Kevin Anderson never meant to get into the publishing business after growing up in a small town in Canada before getting his PhD and graduating summa cum laude from Harvard and starting a tutoring company. Nevertheless, that tutoring company transitioned into what is now a massive publishing company that employs 30 writers and editors that have collectively worked on over 200 New York Times bestselling books and sold over 100 million copies of books by people like Brene Brown, Simon Sinek...

Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress, activist, and the author of the New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort. Her other books include: Wherever You Go, There They Are, and You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up (coauthored with Jeff Kahn).  She was the co-host of Dinner & a Movie on TBS and has appeared on NPR, The Today Show, CBS Early Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, PBS, and numerous CNN and MSNBC programs. Her essays and satire have been featured in The New...

Dave Chesson is the creator of Kindlepreneur.com, a website devoted to teaching advanced book marketing which even Amazon KDP acknowledges as one of the best by telling users to “Gain insight from Kindlepreneur on how you can optimize marketing for your books.” Having worked with such authors as Orson Scott Card, Ted Dekker and more, his tactics help both fiction and nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers.  But that's the official bio stuff. The stuff...

Ashlea Hearn is not only a 1st Lieutenant in the Army Reserves but also the author of Genesis Mortalis, Book 1 of the Take It Trilogy. We met when she reached out to me about the upcoming release of that book. But here's what's relevant: by that point, I had noticed this lovely person named Ashlea Hearn reviewing me wherever she could—different books, this podcast, on Google...everywhere. But here's what I really noticed: she wasn't just slapping a review up there in order to "do the right...

Scott Duffy is an entrepreneur and business strategist who's listed as a “Top 10 Speaker” by Entrepreneur and has been named one of the “Top Influential People To Follow” by Yahoo! Finance. 'But that's not why I brought him on the pod. I brought him on because he's also the author of three different business books on three different topics, from three different publishers and launched in three entirely different ways. When I was at his mastermind a few weeks ago, he articulated why...

Greg Behrendt is the #1 New York Times best-selling co-author of He’s Just Not That Into You and It’s Called A Breakup Because It’s Broken. He's appeared on every TV show known to man, including Oprah, The Tonight Show and The Today Show, is a life long standup comedian and co-hosts the relationship podcast Don't Take B******t From F*****s. He's also a life and writing coach, who can walk you through exactly how to write a book like his—as well as how to survive any adversity that comes your...

Katie DePaola is an author, speaker, entrepreneur and the founder of Inner Glow Circle, a company dedicated to helping women entrepreneurs find their glow and live purpose-driven lives. But most relevantly for our show, she is the author of At Least You Look Good: How to Glow Through What You Go Through, the latest release from Launch Pad Publishing. The book is part memoir, part self-help and all love; it's Katie's story about surviving Lyme disease and her brother's death by overdose while...

Alex Sanfilippo is the host of the top-rated podcast Podcasting Made Simple, the founder of PodPros.com, a software company focused specifically on the podcasting industry and the co-creator of PodMatch, a service that matches podcast guests and hosts together for interviews. That's not all! He also co-founded PodcastSOP, a project management tool that helps podcasters keep up with their episode releases. You get it: the guy is POD OBSESSED. So who better to come on the show to talk about how...

Boy, does Craig Stanland have a story to tell. It starts with the FBI knocking on his door, followed by two years in prison. But that's not really what we delve into here. Instead we talk about the book he wrote on his experience—and the one major mistake he made. Now that he's at work on book number two (title TBD—we get into that in the conversation), he's approaching everything differently. Find out about that, as well as how he's planning to use videos to launch his next book, in this...

Peter Shankman is many things, among them a five-time best selling author, entrepreneur and corporate in-person and virtual keynote speaker who focuses on customer service. But in this episode I got him speaking about something so many of you ask me about: HARO, or Help a Reporter Out...the website he started (and sold to Cision many years ago) that helps so many authors get featured in mainstream media. In this conversation, which happened in rapid fire while he was in the throws of...

Rich Goldstein is a patent attorney, speaker, host of the Innovations and Breakthroughs podcast and, most relevantly for this show, the author of the bestselling book The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent, which was published by the American Bar Association. He's someone who understands through and through what a book can do for someone's business and in this episode, we got into all that as well as how writing a book changed Rich's career, why he sends a copy of the book to anyone who...

This may be the most useful podcast I've ever released. That's because it's with a guy who's an expert on something EVERY author wants: getting people to recommend your book. His name is Rob Fitzpatrick and he's a former programmer who dropped out of grad school to go to YCombinator with his first startup. It's that background—along with his nearly decade and a half of experience as an entrepreneur—that helps make sense of the fact that he's the guy who's seemingly cracked the code on how to...

I literally don't have the words to describe the experience of recording this episode but suffice it to say that it was the most fun interview I've ever done. Back story: Zara Barrie and I knew each other online (I find her incredibly glam and we're mutual fans of one another to the point that I recommended her book, Girl Stop Passing Out in Your Makeup, on KATU). She told me that she and her podcast co-host slash work wife Dayna Troisi were going to be in LA (they're NYC ladies, natch). We...

Paul Angone had an extremely unusual journey to success as an author. First, he tried to sell a book. For eight years. Nary a bite. Then a blog post he dashed off went viral. Very viral. From there, he was able to sell a book based on that blog post to a publisher. The problem was that he had to finish it in a month. Well that book and the next have sold over 100,000 copies and launched a massive speaking career. But that's not even why I wanted to have him on the podcast. I wanted him on the...

Jesse J. Anderson's journey to bookdom is unlike any other guest I've had on the show.  For one, he's not launching a book to help build his business.  Also, that book—Refocus: A Practical Guide to Adult ADHD—hasn't launched yet. In fact, he hasn't even finished writing it.  Why, then, you may ask, would I have him on the show?  Well, Jesse has also built up an impressive Twitter following by releasing Twitter threads of book chapters—a topic we dive into in detail.  When he's not writing...

Ben Mezrich has sold over 10 million copies of his books. And, by the way, that’s not even the impressive part. The impressive part is that he sells EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS BOOKS as a movie or TV show; in fact, if Hollywood isn’t interested in the treatment, he doesn’t even write the book. Mezrich has gotten into this position because of a chance encounter with some MIT students, which led to his writing Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for...

Alex Strathdee is no ordinary writer. That's because he's as much an entrepreneur as he is a writer. How do we know this? Because when he wrote his book, Experience Over Degrees, and it didn't transform the world—or even his life—he didn't just shelve the book and the experience like most people. Instead, he asked: how can I get more people to see this? What followed was a targeted campaign to colleges and then a targeted campaign to businesses to pay for that first campaign. It's an...

Mike Koenigs is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, co-host of Capability Amplifier podcast with Strategic Coach founder Dan Sullivan and 13-time bestselling author, Mike is regular contributor to Entrepreneur and Forbes. He's interviewed, consulted and advised celebrity clients, billionaires and bestselling authors including Tony Robbins, Paula Abdul, Richard Dreyfuss, Dave Asprey, JJ Virgin, presidential candidate Tim Ryan, John Assaraf, Brian Tracy and XPrize founder Peter Diamandis,...

Tawny Lara is a self-proclaimed natural born promoter. She's also a delightful person known as The Sober Sexpert, co-host of the Recovery Rocks podcast and author of the book, Dry Humping: a Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without Booze. This was recorded months before the book's release because I wanted to get a sense of what she was doing at this stage of her launch...turns out, a lot. In this episode, we talk about the ways she's incentivizing pre-orders, why she got a shirt made...

John Corcoran may be my new favorite human. A former White House speechwriter and attorney who worked in Hollywood, he now runs Rise25, which helps businesses get more clients, referral partners and strategic partners through their done-for-you podcast service. In the brief time we've known each other, he's introduced me to countless people, advised me on my business and given me ideas that have sent my head spinning, in all the right ways. This man is a fount of wisdom! And Corcoran isn't...

Joel Stein wrote a weekly column for Time magazine for 20 years, was a columnist for Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times and is the author of the books Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity and In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book.  He's also such a funny person that he manages to come across as incredibly likable both while penning a book defending elitism and while dis-inviting me to his book launch party (true...

Jess Lahey can talk about so many things so brilliantly that interviewing her felt a bit like walking through an outlet mall: so many choices and they all look so good! But really, here's what you need to know: She's a former New York Times columnist and current Atlantic contributor, podcaster and New York Times bestselling author of The Gift of Failure whose new book, The Addiction Inoculation, is the one that the world has been clamoring for. It addresses the question on pretty much every...

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...

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...