On Good Authority: Publishing the Book that Will Build Your Business

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is the New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia: How the Show About Nothing Changed Everything; a history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted; and Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love. She spent a decade on staff at Entertainment Weekly and has since written for many publications, including BBC Culture, The New York Times Book Review, Vice, New York magazine, and Billboard.She's also an old pal from my NYC days; in fact, we used to host Readings & Rubdowns events where people would listen to writers read from their latest books while getting massaged.In the ensuing years, Jennifer has become a huge author and in this episode she breaks down, step-by-step, what makes for a successful launch.FOR MORE INFO, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM

Jay Abraham is the world's highest-paid marketing consultant, a proven business leader and top executive coach in the United States.As Founder and CEO of The Abraham Group, Inc., Jay has spent his entire career solving complex problems and fixing underperforming businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 1,000 industries and over 7,200 sub-industries worldwide. This is a man who is paid $30,000 for a day of business consulting. And I was lucky enough to not only get him to agree to come on this podcast to talk about applying lessons from other industries to a book launch but I was also able to get invaluable advice from him a few years ago that radically transformed my business (we talk about that at the very end of the episode; you definitely want to hear it).In this episode, he doles out some of his top gems—including what to write at the beginning of every business book, how to involve influencers in your writing process, why to read the Amazon reviews of every book on your topic that's come before and how to get readers to hire you.FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.

Jane Friedman is an icon in the publishing space. With over two decades of experience in the business, she is truly considered the world's leading expert on traditional publishing, self publishing and where the twain shall meet. She's the curator of The Hot Sheet, a biweekly paid newsletter, oversees a wildly popular blog and is also the author of The Business of Being a Writer.In this episode, we discussed how important it is to know what you want your book to do for you, how to get bookstores interested in hosting you, the biggest changes in the publishing industry over the past year and so much more. FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.

Do you really need me to tell you who Jeff Garlin is? Well, the simple way to handle that is to tell you that he stars on arguably the most adored show of all time (Curb Your Enthusiasm).But he does so much more than just come to you via your SmartTV. He's also a standup (um, obv), photographer and author. In this episode, he explains what happens when you sell a book to a big publisher but then it doesn't sell the number of copies anyone had hoped (and also has an odd name change somewhere between the hardcover and paperback).This episode also has LOTS of digressions into random topics both because Jeff Garlin could be renamed Digression Garlin and also because we're pals who digress a lot. Listen and digress with us... WANT MORE INFO ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF? GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.

Ed Kressy is not your average human.He's much sweeter than your average human and his sweetness emanates from him.He also has a much crazier story than your average addict with a crazy story...and this is coming from someone who's heard every crazy addiction story over the past two decades.The short version: he went into a meth-induced psychosis for 14 years that left him convinced he was involved in 9/11. The longer version is in his memoir, My Addiction & Recovery: Just Because You're Done With Drugs Doesn't Mean Drugs Are Done With You, which you can get here.He is one of the most exquisitely talented writers I've come across in a long time—something I found, and tell him in this episode, surprising. I've read almost every book out there about addiction and recovery and few are as brilliantly crafted as this. Please get this book. Not only will you be exposed to some of the best writing around but all proceeds are being donated to prisons.And that relationship with prisons, for those here for the marketing tidbits, is how Ed was able to get the great Seth Godin to blurb his book. In this episode, we get into Ed's crazy story, how many drafts he wrote of this book (you don't want to know) and his mission to get the book into every prison he can (so far, it has been accepted by 108 facilities in nine states, serving an estimated 132,000 incarcerated people). Listen in to find out more about the guy whose recovery-related work has appeared in the Washington Post and who's delivered criminal justice-themed talks for groups at Amazon, Cisco, Google, LinkedIn and MIT.  FOR MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM!

Derek Murphy is a USA Today bestselling author with a PhD in Literature, who’s been featured in CNN, writes fantasy and sometimes lives in castles. When not trolling obscure bookshops, he prefers to be sipping espresso, surrounded by kittens and pursuing research on what it means to be a successful creative.Now the word unique is overused but this is one unique guy. Looking at the amazing array of material he puts out there is to enter into a tireless brain of myriad interests—including educating aspiring writers, designing covers, penning paranormal fiction and hosting writing retreats in castles.In this episode, we talked about creative ways to get Amazon to recommend your book (write a blog post that recommends other books like yours and then include a link to that blog in your email auto-responder), the importance of obeying Amazon's ever-changing rules and how to actually make money from book sales.WANT MORE INFO ABOUT THE POD AND OTHER STUFF? GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM.

Originally from Dublin Ireland, David Nihill is the founder of FunnyBizz Conference, bestselling author of Do You Talk Funny?, winner of San Francisco International Comedy Competition, runner up in the Moth’s largest US Grandslam storytelling competition and the first-ever Irishman to have a special on Dry Bar Comedy. His work has been featured in Inc, The Huffington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, Lifehacker, The Irish Times, TED, The Irish Independent, Today FM, and on TV3.He and I met through friends a few years ago and I was immediately impressed not only with his barely indecipherable accent but also with how much knowledge he possessed about marketing, books and how to make them successful. This impression was only solidified when, a few days later, he sent me an email packed with all the strategies he'd used to make his book so successful that he was able to then sell it to a major publisher.In this episode, we go through all those ideas and more. If you listened to the episode, you know that I promised I would give you the email he sent out to his launch team, which you are welcome to copy and steal (he will never know, unless he's reading this, in which case I say hi David!) FOR THE SHOW NOTES [INCLUDING THE EMAIL MENTIONED] AND OTHER STUFF, GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM

Estelle Erasmus is an award-winning journalist, writing coach, teacher for Writer's Digest and adjunct instructor at New York University. The former editor-in-chief of five national consumer women's magazines, her work has appeared in dozens of media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, Huffington Post Personal, Marie Claire and more.Now she's written a book that can show you how to do the same! Writing That Gets Noticed: How to Find Your Voice, Become a Better Storyteller, and Get Published will show you all the techniques for getting editors to pay attention to you so that you can spread your writing beyond your book.In this episode, we dove into some of those techniques (including using your potential article name as the subject line of your pitch email and including your first paragraph of the article in your pitch) and also how to get an agent if you want to pursue the traditional publishing path.WANT MORE INFO ABOUT THE POD AND OTHER THINGS? GO TO WWW.ONGOODAUTHORITYPOD.COM

This special episode is a solo chat about the implosion of Scribe Media. While it doesn't contain tips about how to launch a book that transforms your career, it's a deep dive into what NOT to do when building a business from your book. Everything in here is, like all episodes, just my opinion but I've been in a unique position where I've been receiving constant updates and information from people who have the inside scoop on the Scribe sh*tshow.

Regular listeners know that I'm obsessed with PickFu, a software that, in technical terms, provides actionable pre-launch feedback on creative options. (How obsessed? I never had ads on the podcast because I wanted to wait until there was something I loved so much that I could recommend it without reservations. And, well, PickFu is it!)That's why I was delighted to welcome PickFu's co-creator John Li onto the show. And it's also why I'm delighted to use PickFu to get feedback on my covers, titles, book descriptions and Amazon book pages, among many other things. Yes, you can go onto PickFu set up a poll and ask between 50 and 500 people—hand-selected based on interests, income and thousands of other options—for feedback. This isn't "Yeah, that's good" feedback either; it's feedback that people who want to participate in polling are being compensated to do—millions and millions of people, as it turns out.In this episode, John walks us through how PickFu started, the craziest things it's used for and why someone with no need for an income would want to participate in something like polls.Listen in and my God, if you know what's good for you, please give PickFu a try. If you use the code Pickfu.com/anna, you'll get 50% off your first poll!