My 7 Year Journey from Blog to Book Deal- Part 2

This is part 2 of a 2-part post about 7 year journey from blog to book deal. Part 1 can be read here.

A Mentor, a Misfit, and a media circus: 2013

To this day I’m not sure why he called me of all the people he knew. But Greg Hartle, who I had interviewed asked me if I would meet with him once a week to discuss writing a book to wrap up his project, Ten Dollars, and a Laptop. At that point, all I’d written was a short self-published book called The Small Army Strategy, which was content Mark Schaefer allowed me to repurpose that I had written on his blog GROW. But it was the start of one of the most influential relationships in my life.

Instead of helping Greg with his book I racked his brain for every piece of business advice imaginable since business school teaches you nothing about running a business. He also made the mistake of trying to hire me for a company he owned, and instead found himself doing more work to help me than the other way around.

Meanwhile, I was continuing to interview bloggers, when one Friday afternoon somebody put a link to a collection of essays titled The Life and Times of a Remarkable Misfit on my Facebook Page. I’d seen a lot of ebooks over the years, but this was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I read it one sitting, poured a scotch, read it again and emailed AJ Leon immediately. People like AJ light a fire under your ass. In his own words, the notion that this is not your practice life seeps into your bones and ceases to be hippie new age bullshit. If you need a glimpse, watch this talk, and be warned, the rabbit hole goes deep.

By the spring of 2013, the demands on my content production requirements were increasing drastically. Not only was I getting paid to write, I had a ton of my own creative projects that I was working on. And that was when I came up with the solution to write 1000 words a day. And it’s a habit that I rely on to this day. I’d also completely given up on my goal of getting a book deal. Scott Adams advocates a systems over goals approach. 1000 words became my system.

Writing 1000 words a day gave me an opportunity to approach the blank page without an agenda. I wasn’t trying to sound smart or write for an audience. I was just writing whatever was on my mind. And since I didn’t intend to share most of what I was writing, I decided to write closer to the bone, honest, raw, and unfiltered. These were the kinds of things I was afraid to publish.

In all the years I’ve written, I’ve found that your best work is often a result of those times when you’re afraid to push publish.

For some reason, I decided to start publishing these snippets on Facebook. They resonated like nothing I had ever previously written.

AJ was putting on a conference in Fargo North Dakota and thought my ridiculously long Facebook status updates would make for a good talk at a conference. That talk was titled The Art of Being Unmistakable. The subtitle could have been how to commit career suicide one Facebook status update at a time. At that event 2 things happened that would alter the course of my life.

AJ pulled me aside and asked me why I had spent my times as a supporting cast member/behind the scenes person for other people’s work when I should just be creating my own.

Greg Hartle and I sat in a hotel bar, drinking vodka and sodas, while he asked me why I wanted to work with him. That conversation would be a defining moment.

Inspired by AJ’s collection of essays, I wanted to put together something beautiful. But I couldn’t figure out how to use Indesign, so I got my collection of words edited, had my friend Mars Dorian design a cover, uploaded it to Kindle and self-published this collection of essays about making a dent in the universe. And then I got back to work.

A few weeks later, a media circus that turned my life inside out started. Glenn Beck found my book, raved about it on his radio show and then invited me to be on the show (interview below)

The book went on to become a Wall Street Journal Best Seller.

Many people start blogs because they read the story of someone who made the successful journey from blog to book deal. I’d be lying to you if I said that wasn’t what drew me to it in the first place. What’s usually left out of all those stories is the time that actually went into the work. In a recent article , Mark Manson posed a question that’s worth considering. “What are you willing to suffer for?” You may think you want something, but the question is are you willing to pay the actual price for it? If you think you’re going work on something for a year, and suddenly become famous and have publishers knocking on your door, you’ve deluded yourself.

The Paradox of Being Picked

Years ago Seth Godin encouraged us to reject the tyranny of being picked:

• To stop waiting for a publisher to say you’re worthy of writing a book.
• To stop waiting for a record label to say that you’re worthy of recording an album
• To stop waiting for a movie producer to say you’re worth casting, or a studio to say your movie is worth making
• To stop waiting for an influencer to give you the popular kid’s blessing, to welcome you to the crowd, and say that you’re worthy of more people being exposed to your work.
• To stop waiting for the prestigious college, or the famous employer to say you’re worthy of admission or a job.

And still thousands, if not millions wait to be picked, wait for the big break, or the illusion of the I’ve made it moment. They wait for all of the above. I’ve seen it in myself and I’ve seen in other people. You don’t get picked based one moment, but the cumulative output of what you create.

The paradox of waiting to be picked is that when you finally stop waiting, that’s when you get picked. If you want to know what the ultimate tipping point was, it was the day I once and for all rejected the tyranny of being picked and decided that I had something of value to offer to the world, whether it was for a hundred people, a thousand, people our ten thousand. It’s when I finally understood how to resist the temptation to go for eyeballs instead of hearts. Instead of waiting, I self published my book.

The paradox of getting picked is that it only happens when you finally in the words of Seth Godin, stop waiting to be picked.

A Central Ethos: Unmistakable

At the same time this media circus was erupting, we were planning a conference and about to change the name of a brand after 4 years. After Greg sent me nearly 100 domain name ideas that I hated, he came up with the name Unmistakable Creative. Our designers, developers and everyone on the team got to work to bring this new brand to life. And in January of 2014, BlogcastFM was put to rest and the Unmistakable Creative was born.

When something is unmistakable, it’s so distinctive that it’s immediately recognized as yours, something that nobody else could have done but you.

Every brand, every person has a defining ethos. And once they find it, it becomes their compass. It becomes the filter and the standard by which everything they create is measured and viewed. People have asked me how I arrived at this conclusion of unmistakable. And the only answer I could give you is that it’s the sum of countless conversations and shared experiences. If you are willing to go far past where the average person quits, you’ll discover things that most people don’t.

And this central ethos is the-the title of my first book, which will be out August 2nd.

Depression and The Dip

Strangely after achieving what appeared to escape velocity, I lost my momentum and found myself in a dip. 2014 was the year I almost quit. I’ve talked about some of it in this raw and honest look back at 2015.

Success of any kind is romanticized, and the internet amplifies that romanticism. In many journeys, there are dark parts. There are moments when you will want to quit. And our culture of building “unicorns” and “crushing it” doesn’t make it easy for anyone to talk about these things. But they’re also things that make us grow, evolve, and build layers that allow us to handle bigger and bigger blows.

The very thing that makes us capable of dark thoughts is sometimes the thing that enables us create with reckless abandon, child-like optimism, and starry-eyed enthusiasm, to create the kind of things that cause ripples beyond measure, that shape and shift things in the universe until the dent we’ve made is unmistakably ours. Often it’s adversity that stands between us and the next level of accomplishment.

When things seemed to be at their absolute worst, and I was wondering if we’d be out of business by the end of the year, and I’d have to declare everything I worked on a failure, a seed I had planted 2 years ago paid off again. My editor at Penguin had stumbled upon my article about writing 1000 words a day and sent me this email:

I love your recent piece “How Writing 1000 Words a Day Changed My Life,” your podcast and book, and the creativity movement you have helped inspire and lead. I’d love to chat further about your book that you self-published and why you decided to publish on your own, how the experience was, and if you might be open to potentially working together.

I recently rejoined publishing after working at online education startups, having just left Skillshare to join the Penguin Random House team. While it might seem counterintuitive, I came back just for this specific division that works and thinks differently than most of the industry — and is setting out to help entrepreneurs and changemakers with the stories, experiences, and motivation of people who have successfully forged their own path, people like Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Ryan Holiday, Nir Eyal, Nick Bilton, and more. You are one of those people, and are top of my list of who to contact to work on a book together.

Do you have time this week or next for a quick call? Or if you’ll be in New York soon, would love to take you for lunch or coffee/drinks to discuss further.

Shortly before that, I’d given up on the possibility of getting to ever write a book with a publisher. And in a rather unexpected to development my agent called me on a Friday afternoon before I was about to get into the water and said: “there’s been a development, they want to make an offer for 2 books, not just one.”

Somebody asked me once what my tipping points were. I’d say when you create what you want to consume, that’s when your work changes, that’s when you connect to your voice to create work that matters.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell said “follow your bliss.” For me that’s meant making surfing one of the central forces of my life. The time when I’m the happiest, most peaceful, and feel most alive is when I’m on a surfboard riding a wave. It’s almost as if for a brief moment in time, God takes time to shine a light on me as the rays of sun bounce off of my back, and the surfboard becomes my paintbrush, and each turn, each carve, a brushstroke in the masterpiece of my life. Following your bliss is often a pathway to greater levels of meaning and significance. Your bliss might lead to your calling, but they aren’t always one and the same. Surfing has been my bliss, and writing my calling.

That, in a nutshell, is the story of my 7-year journey from blog to book deal. Unmistakable: Why Only is Better Than Best is also now available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Reader Questions

Did you want to be an author at the beginning? If not for blogging/podcast would you have written a book and where do you think you would be now career wise?

I did have some aspirations to be an author. But I wasn’t aware of the reality of what was truly involved, years of work. It’s hard for me to imagine where I’d be, but possibly fired from yet another half a dozen jobs.

Well, Medium is around now but I’m curious how you grew your blog readership/traffic over the years?

In the earliest days it was primarily through writing guests posts on other blogs. I wrote at least a hundred or more in the first year. The one mistake I made was that I didn’t prioritize building an email list.

When you come to a place where it feels particularly vulnerable to share something, what gage do you use on what is healthy to share and when not to cross some perceived personal boundary or tmi for the reader?

It’s healthy when it’s done from a place of service to your reader. It’s unhealthy when it’s done from a place of seeking pity or treating your audience as a therapist. I know because I’ve done both.

I’m the author of Unmistakable: Why Only is Better Than Best (Available for Pre-Order on Amazon and Barnes and Noble). Each Sunday we share the most unmistakable parts of the internet that we have discovered in The Sunday Quiver. ​*Receive our next issue and learn more about book pre-order bonuses by signing up here.​