.

[00:14:44] Teddy Smith: So she's got kind of past that now. When you were going from. You write, you work a lot with people on helping them to go full time and to do that, you know, that dream of going, making a career out of this. So when you first made that leap and you know, you'd thought, actually, I can make a thing about this.

[00:15:03] Teddy Smith: Can you think about some of the obstacles and the difficulties you had and how you overcame them? 

[00:15:08] Nick Thacker: Yeah. For, for becoming a career author in that sense. Exactly. 

[00:15:12] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:15:13] Nick Thacker: Yeah. I mean, look, I run a company called book career in a year and it sounds tongue in cheek. It sounds kind of like, Oh, that's funny. You know, as if we could do that.

[00:15:21] Nick Thacker: Yeah, it's, it's a big, you know, lofty goal, right? Have an entire book career, meaning whatever financial stability, whatever that, whatever number that is for you, in 12 months, like that's a lot to think of, but the goal with it is to, to show authors that like, look, I've made a lot of mistakes. I've done this for 15 years now or something, something like that.

[00:15:39] Nick Thacker: And I know what I'm doing and I know that if you're writing genre fiction, commercial fiction, whatever you want to call it. So romance, sci fi. Thriller, mystery, that kind of not literary fiction, not poetry, not memoir but you're writing stuff that is intended to sell to like a mass audience. It is absolutely possible.

[00:15:56] Nick Thacker: And as I said before, if you're doing these things right, it's probable that you'll have a career out of it. And yes, a year is probably fast because you will make mistakes. You should make mistakes. You should fail. You should learn from those mistakes. But if you did everything exactly the way. That I'm trying to show people probable that you'll, you'll, you'll do this very quickly.

[00:16:15] Nick Thacker: And so some of those mistakes we've kind of touched on already. It's like. Not wanting to write the next book or not writing the next book because you think you're gonna chase social media You're gonna go be the next tick tock sensation with your one book Hey, that's great. If you can man maintain writing the next book while you do tick tock then go to tick tock But if you don't have the next book and you're not working on the next book or you're not carving out enough hours in The day to write the next book.

[00:16:39] Nick Thacker: There's nothing else you should be doing Get the next book out. The next mistake again, I touched on this earlier, but I, I believe authors as, as a species, we, we, we love shiny objects. We have shiny object syndrome. We go look at the next thing, like tick tock or whatever it is and say, Oh, I need that.

[00:16:55] Nick Thacker: That's the secret, right? We see one guy blow up or one girl blow up over here and we're like, Oh, that must be the thing that I'm missing. It's not, that's not the thing you're missing. The thing you're missing is it. Write the next book, learn from the mistake, figure out what to do next, figure out what to do better.

[00:17:09] Nick Thacker: I've also said this too, part of that shiny object syndrome is there's three things authors should be doing that. That's three you know, email marketing is probably the first one. So, so get a list, get people coming to your website to get on your mailing list. I coach people through that all the time because people think, oh, I have a website and somewhere on that website is a subscription box.

[00:17:29] Nick Thacker: I'm good. Well, no, you're not because people may not even know where that box is. They may not, they're not going to put their information into a box. You have to be very clear about giving them something. And these days, like mine, it has to be something that's worth getting, giving their email address away because we all get thousands of emails a day.

[00:17:46] Nick Thacker: So give them three books, give them five books, give them at the very least an entire book written by you and to, to incentivize them, but then show us what that looks like. Make it pretty, make it look good. So make it pop up when they get to the, get to the website. Don't hide that off in a corner and then say, Oh, I'm good because you're not, you're not getting the eyeballs there that you should.

[00:18:05] Nick Thacker: That's the first thing. And once you kind of figure that out and get a list going, build the autoresponder sequence, all that stuff that, you know, you can get in the weeds. But it's important. Then you can start focusing on building out social media platforms. And this doesn't have to be you know, going and making three TikTok videos a day and killing yourself.

[00:18:21] Nick Thacker: It can be as simple as what I like to tell people is you want your social media platforms to not attract people. You're not, you're not on social media to attract readers. You're there to be attractive. If and when they find your, your platform. So my Facebook page shows who I am. I'm not out there trying to say, Hey, come buy my book.

[00:18:41] Nick Thacker: Hey, come over here. Hey, come like this page. I'm just saying, Hey, this is me. When I post here, I'm talking about stuff. I like whether it's writing or whiskey or woodworking or hockey, you know? And then people come and they think, Oh, this guy is somebody that's like me in certain ways. I like him. I'm going to follow him.

[00:18:56] Nick Thacker: And you know, one day I might even buy his book. So you're looking to be attractive, not attract. And that's the second bucket. The third one is advertising, which we don't have to get into because it's just a whole other thing as well. But if, if you're, if you're an author with a backlist, you've got some books out, you've got something in series, especially it's time to start thinking about advertising.

[00:19:14] Nick Thacker: It doesn't have to be much, but it's time to start thinking about how can you buy eyeballs to get onto your work. Assuming everything's set up really well, Amazon's pretty good about converting people. So you can send people to Amazon have a good cover, have a good description, have a good blurb pricing, all that stuff matters.

[00:19:30] Nick Thacker: But you know, you can literally go on Facebook and buy people to go over to Amazon and potentially buy your books. And that's what we're after with advertising. Yeah. 

[00:19:40] Teddy Smith: So that's really interesting. So. So obviously the main thing is what you're saying is the books got to be written. You got to have that initial work there, but the main thing that's going to get you from being you know, just a writer who's doing their spare time to be able to go full time is to start to understand those different marketing strategies that you can use starting with getting your main list done.

[00:20:00] Teddy Smith: And this is something we hear like over and over again in these sessions. I think for some people they have their, if they're non fiction writers, especially, it's quite easy to create a giveaway to get people to sign up for your main list, but it's a bit more difficult with the fiction writers. So what are some of the tips you have for fiction writers can give away in order to get that first step of really getting the main list started?

[00:20:23] Nick Thacker: Yes. I think you're thinking very creatively like nonfiction. There are a lot of easy creative things we can do. So if you're writing, you know, history book, for example, you can find, you know, little fake artifacts and trinkets of that time period and give those away. Sure. Absolutely. But it doesn't have to be that complicated.

[00:20:38] Nick Thacker: Like with fiction, we're writing books. So the first thing you should think of giving away is a book. And again, when I first started, I had three books out when I, I started my mailing list before that, but I wasn't really, Yeah. Focused on, on making this a career. As I said, I just sort of treated it as a hobby until I had at least three books, but I remember I had three books out.

[00:20:58] Nick Thacker: They were the only books that ever written. I didn't have short stories. I didn't have any chapters. I just had books and those were the same three books that I gave away on my mailing list. And so authors hear that and they think, well, I mean, gosh, you're getting people on your mailing list. You're just giving them the book and then you don't have anything to sell them.

[00:21:12] Nick Thacker: No, I don't. I gave them the books because for me, getting them on the list was way more important, especially early on. that's still the case, but now I've got 43 other books I can sell them. So I don't have to worry about giving those three away. 

[00:21:23] Teddy Smith: Also, they might leave you a review as well on Amazon for 

[00:21:26] Nick Thacker: that book.

[00:21:26] Nick Thacker: Well, that's the thing. And that's part of my autoresponder sequence is like, yeah, hey, I gave you the book. You know, the second day they get an email, did you get the book? And then three days later, they get one that says, hope you're enjoying the book. And then eventually they get an email that says. Would you review the book?

[00:21:39] Nick Thacker: I mean, by now, and by the way, I've got little stories in each of those emails. So it's not just that, you know, boring question. But that's the call to action in each of those emails. And by the time they get the review question, they should know a little bit about who I am. They've probably read some of it if they're interested.

[00:21:52] Nick Thacker: I get a lot of reviews from that people go and they click through and they check out Amazon Even juices, Amazon's algorithm to say, Oh, people are landing on this guy's book. They're leaving a review. Let's show his other books to them, you know? And so that's how Amazon works. I mean, that's, it's all just this AI machine learning algorithm that shows people stuff based on what they've clicked and purchased and reviewed before.

[00:22:13] Nick Thacker: So back to your question. Yeah. Don't overthink it. I mean, I start with a book. If you only have one book give the whole book away. If you're writing the book, the first book you've ever written, give away a chapter, give away whatever you can, but think in terms of. You know, you're not just doing the bare minimum to get people to email to subscribe.

[00:22:31] Nick Thacker: You need to think in terms of what is the most obvious thing I can give away. That's a no brainer that that is the easiest. Yes. I'm going to get from these people. For me, you come to my website. Hey, here's three full length thrillers. Cool. If you like thrillers, you're going to say yes to that. You know, if you don't even know who I am, you're going to say yes to that because it's three books for the small price of an email address.

[00:22:50] Nick Thacker: And they can, and they know they can always unsubscribe later. Right? So just make it, you know, clear that you're giving away. Something that is so obviously a yes, that there's no question in their mind. They're going to subscribe. Definitely. That's a really important point you made about sending people back to Amazon as well to lead the review, to make the purchases because that Amazon changed their algorithm quite recently within this year.

[00:23:12] Teddy Smith: And it did always do this before, but now it's placing more focus on it, on previous purchasing behavior and the way that you interact with the website. So it was always a factor that your previous purchases were going to. You know, tell, tell Amazon what to show you when you next do a search, but they're now placing even more importance on that.

[00:23:29] Teddy Smith: So, you know, your previous purchases make quite a big impact on what Amazon is going to show you as a customer. And then that obviously has impacts on what you're going to buy next. that's great tips you just gave. one of the things I struggled with the most going from like a job. Where you're told what to do and there's someone asking you why you haven't done what you said you're going to do to working for yourself and making sure you're keeping on track and being productive all the time is being productive and sticking to goals.

[00:23:58] Teddy Smith: So when you started out, what were the, did you have any particular problems that you faced and also how did you make sure you were staying productive and, you know, treating it more like a business rather than just a hobby? 

[00:24:12] Nick Thacker: Yeah, no, I think early on I, again, I didn't come into it with expectations.

[00:24:15] Nick Thacker: I didn't know if I could even finish a book. Certainly wasn't worried about how well I wrote. I just wanted to get the words down. And I was shooting for the 100 to 100, 000 word rate, 100, 000 to 110, 000 word range because that's, I believed what most of the action adventure thrillers in my genre, were set at.

[00:24:32] Nick Thacker: So that was literally my goal was, yeah. Finish a book, and it's this long. I did have a deadline, which was Christmas. You know, obviously I wanted to give this to my dad for Christmas, so that was my hard deadline. And I'm not a deadline guy. It's funny, like, I have to have them, or I won't do any work, but I always blow past them.

[00:24:49] Nick Thacker: So I have to set this, like, weird, squishy deadline range of like, okay, well I'm gonna work on this, and I want it done by September, and then inevitably it'll be done in October. You know, but it'll get done. If I don't have the deadline, then the book never gets written. So I didn't know that about myself early on.

[00:25:02] Nick Thacker: All I did was I just said, well, I'm going to write when I have, you know, the time, I opened my laptop on the plane. My wife and I were visiting Colorado where we eventually moved. And that was when I first started writing the first book. I said, I have this idea. I'm going to try this. I like writing on airplanes, you know, like working on airplanes.

[00:25:18] Nick Thacker: And so I opened the computer, started writing, wrote a couple chapters. It was terrible. But I, I started that learning process of, you know, how long did the chapter for me? How quickly can I write one? And it's this, it's this game we play of, you know, how, how to hack our own productivity, you know, and you can read all the books.

[00:25:35] Nick Thacker: You can get all the apps. Um, I had all the writing tools. I remember getting Scrivener, uh, which is what I still use. I remember using Microsoft word, which I hated with a passion. Um, I remember that I can't remember. There's like three or four other ones that I tried out. Okay. Because I loved playing with apps and all that, and I eventually found Scrivener was, it, it gelled with my mind and the way I could, you know, kind of focus.

[00:25:57] Nick Thacker: I eventually learned that if I sat down and wrote for a solid hour, I could get a good chapter done. That was at the time, you know, again, not a good writer, but it was well edited. It was self edited, but it was well edited and it was pretty clean. And I just, I learned things like that. And so I knew after a while that, hey, I can't really do the writing at work.

[00:26:17] Nick Thacker: I can't really hide under the cubicle and type for an hour during lunch. that's just not where I work best or work at all, you know, I couldn't split focus. I learned that I couldn't, and this is still true today. I can't go from like, for example, this interview to writing like, right. Like there has to be, unfortunately, at least a 15 minute gap of like, you know, mindset shifting and, you know, checking emails.

[00:26:39] Nick Thacker: I just can't do it and vice versa. I can't come out of writing and then immediately be in like, you know, email brain. Some people can, and it's, I'm jealous of them. Some people can also fall asleep at night right away, you know, but Hey, I can't do it. So, you know, I don't know that I'm answering your question other than saying, Hey, this is what happened with me was I started doing this and I just started paying attention to my own habits, my own desires, my own needs.

[00:27:00] Nick Thacker: Yes, we can set new habits. Yes, we can change who we are over a long period of time. But what's more important or I should say important before you get to any of that is to figure out what our own question. Personality and habits are, you know, it's one thing to read on writing by Stephen King. Oh, this is what he does every day.

[00:27:16] Nick Thacker: So I'm going to do that. Well, you're not Stephen King. And so you shouldn't, you should at least know, you know, when I read on writing, I had already started writing my book. So I was like, Hey, that's not a process that I think could work for me. Maybe I'll try it, but that doesn't seem like what I want to do.

[00:27:31] Nick Thacker: I don't like typewriters. I don't want to lock myself in a closet. I don't want to not talk to my family until I get the writing done. You know, whatever, I don't want to be on meth.

[00:27:43] Nick Thacker: You should know enough about yourself to know, Hey, I don't think that's going to work. But most authors, I wouldn't say most there's, there's authors that talk to that don't do that. They don't realize that they're, they're a human, right. They have the habits already. They've got ingrained beliefs already.

[00:27:56] Nick Thacker: And they're using those, whether they believe it or not to write and to be productive. So you really have to self analyze better. And you really have to know, this is how I work best. This is when I work best. This is when my family's here and I like my family. I want to be around them. So I'm not going to just use that time just because it's my most creative time.

[00:28:13] Nick Thacker: Doesn't mean I'm going to, you know, shut them all out and go hide in the basement and work. You can be creative at another time. You can figure that out. So just knowing that stuff about yourself is a really, really crucial. Because then you can apply something like James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, to your own productivity.

[00:28:28] Nick Thacker: And, and make really good changes that, you know, that are for the best for you. 

[00:28:32] Teddy Smith: I find you can be unproductive by reading productivity books. Um, Oh my gosh. 

[00:28:38] Nick Thacker: I'm a productivity guru. I mean, I have all the apps, all the tools. I've read all the books. I know all this stuff, but do I do all of it? Absolutely not.

[00:28:45] Nick Thacker: And that's what kills me. I, you know, I do have this belief that reading without action is entertainment. 

[00:28:51] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Doesn't matter what it is. 

[00:28:52] Nick Thacker: If you're reading history without taking action on that, you're not teaching history somewhere. It's just entertainment and there's nothing wrong with entertainment.

[00:28:59] Nick Thacker: But when it comes to something like productivity, if you're reading all these books about productivity and you're not doing anything, you're not implementing them. You're not practicing and doing the hard work of self reflection. It's just entertainment. 

[00:29:09] Teddy Smith: Yep. Yep. Definitely. The, the, the, the one thing that I've felt founds that works best for me, and it's not going to be for everyone, but it's something called the entrepreneur operating system.

[00:29:19] Teddy Smith: Uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a book called traction. It's amazing. It's quite like, do you know, do you know what I believe? Gina Wickman? Yeah. It's a really good book and it's not very all three. It's not very arty. It is quite like set your KPIs and stick to it, but I found it as the best way to like reflect on your business.

[00:29:34] Teddy Smith: And if you are doing that. If you are treating this and you want to become a full time writer in a year, these are the sort of things you need to be thinking about, I think. Because that's when you 

[00:29:42] Nick Thacker: EOS for me goes hand in hand with one called the 12 week year. 

[00:29:47] Teddy Smith: Oh, that's a great book. Yeah. 

[00:29:49] Nick Thacker: Which is just really, really cool.

[00:29:50] Nick Thacker: I love the concept of 12 weeks. And if you do the math, it actually, there's an extra week at the end of every quarter for like Catching up and finalizing and then setting the new goals, but it's a great way to kind of approach, Hey, here's what I'm going to get done in a year. And then, you know, the argument there is that you can probably get a lot of that done in just 12 weeks.

[00:30:06] Teddy Smith: Definitely. Yeah. That basically 12 week here plus EOS is my entire productivity system. So good recommendations. Yeah. Did you find you needed any mindset set shift in order when you started going full time, you know, was there any things? You thought maybe you're struggling with self doubt, or there's things that weren't going exactly the way you wanted it to.

[00:30:32] Nick Thacker: Oh, my God. Every day, man, every day. That's still where I am. So I have anxiety. I'm an anxious person. I get really anxious. And you know, over the course of many, many, many hours of therapy and learning and self reflection, all that I know my triggers and so I'm healthy. But I'm still anxious. Right.

[00:30:45] Nick Thacker: And so I, I, in unhealth, I lean toward being anxious, freaking out about everything, extrapolating this number to mean, Oh, we're going to be dead and poor on the street, you know, in a, in a, in a month all the fear and worry that comes with that. So yeah, every single day is a battle with, in my own head of mindset shift of, Hey, you got here.

[00:31:04] Nick Thacker: And things aren't really that different than they have been. So you're probably going to be fine next month. You know, just that, that self talk, right? One of the big mindset shifts I had early on was in realizing this is a business, whether we like it or not, what we're doing by putting a book out into the world is saying, Hey, here's a tiny itty bitty.

[00:31:22] Nick Thacker: Almost insignificant business, but it is a business. Um, we are putting it for sale. That implies again, it's good enough that other people might like it. And even if you pretend like you don't, you want somebody to buy that. Um, so there's so many authors that are like, well, I just write for myself. And I'm like, great.

[00:31:38] Nick Thacker: Why are your books on Amazon? Why are they for sale at Barnes and Noble? Why are, why do you have a website? You know, like what, if they're, if they're for yourself, there's nothing wrong with that, but then don't put them online. So the reason I'm getting to that mindset shift talking about mindset shift here is.

[00:31:53] Nick Thacker: These authors are lying to themselves. They're trying to let themselves off the hook with this. And I know I'm being a little harsh here, but like, that's, it's a mindset shift that I had to go through as well. Oh, I'm just writing for myself. I just want to write what I want to write. Great. Then why is it for sale?

[00:32:06] Nick Thacker: You're just letting yourself off the hook. You're saying, Oh, I don't need to learn marketing. I don't need to learn advertising. I don't need to be a brand. I don't need to focus on, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't need to do any of this, right? Because I'm just writing for myself. Right. so that's a big mindset shift is no, no, no, you're not.

[00:32:20] Nick Thacker: You're writing for readers. You're writing for people to come find your book and enjoy your book and become your fan. And that sounds, that all sounds great. Guess how they have to do that. The mechanism for doing that is capitalism. It's buying the book or it's signing up for your mailing list. It's getting the book from you somehow.

[00:32:35] Nick Thacker: So get over it. That, that, that's the mindset shift. Get over that whole, yeah, we're in an art, artsy, creative cottage industry, almost, you know, of, of, of authors and creatives, we still have to sell our work. We still got to put food on the table. And if you're okay with that then the mindset shift is just getting over the hump of.

[00:32:52] Nick Thacker: You know, Hey, you're a creative, you can still be an artist, but you also get to be a business man or woman and you get to make these decisions as a business. Um, and when you start doing that, and only when you start doing that, will you start to see some of this success that you pretend like you don't want?

[00:33:06] Teddy Smith: Yeah, a hundred percent. I couldn't agree more. It's basically the, the, if I could summarize. This whole podcast that I do into one sentence, that's kind of, yeah, where it's, it's all about, you've got to think about this as a business, you know, you're, you're listening to this cause you want to sell more books.

[00:33:20] Teddy Smith: So if you want to sell more books, you got to treat it like a business. You know, only very, very lucky authors can just be complete artists and hope to make money during their life in that way. Like you've got to, you know, and guess what 

[00:33:32] Nick Thacker: those, those authors, there's a business there as well. And they may not be the one running the business components.

[00:33:38] Teddy Smith: But 

[00:33:38] Nick Thacker: they're still a business there. There's no way to buy a book without buying a book. Like, I cannot go get Stephen King's next book without getting his book . Maybe he's not gonna just give it to me. Right. He's not gonna print it out and hand it to me. So, 

[00:33:51] Teddy Smith: yeah, 

[00:33:51] Nick Thacker: absolutely man. 

[00:33:52] Teddy Smith: He probably even charges his wife to read the book.

[00:33:54] Teddy Smith: I imagine. That probably would. 

[00:33:56] Nick Thacker: I mean, I mean, I would, I mean, hey, if, if I can't even get her to buy it, why do I expect anybody else to buy it? Right. 

[00:34:00] Teddy Smith: Yeah. . And also you get another review outta it as well, . 

[00:34:03] Nick Thacker: That's right, that's right. 

[00:34:05] Teddy Smith: Now, so talk like basically the re the reason people have been. Picking up would have picked up top.

[00:34:12] Teddy Smith: Sorry, I'll start again. So the reason people would have listened to this podcast in the first place was because. We said, how can you, you know, become a writer in a year and turn it into a full time career? So you've got your program, which is about just that it's about becoming a full time writer, doing it in a year.

[00:34:27] Teddy Smith: So could you tell, let's go through just roughly the step by step that you would need to go through in order to get to that year. And then we can talk about some of the applications of that you'd put in real life. Yeah, sure. I mean, so there is a lot there's a lot of, of work, but there's some, some core components.

[00:34:44] Nick Thacker: There's basics here. So if I do any coaching with an author these are the things that I'm going to focus on first and foremost. And day one, week one is going to be, do you know how to write a book? Do you have a book already? Is it good? Is it good enough to sell? If not, are you taking the right steps to learn?

[00:35:00] Nick Thacker: You know, there's ways to learn craft and there's ways to learn structure and pacing intention. And, and you need to know your genre, but that's the first kind of big question mark. Many, many authors that I coach are already over that hurdle. They know they've already written books. A lot of them have written a lot of books.

[00:35:14] Nick Thacker: They're just like, I don't understand why they're not selling better. Right. So that's usually something that they've already answered. They know how to write a book. Then step two, I say, well, are you writing the next book? Because no matter what we do here, we need to have something new and fresh to market at the end of this.

[00:35:28] Nick Thacker: Right. And that's the next book. So once we kind of answered the writing question, we get into the marketing stuff, we get into. When somebody goes online to find out who you are, do you have a website? Do you have a place for them to go? And I call this the home base on the internet. Like it's something you own, you know, it's, it's not a wordpress.

[00:35:46] Nick Thacker: org. I think is the website, you know, it's Wix. You know, it's not a Squarespace site. It's something you own that you host that you pay for. But the reason for that is that they can't pull the rug out from under you. If anyone's following the wordpress stuff right now with Matt Mullenweg, it's crazy. He has full control over everyone's wordpress.

[00:36:02] Nick Thacker: org sites. You know, I'm on WordPress, but I use self hosted. I manage it myself. He can't touch it. Basically. Anyway, the point is you have to own it. You, you cannot build a home base on, or by my definition, a home base is not something that's built on rented land. So it's not Facebook page. It's not a Twitter profile.

[00:36:19] Nick Thacker: It's not an Amazon, you know, author page. Those are great. Those are called outposts and those all point back to the website, but the website is the home base. And so we talk about that. We talk about how to build that, what you need. Again, I don't like overthinking things. So I'm like, hey, bare minimum, just have one page.

[00:36:34] Nick Thacker: Here's what you put on it. Gotta have that pop up with the book that shows the freebie offer you're giving them, whatever. And then we talk about the outposts and stuff that gets into social media that gets into one of my big buckets, which is you need to have something. You need to find out where your readers are.

[00:36:47] Nick Thacker: If you're nonfiction, they might be linked in. If you're writing business stuff, if you're a twitter, it might be nonfiction. If you're twitter, you know, if you're writing fiction, it's probably facebook, instagram, tiktok, one of those pick a place, pick a platform doesn't have to be more than one at first, but then start being attractive.

[00:37:03] Nick Thacker: Right. You're not, you're not trying to go there to attract. You're not going to be on there every single day, posting, tweeting, you know, here's a picture of my dog. Go buy my book. You're just trying to be attractive and build that outpost. It's really important. I think it's important to be attractive for people.

[00:37:14] Nick Thacker: this shows your personality. This shows your brand. Which is kind of the next thing we talk about at that phase. Like, Hey, branding is all you are branding, whether you realize it or not. So you might as well put in at least an hour or two of work on. What does it look like? When I put my name out there.

[00:37:28] Nick Thacker: In a logo format. What does that look like? Is it consistent? You know, what, what are the, what's the color scheme that I want to use when, when I want to say this is, this is my brand. You know, I used to make these little pretty graphics with a quote on them from a book. And I would just use whatever was pretty in the app.

[00:37:42] Nick Thacker: I was like, Oh, there's a mountain. And then there's some like fog and then like some, some serif text. None of it was branded, right? It did. It was cool. And it was great. And it was technically posting on social media but it wasn't my brand. And so I've had to kind of go back and say, well, whenever I get on Tik TOK and post something, I want to have my colors, my brand show up, you know, that's, that's important.

[00:38:00] Nick Thacker: It doesn't take a lot of work, but again, you got to think about it. And then so at that point, you know, they're writing a book, they've got a website, they've started to play around with some social media stuff. Obviously the email that's part of the website. That's kind of in that that phase of like, when you put a website up, you've got to have a mailing list.

[00:38:15] Nick Thacker: And so we get, you know, talk about the platform you want to use and having an autoresponder sequence. And then we start talking about advertising because that's, again, it's a huge, huge, huge component, especially now that we have a lot more authors coming online selling their books. We need to make sure that we can carve out a niche and get those eyeballs over to where we want them, whether it's our website or Amazon.

[00:38:34] Nick Thacker: And from there, it's really just a matter of where that particular author is, you know, do you want to advertise on Facebook or Amazon or both? You have a budget to do both right away. Do you want to try doing book bub ads? Like there, there's all sorts of things that we can do that just depend on the genre, the style of the book, who the author is, their personality.

[00:38:50] Nick Thacker: So it is a lot of, you know, courses, but it's also coaching, right. It's also kind of done with you sort of. I just had a lunch meeting with a lady yesterday who's an accomplished author, knows what she's doing. Just needs help kind of focusing, like homing in on what to do. She's like, I know all the stuff that I could do.

[00:39:07] Nick Thacker: I've heard of it all. I've even played with some of it. I just, you know, obviously need to focus on something to really make it work, which she's correct about. She's like, I just don't know which one to focus on. And so then I can come alongside and say, Hey, based on what I'm seeing, I would do this next.

[00:39:21] Nick Thacker: And for her, it was get that pop up on your website with a freebie offer. That's so obvious and so good. They can't review. They can't say no. And then let's start advertising that. So on Facebook, we're going to run ads to that website to get people on the mailing list and specifically a landing page that we're going to build.

[00:39:38] Nick Thacker: Um, so just things like that. And that's the kind of stuff that I like to do. I've, I've talked about a lot of stuff I'll shut up, but you know, basically career in a year, the company is just all of my nonfiction. So it's books, courses, coaching, teaching. There's a blog, there's free stuff. There's podcasts.

[00:39:53] Nick Thacker: It's everything that I'm doing to help authors get to the next level. So it's not just one course, you know, there there's courses there. Frankly, we don't even have the full course out yet. The idea is we're building all these little mini courses first. They're full length courses, but they're inexpensive.

[00:40:07] Nick Thacker: You can buy them a la carte. Um, and then eventually we'll have a course of courses called book career in a year, which is what I was talking about. 

[00:40:13] Teddy Smith: Brilliant. Do you, for the people that wants to work with you, do you have any expectation about where they'd be with their book? Or is it for people who are thinking, you know what?

[00:40:24] Teddy Smith: I want to write a book or is it more, you've got your book. Let's get that. Let's get it rolling. 

[00:40:29] Nick Thacker: I can help either, either author. I, I often help authors that have. Some experience that, that have a book at least if not three, four, five, six books out already. Um, that's not a preference. That's just what, you know, I go to conferences and a lot of times the, the, the appointments I get or the the contacts I get are authors who already have a book out.

[00:40:48] Nick Thacker: They're just like, what do I do next? So for those first authors, first time authors, like I said, I do, I do love to coach them as well because then the conversation is much more around how do you want to publish this? How do you want to get this out into the world? You know, there's a lot of authors that still believe traditional publishing is the only way to publish.

[00:41:05] Nick Thacker: Um, and I'm not here to tell them that traditional is bad. I'm, I'm just, I've made a lot of success in the indie world, right? But I own a publishing company now. And so, it's important to realize like, hey, there's, there's a different route here. Like, if you want to do a lot of this yourself or hire out some of the stuff, but maintain full control, indie publishing might be the way to go.

[00:41:23] Nick Thacker: and so that's kind of how those coaching sessions would go. And then I can kind of come alongside like, Oh, well, you still want to go that route. Cool. Let's talk about how to get an agent. Let's talk about querying. Let's talk about making sure this book is really in shape for the New York publishing houses, because that's really what they're after in that case.

[00:41:41] Teddy Smith: Yeah, I've absolutely love this conversation. It's really nice to have such an honest conversation about like the problems and some of the successes you've had. I really appreciate your time here. Yeah. Thank you so much. So if people want to get in contact with you, that's build your book, career in a year.

[00:41:56] Teddy Smith: com is the best place to career in a 

[00:41:58] Nick Thacker: year. com. Yeah. 

[00:41:59] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah. So head there and find. Loads of different courses about the different different aspects about writing a book. It's really good. Thank you very much. So just before we go, we've got one final question, which is, what's the book that you recommend everyone should be reading at the moment?

[00:42:15] Nick Thacker: Well, so there's, I'm gonna give you two. One's fiction, one's nonfiction. One is, I guess they're both technically traditionally published, but one is really helpful for indie authors. Um, it's called Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain. It's an old, old, old book. He's dead. He's a little, it's a little out of date in terms of his beliefs.

[00:42:34] Nick Thacker: I think it's probably the lightweight pieces. but that isn't, it's not, it doesn't come through in the book very much. I think that's just, if you know anything about him. But the book is, is great. He actually taught Jack Bickham who wrote scene and structure. I think it was seen in structure and, and he like learned from Dwight Swain, but Dwight Swain is the OG, right?

[00:42:52] Nick Thacker: He's the original gangster for scenes and sequels and how to craft fiction that sells like what we're talking about, commercial fiction. No matter the genre. And so he gets down into the granular detail of like, you know, talking about how a sentence is structured. You know, you don't, I see the car out the window as I look out, right?

[00:43:10] Nick Thacker: That he's like, no, that's not linear. That isn't, that's not chronological. Like you look out the window and then you see the car, you know? So he just kind of, he has a great way of helping frame you know, like he's not a flowery prose guy. Let's just say that he's not a literary fiction guy. He's a pulp fiction author or was.

[00:43:26] Nick Thacker: Yeah. But I found that really, really, really helpful. It was engaging, but it was also very like, just do this, you know, and I needed that early on. But I still read it. I've got it on my shelf. I still read it. I try to read it once a year. Just very, very apropos, very helpful, good wisdom, for crafting fiction.

[00:43:41] Nick Thacker: the second one is fiction. I also have this one on my shelf. I have a first edition signed copy I'm really proud of. It's in plastic wrap and all that. But the book is called Amazonia by James Rollins. and if anyone's ever read my book, the Amazon code, it's book two in the Harvey Bennett series.

[00:43:57] Nick Thacker: I put in kind of an homage, like a forward in there to James Rollins. I'm sure he's never read it, but, I always said when I, when I wrote, like, I want to write a book like James Rollins. I want it to feel like you're reading a James Rollins novel. He's the guy that I tried to write. Like he's I've met him a couple of times.

[00:44:11] Nick Thacker: Like, he's a good guy who crafts the best thrillers on the market, in my opinion, as far as the action adventure style. And Amazonia is just, it's a romp. I mean, it's just fun. It's, it's got a little bit of that kind of fantasy element to it, but not enough that it's a fantasy book. But it's just, it's just a really, really well crafted, well done thriller.

[00:44:29] Nick Thacker: I like to read that one once a year too, if I can. But the problem is I know the ending now. So, you know, it gets, 

[00:44:34] Teddy Smith: yeah. 

[00:44:36] Nick Thacker: And if you read everything once a year, then you'll 

[00:44:37] Teddy Smith: never read anything new. 

[00:44:39] Nick Thacker: I'll never read anything new. And that's the problem too. Isn't that the irony of it? I became a writer because I loved to read.

[00:44:45] Nick Thacker: That was it. And now I'm like, Oh, I don't have any time to read. Cause if I, if I have time to read, I would feel guilty. I'm like, well, I should be writing, you know. Yep. I think everyone feels like that. Oh, thank you so much. That's been really good recommendations as well. Like there's two new books. I don't know.

[00:45:00] Teddy Smith: So thank you for that. And, uh, I really appreciate your chat. I think people are going to get a lot out of it and look forward to seeing you again soon. Well, thanks a lot. I'm glad to be here and hope hope it was helpful. 

[00:45:10] Teddy Smith: Thank you so much for tuning into the Publishing Performance Podcast. I really hope you found today's episode inspiring.

[00:45:15] Teddy Smith: I love chatting to authors, writers, and people in the publishing world. Now, just before we wrap up, let me tell you about Publishing Performance, the number one platform for authors who want to increase Amazon book sales, but I'm not really sure where to start. Now, this show is all about helping you to sell more books.

[00:45:33] Teddy Smith: And if you're looking to boost your publishing game and to maximize your book's potential on Amazon, then Publishing Performance is designed to help authors just like you to grow your readership and to reach a much wider audience. Now, I know that Amazon ads can be slightly complicated, which is why Publishing Performance is like having a personalized ad account manager to create your ad campaigns, to choose your best keywords, and to make adjustments in real time.

[00:45:58] Teddy Smith: Now, if you're investing in ads, you really want to make sure that your investment is being used effectively. And Publishing Performance does just that. It aims to make your budget go further, improve your organic rank, and target keywords more effectively. Just go to publishingperformance. com to get started with Amazon Ads for just 

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