Book publishing startup founder talks self-publishing, marketing, writing

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Tucker Max is the co-founder of Book in a Box, a company that uses a structure and process to help authors write their books. He wrote three number one bestselling books and even had a movie made about his life. Here are some things we can learn from my interview with him.

How did you come up with the idea for Book in a Box?

“[…] Everyone has this image that entrepreneurs […] have these flashes of genius and insight, and they come down from the mountain with their amazing companies already done. That’s just not what happens. I think my story is actually a really good example of that. […] I almost had to be beaten into doing a successful company. I’ll tell you the story.

“I was at this entrepreneur dinner and this woman comes up to me. At this point, I’d already written three number one bestsellers, I’d sold millions of books, and I was well-known as an author, but I didn’t have a publishing company or anything—at least nothing substantive.

“She said, ‘Listen, people have been asking me to write a book for a decade. I don’t have the time or desire to sit down at a computer and type this thing out, but my book would help people and they want it. How can I get this thing out of my head without having to go through the normal process?’

“I looked at her and I said, ‘Hold on. You’re asking me how you can write a book without writing it?’ She said, ‘Yeah, actually, I kind of am.’ Of course, I started making fun of her and I started lecturing her. [I said], ‘Everybody wants to be the star, but nobody wants to do the work. The writing is part of the process,’ and blah, blah, blah.

“After three to five minutes of me being a really condescending prick to her, she rolled her eyes and said, ‘Tucker, this is an entrepreneur dinner. Are you an entrepreneur?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m not so sure that’s true. An entrepreneur would help me solve my problem, not lecture me about hard work.’

“[She] totally called me out. But the thing is, she was a hundred percent right, man. I mean, this woman had this super successful company and she had a family. She was doing ten times more than I was and I was lecturing her about hard work instead of helping her solve her issue. I became obsessed with this idea: how do I get her book out of her head without her having to sit at a computer and type it?

“It took me a month or so, then it all came at once. I was like, ‘Oh, God. This is so obvious.’ Think about how many people never wrote a word down but have really famous books—Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Malcolm X, Marco Polo—all these people used scribes to write their books, right?

“It was like, ‘Of course. Why can’t I just be her scribe?’ [So] I got on the phone with her.

“She didn’t want a ghostwriter, right? She didn’t want me to research her subject and write my book about it and I didn’t want to learn about her subject, so it had to be her words and her voice[…]. She wanted the same thing.

“I wrote down on a white board every single thing you have to do to write a book. I realized the only parts I needed her for were the actual knowledge—I could do everything else. Me and Zack, who’s my co-founder, basically got on the phone with her when we needed her, got everything out of her head, and then we did the work on the back end. We kind of structured or outlined her book by interviewing [her]. We transcribed all the interviews [and] cleaned up the prose. She gave us notes on it. Then, all of a sudden, we had this really good book.

How does traditional publishing work compared to self-publishing?

“[Books are] […] deep, complicated, weird subjects. […] There’s three basic ways [to publish a book]. There is traditional publishing, there’s professional publishing, and there’s self publishing, right? Traditional is what most people think of when they think of books. They think of Random House, Simon and Schuster, or the big companies, right?

How do you make money writing a book?

Do you have any tips to share when writing a book?