The Publishing Performance Show

Chris Wallace of WrittenWell - Cracking Amazon's Algorithm: From Poker Player to Self-Publishing Expert

• Teddy Smith • Episode 88

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Chris Wallace is a professional poker player, author, and co-founder of WrittenWell.com. With a background in guitar building before developing an allergy to exotic hardwoods, Chris transitioned to professional poker, which led to writing opportunities during the poker boom. He began writing for poker magazines and blogs, eventually publishing several poker books including a strategy guide and "Short Stacked Ninja." After helping famous poker players increase their book sales through his understanding of Amazon's algorithms, Chris expanded into consulting with authors across all genres before co-founding WrittenWell.com with Adam Stempel and other publishing experts.


In this episode:

  • Journey from poker player to poker writer to author consultant
  • How analyzing Amazon's search algorithm led to book marketing success
  • Comprehensive self-publishing resources on WrittenWell.com
  • Genre-specific guides with tropes, clichés, and market trends
  • Keyword optimization strategies beyond basic search terms
  • Importance of avoiding keywords that hurt conversion rates
  • Audiobook trends and AI narration developments
  • WrittenWell.com's critique groups and writing sprints
  • The future of self-publishing vs. traditional publishing


Resources mentioned:


Book Recommendations:


Connect with Chris Wallace:

  • WrittenWell.com - Use code "publishingperformance" for a discount


Connect with Teddy Smith:

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[00:00:00] Teddy Smith: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Publishing Performance Show. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Chris Wallace, who is a poker player, an author, and the co-founder of written world.com. So thanks for joining the show, Chris. 

[00:00:15] Chris Wallace: Thanks for having me. 

[00:00:17] Teddy Smith: Yeah, so why don't you gimme a bit of your background into how you got started with writing.

[00:00:24] Chris Wallace: You know, I've always been interested in writing from a young age, but I wasn't really serious about it. I didn't grow up in a world where I thought you could write for a living. That just wasn't a thing that I understood as a reality, or I probably would've done it a long time ago. I. Was a guitar builder developed an allergy to the exotic hardwoods I was working with, and immediately had to find a new job.

[00:00:45] Chris Wallace: I my job was trying to kill me and I had counted cards in blackjack as part of my living for many years. And I had a friend who was a professional poker player, semi-professional poker player. He, you know, he was a winning player, but he wasn't playing for a living. And he made fun of me for getting kicked out of another casino for counting cards in blackjack when the, the casino doesn't care how good you are at poker.

[00:01:08] Chris Wallace: And I was driving a taxi and trying to figure out what to do for a living now that my career in, in building guitars was, was over. And I asked him, can, can you, is it possible to do that for a living? And this was, you know, 25 years ago when people would really didn't know you could do that for a living.

[00:01:23] Chris Wallace: And he said, you, yeah, I don't see why not. And he loaned me three poker books and I was, I was off and running as a professional poker player and I was also in the midst of a rough divorce and I started writing to kind of. Just, just journal that and maybe do something with it. And Adam who I run the site with, Adam Stempel was was also a big help in writing.

[00:01:47] Chris Wallace: And I said, do you wanna look at some of my writing? He said, yeah, bring some of it in. So he, he redlined in, in Penn. It was back in those days about 30 pages of what I'd written to, to start a book. And, said, look, you need a lot of work, but you have a lot of talent here. You should, this is something you should do.

[00:02:04] Chris Wallace: And, and so as poker was paying my bills, which happened pretty quickly about within six months of starting to study poker, within six months of the time, I'd played my firsthand at Texas hold them. I was making too much money to go to work at the Cap company. Nice. And and then the poker boom blew up.

[00:02:20] Chris Wallace: A year or two later, all a sudden moneymaker in the World Poker tour and a bunch of other things combined to just absolutely blow poker up. And I was writing a blog for a company called Pocket Fives. And it was very popular and I was playing so much smaller than everyone else who was blogging for them, but I was blogging every day and I could write, so these other guys who were playing really big just couldn't write or couldn't, or wouldn't, wouldn't, weren't blogging very often.

[00:02:45] Chris Wallace: And so I was getting a ton of readers and then I got, was approached by a poker magazine. Hey, we like your blog. Can you write. Articles for us, and I was ecstatic to do that. I'd never been paid to write anything in my life. 

[00:02:55] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:02:55] Chris Wallace: And all of a sudden I was getting paid absurd amounts of money to write things.

[00:03:00] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Because 

[00:03:00] Chris Wallace: when the poker boom happened, there weren't a lot of poker players who could write, and there was all this money. The money in the early days of the online poker boom were in Incre was incredible. But it was a time when poker stars was making millions of dollars a day and was making millions of dollars a day, and they were buying the advertising in these poker magazines.

[00:03:16] Chris Wallace: So. The magazines were making so much money they just needed to fill in with content. So I was getting $1,500 for a thousand word article. 

[00:03:24] Teddy Smith: Oh, 

[00:03:24] Chris Wallace: nice. And you know, I didn't tell my author friends how much money I was getting paid 'cause I knew they'd be mad because you can't, it's just, that's just unheard of money.

[00:03:33] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:03:34] Chris Wallace: And I was writing as many of them as people wanted. I mean, at, at that rate. Yeah. Do you want 50 articles a month? I'll do it. I don't care. Yeah. However much, however many articles you want. And. I started to watch what my, what my editors had published as opposed to what I'd sent them and then try to make it, try to make the next thing.

[00:03:56] Chris Wallace: I sent them more like what they'd published, figure out what they were changing, how they were doing things, because in, I don't know if it's true in all of the magazine world, but in, in in poker magazines, they really would, would take what I sent them. Do whatever they wanted with it and publish it. They didn't send me corrections and ask me if I liked them.

[00:04:14] Chris Wallace: They didn't, none of that. They were paying me too much money to bother with that, so they just did that. And, and so I've just watched when the magazine came out and compared it to what I had sent in and, and try to get better at that. And, and within a few years I was sending them stuff that they were just printing.

[00:04:29] Chris Wallace: Yeah, and I was writing a thousand word article in 45 minutes. I, I write fast. But it, you know, it took work to get to that point. But, but within a few years I was at that point. And then, and then I wrote a few poker books. I sent my business partner in, in written, well, Adam is a consummate writer.

[00:04:45] Chris Wallace: He is a real student of the craft and, and really knows the game. And, and, and, you know, his whole family are writers. His mom's published 400 books. And so. I ended up with 80,000 words of the the strategy that I had taught myself. I. For no limit. Hold them. Yeah. I was making a living playing no limit, hold them online playing poker and, and doing really well.

[00:05:07] Chris Wallace: And with spreadsheets and equity calculators and all these poker related tools. I had, I had kind of taught myself a strategy and figured it out and I wrote 80,000 words, but it wasn't really a book. I didn't know how to order it, how to deal with the various problems that were there. So I sent it to Adam and said, Hey, what do you think I should do with this thing?

[00:05:24] Chris Wallace: I don't know how to organize this. And he said, Ooh, let me make this a book. It's good. So. He turned it into a book. We bounced it back and forth a couple times for a few a few edits, and we self-published it back in the days before print on demand printing. And back in those days, maybe 1% of self-published books made a profit.

[00:05:43] Chris Wallace: It was very rare. It was generally a vanity thing. But we. Already had a built-in audience. I had a lot of people reading my stuff and watching training videos I made, things like that. So, so we had 2000 books printed up and delivered. We got, we took delivery of pallets of books unheard of these days that you could, couldn't pay me enough to take delivery of a pallet of books right now.

[00:06:04] Chris Wallace: And sold and sold a ton of them and made a, you know, made a bunch of money. I think we made 30 or $40,000 from that book in the first printing and, and kind of. Learned a lot from doing it. Realized I could write a book and that this was a thing. And so as the money fell off in the, in the online, in the online poker world you know, those, those writing gigs that I had really started to dry up, they started to be, oh, we'll pay you 500, then we'll pay you 300, then we'll pay you 200.

[00:06:31] Chris Wallace: And then like, oh, we don't really pay people anymore. And, you know, multiple of those magazines said, by the way, we're broken. We're not paying people anymore, and we're not paying you for the last two months. Things, things like that happened. Yeah. So I quit doing that and I started to focus on writing poker books.

[00:06:45] Chris Wallace: So I wrote two more poker books. Short Stack Ninja is a book I wrote on my own. And then getting started with Horse, I wrote with a couple of very famous poker players, the Meraki brothers. And, neither one of 'em sold that well at first, and it's really poker books. Not, not only have poker books dropped off and don't sell as well as they used to, but you can't advertise them.

[00:07:06] Chris Wallace: Yeah, and this is a, this is kind of a gray area in Amazon because I do see sponsored results with a bunch of poker books in them, but I believe they're, they're kind of gray hat marketing their way into doing this now. 

[00:07:17] Teddy Smith: I think, I think the, the restriction is on gambling. 

[00:07:19] Chris Wallace: Possibly. Yes. And they call it gambling.

[00:07:21] Chris Wallace: And so, yeah. And the same thing with Facebook. 

[00:07:23] Teddy Smith: Yeah. I mean, there was a book, I, there's I, I did a coaching call with a guy who was writing a book about how to win the lottery. And even lost that, that was able to be advertised either 'cause it was, lottery is gambling. I. 

[00:07:34] Chris Wallace: Sure. So whether there's is still a prohibition or a way around it now or whatever.

[00:07:39] Chris Wallace: At the time a few years ago, it was just impossible to advertise these books anywhere that had significant reach. I couldn't advertise them on Facebook or Amazon and. So rather than do that or, or, you know, write something different, what I focused on was the Amazon search algorithm. Yep. I used a lot of my game theory knowledge to reverse engineer the Amazon search algorithm and learn how Amazon worked and what they wanted and how this worked.

[00:08:05] Chris Wallace: And so. I was able to then get a lot more sales than, than poker writers who were a lot more famous than I was. 

[00:08:12] Teddy Smith: Yep. 

[00:08:12] Chris Wallace: You know, I, and I started to do consultations. I worked with a, a number of very famous poker players, helping them get more sales 'cause I was out selling them. 

[00:08:21] Teddy Smith: Yeah. And that 

[00:08:22] Chris Wallace: then turned into helping some other people who weren't poker players do the same thing.

[00:08:27] Chris Wallace: And then it turned into a big consulting where, where I just had, you know, I was having Zoom calls every, all day and. And didn't have time to do anything else. And so I, we decided to launch a website and, and teach people the same way. Had we had done with a poker training website 25 years ago, we decided to do the same thing with, with this self-publishing, you know, between Adam's knowledge of the craft and both of us having sold a bunch of books, self-published and, and my.

[00:08:53] Chris Wallace: Consulting with, with authors to help them get more sales and all the things that we learned. We decided we had the knowledge to do this, and then we brought in two other people who had some, some knowledge we didn't have Blaze Ward, who's published. 250 books and run a, an independent author magazine kind of thing for years.

[00:09:13] Chris Wallace: And, and then lighten Morehouse, who's who coaches and teaches and, and writes paranormal Romance stuff, which is just a, a subject we didn't have any part of. And so between the four of us, we, we had things pretty well covered and we started to make make content and fill up the site. And and now we're, now we're working with a bunch of industry people, including you to, to help them out with whatever content they need and to to help their customers get more book sales because people can continue to buy publishing performance if they're putting out enough good selling books to pay for it. Right. So that's, that's kind of how we're working with everybody in the industry is.

[00:09:48] Chris Wallace: We can help your authors get more sales and if they have more sales they can afford whatever your product is or, or you know, we'll keep using it or whatever. 

[00:09:56] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Nice. So that's where Written Well came in. So that's where you founded Written Well. So why don't you give us a bit of an overview of how Written Well Works?

[00:10:03] Chris Wallace: Yeah. Can I can I screen share in this software? 

[00:10:05] Teddy Smith: Yeah, you can, but we just need to make, remember that it's an audio podcast as well, so we could, as long as we're talking about what we're doing that's no problem. Ah, gotcha. It, but it's no problem. We just, I think I need to give you permission.

[00:10:15] Teddy Smith: Looks like I'm I think you just screen share. 

[00:10:17] Chris Wallace: Yeah. It looks like just screen and then I can choose. And so there we go. This is pretty easy. 

[00:10:24] Teddy Smith: There you go. Yeah. 

[00:10:25] Chris Wallace: So we just need, 

[00:10:26] Teddy Smith: we just need to make sure we're talking about what you're, we're seeing. 

[00:10:28] Chris Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. What we started with, with written, well the goal was to be sort of an overarching teach people all about self-publishing and give them whatever knowledge they don't have because there's so many different things you need to learn.

[00:10:43] Teddy Smith: Yep. 

[00:10:44] Chris Wallace: You know, you need to. You need to learn about writing to market. You'll need to learn how to actually write and how to finish a book, and then how to format a book and how to design a cover that's correct for your market and looks good, and write a blurb. And I could go on all day about all the different skills you need to learn to be a successful self-published author on your own.

[00:11:01] Chris Wallace: I. And if you have 80% of them, you're screwed. You have to have them all or you have to pay somebody to do them, and you have to understand that you don't know them and you need them and, and then you can pay somebody to do them. So what we wanted was to give people an overview of all the things they needed and then resources to.

[00:11:21] Chris Wallace: Get all those skill sets or hire people to do those things for them so that we could make sure they had everything. 

[00:11:27] Teddy Smith: Mm-hmm. 

[00:11:28] Chris Wallace: And so that's what we did. We, we put together courses on a bunch of different things and we have more courses going up this week. So these, the, you know, we're looking at courses on Amazon ads.

[00:11:39] Chris Wallace: On becoming an independent author on writing to market 30 days to better writing Amazon ads. One, there's a, a whole list of courses and then we have the, the amount of information on the site is absurd. It's really enormous. We had to switch to a different hosting company just so that this thing would move fast enough.

[00:12:00] Chris Wallace: And get dedicated hosting and the whole thing. So if we go to the, the genre guides, which are a big part of the site click on fantasy guide and you can see. The detail that's involved in all these genre guides, and these are all geared towards sales, right? I don't, I, I've told my poker students for 25 years, I can teach you how to make more money playing poker.

[00:12:22] Chris Wallace: I can't teach you how to have more fun. So if, if, if you're just a recreational player who just wants to have fun and get better, I can make you better, but. Really, I'm gonna be focused on making money. That's what I've focused on. I've had, I've got bills to pay, right? I, I don't have money. I don't have millions of dollars in the bank where I can just screw around.

[00:12:40] Chris Wallace: So I, I've treated writing in much the same way. This is, this is about making money, writing, making a living, writing. And so our genre guides cover every major genre on, on Amazon and when we we're looking at the fantasy genre guide here, they start off with what is. What is this? You know, if you don't know a lot about any of these genres, you can go and start off by reading what, what does it look like?

[00:13:07] Chris Wallace: Then there's always a, should I write in this genre button? The, you know, one of the big keys is, do you, do you love this genre already? Right? If you can't write something just because it's successful, or I'd be a romance writer and I just, I just can't. And so you can go read a whole article on should I write in this genre?

[00:13:22] Chris Wallace: Do I, do you need these qualities? You need to, you know, wanna write these things. And then the must haves. For any book they must haves, like, can thriller include a ticking clock and a a, mm-hmm. Hyper. Hypervigilant and hyper competent hero. And you know, the things that you have to have in every, so in, in fantasy, it's a sense of wonder and an internal consistency in your stories.

[00:13:43] Teddy Smith: So, so basically if you are thinking about writing a novel or especially something that is fiction in one of these areas, these guides basically give you a, a overview of all of the things you need to be including. So it's by joining, you are getting guides for. Essentially like lots of different books that you'd be buying on Amazon as guides to, to start your own book.

[00:14:02] Chris Wallace: Yes. And these guides are very in depth and there's, there's sub genre guides. Like in fantasy there are like 20 sub genres where there's a guide for each of those. So there's the, the must haves. Then there's a list of tropes and cliches, right? Tropes you want to include, cliches you don't. We've also got lots of information about how to determine more tropes and cliches.

[00:14:22] Chris Wallace: We talk a lot about how to do your own research, but we've done a bunch of it here. As the basics. So, so traits are 

[00:14:28] Teddy Smith: basically the things everyone expects to see in a book. Whereas the cliches are ones they expect to see, but it's kind of been done too much 

[00:14:34] Chris Wallace: what they're tired of. Yeah. 

[00:14:35] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Okay. And we 

[00:14:36] Chris Wallace: talk a lot in our, in our research videos, you know, how to, how to learn about your market. One of the best ways to find the cliches is to find good books that are selling really well. Usually you wanna find self-published books if you can, because they're, they're more what you're comparing to. And then look at the bad reviews.

[00:14:54] Chris Wallace: And find out if, if, if there's, you know, something that people are tired of in a genre, you're gonna see it a reoccurring in these bad reviews. And you're gonna know this is a cliche. And that's kind of how we found, come up with a lot of the cliches. 

[00:15:05] Teddy Smith: Yep. 

[00:15:06] Chris Wallace: And then there's this list of all these sub-genres, which all have their own guide.

[00:15:12] Chris Wallace: There's a business report, which is updated every month. Adam somehow has figured out how to go through and do a full market report. You know, he uses publisher Rocket, which this, this screenshot is from, but he also uses Kindle Trends and a bunch of his own things that he's written and spreadsheets and all these, you know, all these resources.

[00:15:30] Chris Wallace: And so every month he does a review for every genre and every sub-genre about how this looks. What kind of things people are buying in this genre? You know, fantasy is, fantasy as a whole has trended down a little bit as and that's something we're looking at on screen right now. 

[00:15:46] Teddy Smith: Yep. 

[00:15:46] Chris Wallace: But it doesn't it doesn't affect you necessarily because a number of fantasy sub genres that you might be writing in have gone up.

[00:15:54] Chris Wallace: And fantasy is still big business. We're not panicking over this. Then there's always a link to the best sellers a guide on writing to market in this particular genre. There's a video here that is talking about how to write to market in fantasy and do your research in various fantasy sub genres.

[00:16:10] Teddy Smith: So who, who's your target audience with written well, is it, is it people that are starting out to write their books or is it, 'cause you mentioned before, you are also looking at businesses who might be using riol as well. 

[00:16:21] Chris Wallace: Yeah. Well, we didn't think businesses were gonna, we didn't, we, it didn't occur to us that businesses were gonna be part of this thing.

[00:16:27] Chris Wallace: Yeah. Our target market was, was people who want to be self-published authors and current self-published authors that wanna get more sales. Yeah. Those are the people that I was already doing consulting with. So I thought, these are the people that are our market. And then we went to the Author Nation conference where we met you.

[00:16:42] Chris Wallace: Yeah. And. Every industry, every major industry player when we talked to them, said, we love what you're doing and we want you to, we wanna work with you. Yep. And you know, that may not turn into any money ever. Who knows? It's, it's, but it's, it's a totally different market than we thought we were gonna be dealing with.

[00:17:00] Chris Wallace: You know, yeah. We've already been on all these big, you know, we, we've either been on or, or are going to be on all these big podcasts. Adam was on the book funnel podcast last week. I was on the Ind India Author magazine podcast the week before that. We, you know, we've done all of these things that, that, you know, we just launched at at Author Nation and to have all these industry people interested, really validated our idea.

[00:17:24] Chris Wallace: It that, okay, this is a thing that the industry needs. There are, there are lots of people who can teach who, who are willing to do all these different things for you, but there's nobody who's covering everything and who's willing to send you to other places to get the right thing for whatever you are.

[00:17:41] Chris Wallace: You 

[00:17:41] Teddy Smith: know, we 

[00:17:42] Chris Wallace: have multiple courses on Amazon ads. We're also gonna tell people about publishing performance because it whatever's right for our subscribers is what we want them to have. 

[00:17:51] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Awesome. 

[00:17:52] Chris Wallace: Like we have, lots of more advanced stuff, but there are some advanced things where we just say, go talk to Matt Cooper.

[00:17:59] Chris Wallace: Here's her website, here's her email address. She's really good at that thing. You know, we don't have, we don't consider ourselves to have any competition at all. Yeah. We will send people everywhere. We just want our, our people to do well and, and make sure that we can help them get sales. 

[00:18:16] Teddy Smith: Yeah. How, how are you when, when you're working with authors and businesses what does that work look like?

[00:18:22] Teddy Smith: Is it, because obviously you've got the blog, or not the blog, but the guides, sorry, where people can read through the content and get understanding of things like the tropes, but what does, what does working with you look like? Sorry, what does what look like working with you? Or is it just the going through the content?

[00:18:39] Chris Wallace: Well, I I still do some private consulting and we do do. Whatever. People want, I mean, we're, you know, we're for hire, but it's not, not something we stress on the site. Okay. The site is really for giving you all the resources to get it, to find these things as cheaply and efficiently as possible. And, you know, the, the cheapest and most efficient way to get something like a cover design is not to pay us to do it.

[00:19:03] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Right. 

[00:19:03] Chris Wallace: Of course, the way to get the best thing possible is to pay us to do the market research and design the cover for you. That looks like it's appropriate for your, you know, all that. But, but it's expensive and most. Self-published authors don't want that. And so we want to give you all of the all of the information.

[00:19:22] Chris Wallace: To be a successful self-published author in one place. Yeah. So there's, what it looks like to me for people who just sign up for the site is, oh, look at all these genre things. Look at all the research. I can figure out exactly what I should be writing and how to write to market. I can take this right to market course and I can learn about all the things they're talking about so I can start writing things that are gonna sell.

[00:19:45] Chris Wallace: And then when I get, and then, and then, you know, I wanna make these things good. Well, there's all these courses from, from Blaze and from Adam and about how to write Well, I. And how to get books that get good reviews and get sales because they're written well, yeah. And I can take those courses while I'm, you know, I can take the course on, on editing yourself once my first draft is done.

[00:20:05] Chris Wallace: Every, there's support all along the way. Yeah. And then, okay, now it's time to run my ads and it's time to, you know, write my description and, you know. Pick my keywords and here's where I read Chris's content about how Amazon really works and how these keywords really work. And you know, the keywords course that I'm gonna put up in the next day or two.

[00:20:25] Chris Wallace: Is a different look at keywords than anybody's ever taken because I'm looking at it from a whole different perspective. Like I broke down the, how this really works and what's successful and what isn't. And no one's ever, everybody else just goes, well try to pick things that you know are relevant to your book and we'll get lots of search results and you know, here's how to find a bunch of keywords that's, that's.

[00:20:45] Chris Wallace: That's great, but that's not gonna make you a lot of money. What makes you money is figuring out the keywords that no one else is using and the keywords that are actually valuable because Amazon already knows so much about your book that you know, people will write like a historical romance and then put historical, historical romance in their keywords.

[00:21:05] Teddy Smith: Mm-hmm. 

[00:21:06] Chris Wallace: If you're already in that category, that does you zero good on Amazon. Amazon already knows that about your book and they'll just ignore it in your keywords. But if you write instead you go with Victorian L-G-B-T-Q romance because that's what your book is, you get those long tail search results that other people might not be getting.

[00:21:25] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:21:26] Chris Wallace: And then you look at, like, one of the examples I put in the book was it, what if you ranked high for horror or book. That's a, people like a very simple keyword that people will pick. First of all, Amazon already knows that you wrote a horror book, so you're not going to rank high for it. But what if you did a bunch of work to rank high for that keyword?

[00:21:45] Chris Wallace: Well, then you would rank high for a keyword where almost no one gets to the search results because there are 40 sponsored results before the search results. 

[00:21:54] Teddy Smith: Hmm. 

[00:21:55] Chris Wallace: So no one even gets to your, to your, to your book anyway. If you rank number one, they still see 40 things before that that look like results.

[00:22:04] Chris Wallace: They see good reads results, they see sponsored results. They see all these different things before they see your book, and it's a waste of time. Whereas instead, if you wrote you know, if it was new England werewolf books. At least, you know, maybe it's only 50 people a year that search for that subject, but at least you get those 50 people and you can get all of them.

[00:22:28] Teddy Smith: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. 

[00:22:28] Chris Wallace: If you, if you, you know, so much more valuable and looking at how Amazon ranks things and which things are important and you know, that, like, I don't think anybody else is putting that kind of work into how a, you know, how keywords work and that's just. My brain just likes to break things and figure out how they work.

[00:22:45] Chris Wallace: And yeah, so that's what I did and that, that's what we've done with everything on the site. Literally like all the, all the courses on, on the right to market stuff and then on writing and on the craft and on advertising. And I've gone as far as like, you know, I wrote a, a, a, an article on keyboards and, and like.

[00:23:03] Chris Wallace: Everything around the office that you can use that's, that's valuable to you? You know, I'm, I'm a mechanical keyboard nerd, so I've learned all about all the different ones. But Adam uses the, the crappiest, thumps keyboard you can find, and that's all the, all the different options in how to test them out and what might be good for you.

[00:23:18] Chris Wallace: And so, yeah. And then Blaze Board has written 250 books and when we asked him to, to create some content for the site. He dumped an absurd amount of content on us in a big hurry. We, we were not prepared for how much work Blaze puts in every day. This guy in Incredible, the amount of work that he does just yeah, every day, all day.

[00:23:39] Chris Wallace: He's a, he's just one of those super high performance humans. 

[00:23:43] Teddy Smith: That was interesting what you said about the keywords before. 'cause I'm, I say this to clients a lot when I speak to 'em and they say, oh, I want to rank for, oh yeah. As you mentioned, like I mostly nonfiction people I speak to but I'll speak to someone, they'll say, I want to be.

[00:23:56] Teddy Smith: Number one for public speaking, and I'm like, well, you could do, but you know, you're competing with. Tim Ferris and people like that, or, you know, I speak to people, they're like, I wanna be number one for productivity. And I'm like, well, you can, but you're gonna be competing with Atomic Habits. So is that really what you only doing?

[00:24:12] Teddy Smith: Or do you wanna try and find a different keyword to try and rank for, which is much more specific to the exact book you are trying to try and target. Mm-hmm. You know, it's. Yeah, if, if you're ranking number one for horror, you're probably competing with Dracula. You know what, what, who, who's gonna win that battle?

[00:24:26] Teddy Smith: It's not you, you know? Yeah. It's 

[00:24:28] Chris Wallace: I, I tell people the amount of money that I suspect that I think it would cost them to rank for that keyword. 

[00:24:33] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:24:34] Chris Wallace: I think, I think I can help you rank for the keyword productivity. I think I can help you rank in the top five for that keyword, but yeah, hundreds of a day, $25,000.

[00:24:45] Chris Wallace: Yeah. Right Now to get started to do that, it's, it's gonna be so much work and so much money, and I promise you're not gonna make that money back. 

[00:24:53] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Like, 

[00:24:55] Chris Wallace: I, I'll, I'll just tell people openly we can do that, but it costs so much money, you're gonna lose this much money doing it. It's not worth, you know, it's so not worth it.

[00:25:03] Chris Wallace: And, and finding the right long tail keywords. The, the course as a whole. A whole thing about how to narrow out, narrow down your keywords to the things that actually matter, that Amazon doesn't already know about your book. And that will, will, will bring in conversions because ultimately all Amazon cares about is conversion rate.

[00:25:19] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. 

[00:25:21] Chris Wallace: So if it, if you're, if a ranking for a keyword brings in people that. Won't buy your book. It's bad for you. It's horrible for you. Yeah. 

[00:25:30] Teddy Smith: Because 

[00:25:30] Chris Wallace: if, if Amazon sees you not converting, they downgrade your search for everything. Yeah. If you're not converting. So, you know, a a, a book, an example I use is if your description includes the words right and angle and geometry.

[00:25:50] Chris Wallace: But they're not related to geometry. They're about your sci-fi book and they happen to be in there. Then you may wanna put in your keywords,

[00:26:04] Chris Wallace: geometry in quotes, and angle in quotes. But not put right angle geometry or any of those things without quotes, because quotes exclude all the other words. Yeah. Yeah. And there may be reasons to exclude keywords. Virus is another good one where I helped a guy with a cyberpunk book and they were, there was biological engineering and they were computer viruses.

[00:26:31] Chris Wallace: And I said, let's. Put biological engineering in quotes and computer virus in quotes, because we don't wanna ever rank for biological virus or biologically engineered virus because those people will definitely not buy this book. They're searching for something else, 

[00:26:47] Teddy Smith: conspiracy theists, and that hurts us 

[00:26:48] Chris Wallace: in our conversion rate.

[00:26:49] Chris Wallace: And then Amazon downgrades us. 

[00:26:51] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:26:51] Chris Wallace: You know, that kind of in depth understanding of how the search algorithm works and, and how to make money just with the simple keyword boxes, which are much less, much less important than. Cover description, title? 

[00:27:03] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:27:03] Chris Wallace: But, you know, going into that kind of depth is the, is the, the, the algorithm nerd that I'm, yeah.

[00:27:09] Teddy Smith: I did a really in depth conversation with Dave Chein from Kendall Preneur about that exact topic, about what to do with those backend seven keywords. And he was, he said exact same thing. So if you wanna see a bit more of an in depth episode, yeah. He, he knew, he knows what he's doing. He's the, he's the man on that.

[00:27:25] Teddy Smith: But yeah, on your, your course, it sounds like it really goes into a lot of detail on all of these different aspects. So when you are a member, you can. Literally just see all the different parts. Yeah. Now with, with with your genre guides obviously you've seen a lot of trends and changes in the industry over time.

[00:27:41] Teddy Smith: Are you seeing any trends or changes to the way that content is being consumed at the moment? 

[00:27:47] Chris Wallace: Adam would be the real expert on that. He, he, he checks that every month, but we're definitely seeing more and more people listen to audio books. Yep. There will be a time. Two to five years from now, maybe probably closer to five where you can just upload your book and an AI will do the narration and it will sound good.

[00:28:12] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:28:12] Chris Wallace: You know, I think currently you can do that, but it's not great. It's just, it's just Okay. Yeah. So you can. You know, Google Playbooks does that automatically for you. Audible's now testing it. You can just go to 11 labs or places like that and, and have the narration done and pay for it.

[00:28:33] Chris Wallace: You can probably have a book narrated for a hundred bucks from an ai. But in five years, that's gonna be, it's gonna really sound good. Whereas right now there's a company called Spoken where they, they 

[00:28:44] Teddy Smith: I spoke to 'em earlier this week that, that episode's coming out soon. 

[00:28:46] Chris Wallace: Yeah. They're very interesting.

[00:28:48] Chris Wallace: And, and one of the things you can do there is fix the, the problem I have with AI narration, the problem most people have with it is that it, it, it puts the. Emphasis in the wrong places in sentences and doesn't understand that stuff. So the voice may sound natural, and then it sounds like someone who hasn't really spoken English before.

[00:29:07] Chris Wallace: And you can, in, in spoken, you can go through and, and listen to your book and you go, oh, this line is not spoken correctly. Click the record button, speak it correctly with the right emphasis, and then it will take the AI voice and make that emphasis in that, on that line. And now it sounds right, you have to go through your whole book line by line, but you can actually get it to sound right and it doesn't cost you, you know, a bunch of money.

[00:29:34] Chris Wallace: Whereas a, you know, having a narrator do your book is gonna cost you at least a thousand dollars. 

[00:29:38] Teddy Smith: Yep. 

[00:29:38] Chris Wallace: And you may have to give them a piece of the book. If you go through audible, you know, it's, it's an expensive process because it takes the, the narrator a lot of time. So that, you know, that's gonna take over audio books and, and audio books are gonna be even more common.

[00:29:52] Chris Wallace: And I think they're gonna continue to take over. I, I just, I meet people all the time who are making more money with audio books than they did in the past. And, and also I meet people at, you know, out in public who, who listen to books and don't read them. Yeah. These days it's becoming the most common thing.

[00:30:07] Teddy Smith: Well, the guy that started spoken, he doesn't read, he just listens to books, but he, that's why he did it. Yeah. And the 

[00:30:12] Chris Wallace: majority of the books that I consume these days are listened as well. 

[00:30:16] Teddy Smith: Wow. Yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty interesting. Now, what about AI in writing? Are you seeing any trends or changes in that and how that's affecting things like the way you do ads?

[00:30:26] Teddy Smith: I'm not talking about the way that sort of publishing performance works. I'm talking about more about the, the way that it's written. 

[00:30:32] Chris Wallace: I, it's interesting, you know, what AI does well is exactly publishing performances thing, right? That's what it does well. What it doesn't do well are the human element stuff.

[00:30:43] Chris Wallace: And, and while a lot of writers are very con concerned about AI writing books these days, and in fact members of the general public think AI writes good books now, many of them think that, and it's really, really far off. I did a thing a couple, like a year ago where I used pseudo right. And I didn't, I didn't train it.

[00:31:04] Chris Wallace: You know, I'm sure I could have done better, and I'm sure it's better now, but what I did was, was tell it. I wanted to write this story about a fool who goes off to fight the dragon to defend his village. And then we, we traded off paragraphs, kind of like pseudo write, we'll do, it'll write a few paragraphs and then have you write a little something to direct where things are going.

[00:31:23] Chris Wallace: And, and so I used that feature and then, and then pointed out all of its mistakes and, and comically corrected them. And so, like, you know, 4,000 words into the story the fool finds the dragon. And then I write, but this wasn't the actual dragon. In fact, this dragon flew away and never came back. And the character didn't run into the dragon until 65,000 words because it would be ridiculous to have him fight the dragon this early.

[00:31:49] Chris Wallace: And then I let pseudo write some more. And then, you know, the third time that the character run ran into wolves that right after that I said, and then the wolves fled. And. The, and the character didn't run into any more wolves because that was getting ridiculous. And I kept, kept correcting it in that way.

[00:32:05] Chris Wallace: And it was a big hit on Facebook. People thought it was really funny. And seeing what AI does when you tell it to write fiction and especially seeing like, okay, the first time you get this thing where you think, oh, if it can generate a bunch of these, I could fix these. And then you generate the second one and it's exactly like the first one.

[00:32:24] Chris Wallace: You go, oh crap, 

[00:32:25] Teddy Smith: it's not 

[00:32:26] Chris Wallace: actually gonna do anything for me here. This is, you know, when I prompt it with, write me a fantasy story about these things, it writes me basically the same story every time with the same mistakes and it's gonna be a problem. I know there are some. Romance some companies that write romance that will have a romance book written by AI with certain prompts mm-hmm.

[00:32:46] Chris Wallace: And then give it to an editor and then another editor to get it kind of turned into a trashy romance. And even when they're done, it isn't that good. It's just that they can crank out a lot of them and they can, you know, they don't have to have any good writers on staff. They can just have a bad written, a badly written AI thing.

[00:33:02] Chris Wallace: And then editors who fix it, you know, and these editors will run it through pro rating, pro writing aid and auto crit and fix things themselves, and then kind of make it like a passable, trashy romance. But they can churn out three of 'em a month. 

[00:33:15] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:33:16] Chris Wallace: And I think that turns into money if you get somebody who reads zero catalog.

[00:33:19] Teddy Smith: Those romance ones are a bit, paint my numbers sometimes I think, and a lot of people just love reading them. I didn't even realize this until I went to Author Nations to be honest, but people just love romance books and, 'cause I don't read them myself. I think people just read like five a week and just, just bash, just bash through them and just go loads.

[00:33:35] Teddy Smith: They're racist 

[00:33:36] Chris Wallace: readers. Yeah. And that's they, and if, if the, if, if a romance reader likes your first book, they will just buy your whole catalog and read all the way through it. 

[00:33:46] Teddy Smith: Yep. Yep. My and I, I only, and I only found out this was true because I, after Author Nation, I spoke to my mum and that's how she reads.

[00:33:53] Teddy Smith: So I'm quite picky. I like read one or two things and then if I don't like it, I'll stop reading and read something else. The money and 

[00:33:58] Chris Wallace: romance can be incredible for people who, who write well and quickly. I. 

[00:34:02] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:34:03] Chris Wallace: Really like, really a lot of money. 

[00:34:05] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:34:05] Chris Wallace: And especially like, you know, seeing the trends when Adam puts them up every month, the dark romance has been cra gone crazy.

[00:34:11] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:34:11] Chris Wallace: That cat, that subcategory sub-genre is just like shooting up the, all the graphs are are sky high right now for, for dark fantasy and dark romance. If horrible things happen to your character and then they fall in love with the person who did it to them. You know, your books are selling really well right now.

[00:34:28] Teddy Smith: So what I'm getting from you about written well is basically it's just. A place where you can get the expertise of the, the leading experts in the industry and get their up-to-date views on exactly how you should be writing something with the trends in the market. And it just, it's just the best place just to see essentially what's going on in the industry at the moment and how you can take advantage of that.

[00:34:50] Chris Wallace: Yeah, and we also do. Tons of articles on the craft of writing and how to write Well, yeah, we do. You know, the upcoming events, which I've pulled up on the screen here right now, there's in a couple of hours I'm running the Wednesday Critique Group, where you have your own writer's group and you can, you submit up to a thousand words on the forums and we all go read them and then we'll read each other's stuff.

[00:35:09] Chris Wallace: And then we do a critique on Zoom, and then Adam runs a Monday writing sprint where you sign up for that and, and do. Sprints. I, I went to that last week and wrote 1500 words in the, in the nice 70 minutes or whatever. We did the multiple sprints and, how many people do you see usually join these calls?

[00:35:27] Chris Wallace: Right now it's just maybe 3, 4, 5, because we just really kinda launched the site and they're starting to get people on. 

[00:35:33] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Nice. So you can get a bit of 

[00:35:34] Chris Wallace: extra help. It's a lot more valuable now than it will be in a year, I'll tell you that because yeah. And you know, if we have a thousand members on the site, I have no idea what I'm gonna do with this critique group or how to run, you know, how to run 20 critique groups.

[00:35:49] Chris Wallace: I can't do them all myself. So, you know, it'll be a different thing. Right now you're getting Adam and I specifically, you're getting Blaze word to critique your sci-fi book. You're getting, you know, I mean, right now it's incredibly valuable, but but that'll change as time goes on and that, you know, that all becomes different.

[00:36:06] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Nice. And the 

[00:36:07] Chris Wallace: forums are a big part of the site as well. We want people to be helping each other. 

[00:36:13] Teddy Smith: So what's the plan for the future over the next year of written? Well, 

[00:36:19] Chris Wallace: Plan number one is for this to replace the. So that we can work full time on this thing and make it and just make it better all the time.

[00:36:28] Chris Wallace: Spend all of our time on it. That's really what we wanna do. We want to keep flushing out the site until we just are covering everything. We'd like to bring a few more people in to handle different. Genres to run things in forums, to run writers', critique groups to run you know, all these things that are like personal interactions that we won't have time to do as, as membership increases.

[00:36:55] Chris Wallace: And then we'd like, just like to see something build on the forums or people are helping each other where you know, we're, we're. You can go to places like Critique Circle is like a place that I did you know, I learned a bunch of things about my own writing. 'cause I didn't have a writer's group, right.

[00:37:11] Chris Wallace: Adam has a writer's group where he's a Lucas Award winner and he is the least decorated person in his writer's group. And he is got all these brilliant people, you know, critiquing his stories. And I don't have that. So I would post things on critique circle and people would savage them, and then I would learn, you know, what people hated about them.

[00:37:26] Chris Wallace: They're, they're pretty rough, but but I learned a bunch there. We'd like to, you know, we'd like to take the place of things like that for people where now they can do this on the forums and groups form. On the forums and everything. We'll facilitate whatever people want to do, but we'd like to see the forums turn into a place that.

[00:37:43] Chris Wallace: That is a bunch of people helping each other being positive, doing, you know, and that's how our our poker training site was. You know, I still have a bunch of friends who were members of my poker training site because it was such a friendly environment and if somebody wasn't friendly, we just booted 'em and tossed them.

[00:37:58] Chris Wallace: 'cause it's our business. We don't have to be nice to anyone. So if somebody's rude on the forums, we won't say, Hey, stop being rude on the forums. We'll just kick 'em off the site and never let 'em back. 

[00:38:07] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:38:08] Chris Wallace: Like, there's no reason to bother with that. And so we can police the forums in a way that makes everybody have a good time while we're there, while they're there and, and turn that into a really positive environment where everybody's encouraging each other and, and helping each other learn how to be successful.

[00:38:22] Chris Wallace: As a self-published author, I guess the real goal, all this turns into I want to create so many successful self-published authors that the traditional publishers all go under. That's what I would like to see. I would like to see 'em all just crumble to the. To the ground 

[00:38:38] Teddy Smith: that that's gonna be the quote for my for the front cover of this episode.

[00:38:40] Teddy Smith: I think 

[00:38:42] Chris Wallace: it's, it's been a miserable, corrupt business for so long that I'd like to just see 'em all burn. I was in the music industry for a while and, and I know streaming isn't paying people as much money for some of the top bands as it used as as they used to make with CD sales. But it's also providing more money for some of the lesser bands and it's providing cheaper.

[00:39:05] Chris Wallace: Music access to customers. And so, you know, whatever replaces the old system is just, is just got to be better. And, and how corrupt, I saw the music industry business as was worse than the current streaming rates. Yeah. So I, I see the same thing with self-publishing, however bad Amazon might be, however bad any other company might be, they're gonna be better than.

[00:39:26] Chris Wallace: The fat cat, traditional publishers who, who just would give you nothing for your books. 

[00:39:31] Teddy Smith: Yeah. 

[00:39:31] Chris Wallace: In fact, that's how we started self-publishing was we got off, we got an offer from the kind of big poker book publisher at the time. That was horrible. Yeah. And we said, we're publishing this ourselves. Yeah. We just like, this is an unacceptably bad offer on when we're not doing this.

[00:39:49] Teddy Smith: Yeah. That's really interesting. I mean, I'm, I'm really full to seeing where this goes. 'cause I think this, you know, it's, is it, it's quite different to what I was expecting it to be. You know, when I first spoke to you, I wasn't really sure what it was. And then looking through it, I was like, well this is such a useful guide for people, especially if they're starting out and wanting to get that help.

[00:40:06] Teddy Smith: Because, you know, especially now with, there's loads of stuff being pumped out of ai, having that. Chance to chat to other people in your industry where you can get a bit of critique on your work. I think it's gonna be really invaluable. So, yeah, I think I'd, if people wanna get in touch with you about this, where's the best place to go to?

[00:40:20] Teddy Smith: Is it just written well.com or is there another way 

[00:40:23] Chris Wallace: written well.com? Yeah. And if you, let's see. Stop sharing this. I'll make sure I got this right.

[00:40:34] Chris Wallace: And we will create a, I'll go do it right now. We'll create a a discount code for your members. Let's just say it's publishing performance. All small letters. Easy to remember. 

[00:40:46] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Great. I'll I'll, we'll, we'll put a link to the for anyway, so you don't need to remember it, but yeah. There we go.

[00:40:52] Teddy Smith: Thanks. Coming on, Chris, I've, I've been really appreciate your time to come on. Usually, yeah, it's. Usually in these calls with just a, just a question. It's usually about a book that you recommend other people should read. So have you got any books that you recommend that people should be reading? 

[00:41:06] Chris Wallace: Oh. I have a ton of books I love.

[00:41:10] Chris Wallace: I, what I do is when I'm writing fiction I have a pile of books that I think are relevant to that particular book. And, and so I can reference how did this person handle this? How did this person handle that? So like, like, just work was just working on a, a project that is a vigilante, working in Detroit, killing people, doing crazy things and, and how to handle a psychopath and also make them likable.

[00:41:36] Chris Wallace: So I have two of Thomas Harris's books, right? I have, I have dragon and. Silence of the Lambs, and I can just like look at, you know, some of the ways that he handled this and got some inspiration from that. So I have just a, you know, a pile of books in that, in that, you know, bunch. I think everything Thomas Harris written is, is great.

[00:41:53] Chris Wallace: And I love Cormick McCarthy for that kind of stuff too. I've, I've referenced his stuff as well and you know, I think reading great fiction is so. So valuable for me that I don't I have some books, like I have a book called Characters and Viewpoint that I was just reading. That's, that's pretty good.

[00:42:10] Chris Wallace: And I have, you know, some grammar books, things like that. But I think most of my, most of the value that I get in writing better from a book is from just reading great fiction. And I, you know, I think people like McCarthy and Harris are are good. Great examples of of that. 

[00:42:26] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Great. Well thank you very much.

[00:42:29] Teddy Smith: This is good. Recommendations. Well, it's been great chat Chris, and we'll speak again soon. Alright, I'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much for tuning into the Publishing performance podcast. I really hope you found today's episode inspiring. I love chatting to authors, writers, and people in the publishing world.

[00:42:44] Teddy Smith: 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. And if you are looking to boost your publishing game and to maximize your book's potential on Amazon, then publishing Formants is designed to help authors just like you to grow your readership and to reach a much wider audience.

[00:43:09] Teddy Smith: Now I know who the Amazon ads can be slightly complicated, which is why publishing Formants 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. Now, if you are 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.

[00:43:36] Teddy Smith: Just go to publishing performance.com to get started with Amazon. Amazon ads for just $1.