Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en all right so i got curious about something i saw this so there’s this guy named mark manson mark manson has this book called the subtle art of not giving a [ ] then he created a couple spin-offs from it so i’ll tell you a quick a funny story so this book uh was the best-selling book of 2020 i believe or 19 either 19 or 20. i forget the exact year um and it or maybe even prior before that actually but it just sold like many many millions copies of books i actually had uh dinner at a conference with tucker who we were just talking about and mark manson sat next to me and i was talking to him and i was like so what do your parents think about your job and he goes well they kind of make fun of me and ask when i’m going to get a real job they don’t really know what i do they just think i play in the computer all day and i play video games all day they don’t truly understand like what i’m doing but they kind of understood it this year when they released a report for new york times saying i sold more books than hillary clinton so that’s when they that’s when they kind of understood what i do and so uh that’s a funny story about mark but i looked up uh i was i was curious about something about him and i googled and the first article came out that he had a condo in new york city that he recently sold for 14 million dollars and i got curious about that because i think that book i was like books can’t make that much money can they and atomic habits this year sold or so far has sold around five million books in total and this year atomic habits was the best-selling book on amazon in 2020 um or 2021 and i was curious about how much bookmakers uh authors make so i i have a friend i can’t talk about his name but he sold 30 000 copies of a book that was published on a major publisher and i want to explain to you how much money he made by the way and that 30 000 that’s a ton that’s like in the top one percentile you know yes this book is in bookstores and it’s probably in the airport and things like that so they were given they didn’t have a book before they were given a 250 000 advance which is basically just like uh here’s 250 go yeah and go write the book um off that 30 000 in books they have not made a cent in royalty or licensing fees and he told me that when he was looking at the contract he doesn’t even entirely understand when he’s gonna get paid past that amount and he only gets paid like pennies on the dollar for every like fourteen dollar book sold right and he said he’s like i he goes basically i get paid they spent a certain amount of money to help me make this book and they get paid once it’s i get paid once it surpasses that amount but i can’t even understand in the paperwork how much they spent like including everyone’s salaries on doing this and publishing and things like that but i have made he said an additional four hundred thousand dollars this year on selling other stuff like courses and coaching and consulting which wouldn’t have happened because uh which happened because of the book but basically on 30 000 copies sold he has not made a cent other than the 250 and he told me that his editor wasn’t that good that he had to spend a little bit of money uh get getting their his own editor and that their marketing people weren’t that great and i found it to be very interesting and so i looked up dan blizzarian dan bilzerian you know who he is the instagram guy he self-published his book and so dan bazarian’s book it costs 35 and he has a shopify store that sells it you can’t buy it on amazon and it works for dan blizzarian because he just posts a link on instagram and he goes viral but david goggins did it as well and so anyway this whole publishing kind of thing got me interested because these people do not i guess mark manson he must have crushed it somehow but for someone who sells 30 000 books they don’t make [ ] off their off their books and i found it to be incredibly fascinating i guess if you’re like ryan holiday i heard that he makes he does good but a lot of people they just don’t get paid well i think it’s two things it’s if you take an advance the econo and it’s your first book the economics can be super skewed against you if you um if you have multiple hits like a ryan holiday then you know by the time you negotiate your third book deal you’re gonna have much better economics in the thing you know tim ferriss probably made more of his last book than he did off the first book which is the best seller and then the last thing is self-publishing you know changing the game in a way so you know let’s say a book sells for 13.99 or whatever 14 bucks um you know i think it’s gonna be like probably uh you know seven eight bucks of just the cost of the book plus shipping to get it to a customer and you know so you’re left with four or five bucks at the end to play with now whether that goes all in your pocket or your publisher’s pocket i think that depends on how you negotiate but even if you just take four bucks per copy um you know five million copies sold for atomic habits you know i would believe that he’s grossed you know 20 million 30 million in sales uh i’m sorry like gross profit off that now i don’t know what his deal was if he’s i don’t know if he’s self-published or what well five million books times fourteen dollars is seventy thousand seventy million so the the revenue on that i would bet is in the 50 to 100 million range yeah that huge ballpark but i don’t know what a guy like him would make but i bet you he could get paid like many thousands an hour to come and talk i mean i bet you even cost him fifty thousand dollars to show up at a at a board room in new york to give a discussion to get yeah i just got paid eight thousand dollars to do a zoom call for one hour um really to give a talk and so that means that somebody who’s you know the author of atomic habits is definitely commanding you know 25 50k per person that’s crazy that’s crazy so anyway i thought uh i thought this was interesting and uh it shocked me writing a book because you’re going through this i know i know you’re thinking about going through i don’t know how far how far you are i basically paid to write the book and now i gotta write the book this year so that’ll happen uh and so yeah i don’t i would predict that you don’t make money directly off of it but i imagine there will be money made in some ways yeah i think a book is a pretty horrible way to make money so i’m just doing it for fun [Music]