If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

Nicolas Cole built his first ghostwriting business by answering questions on Quora in 2014, and somehow that has compounded into a $10M+ portfolio of writing companies that he runs with his partner Dickie Bush—anchored by Premium Ghostwriting Academy, the 16-week program that's trained roughly 2,000 ghostwriters to charge premium rates.

Cole is a three-time guest on this show, which is a record nobody else holds, and there's a reason for it. We met at a party years ago and immediately started geeking out about books and publishing like two people who'd finally found each other at a conference for a very specific kind of weirdo. He's one of the few people I've watched scale, burn out, blow it up and rebuild without losing the part of him that actually loves writing.

The part I really wanted to get into was the 10x argument, which is the cleanest case against traditional publishing I've ever heard anyone make.

A traditional publisher pays you roughly 10% in royalties, meaning you keep 10% of the book and they keep 90%.

Self-publish and you keep 100%.

This means that to make the same money as a self-published author, your traditionally published book has to sell 10 times more copies.

We also get into his Medium loophole that paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties before they emailed him to make him stop, the Christmas Eve in 2019 he tried to duct-tape together a paid newsletter six months before Substack existed and how he emailed the Substack founder to invest the moment he saw their first round.

Also discussed: his Write With AI newsletter that now does $400K a year in subscriptions and feeds a $1-2M business on top of that and his case for why the only book worth writing is one you’re willing to write about on social media day after day after day after day.

In this episode:

• Why a traditionally published book has to sell 10 times more copies than a self-published one just to break even
• The Medium loophole that paid Cole hundreds of thousands of dollars before they emailed him to stop
• Why Cole emailed the Substack founder the day they raised their first round and what happened when they said no
• The $400K-a-year Substack newsletter Cole built by following the money
• Why charging less than $3,000 a project means you have a faulty relationship with money, not a pricing problem

Want to know more about my company? Legacy Launch Pad Publishing is a boutique hybrid publisher for entrepreneurs and established founders. We help clients create books that build authority, attract opportunities and grow businesses. More info 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com

Want to ask me how to build authority with your book to generate seven-figure returns, speaking opportunities and high-value clients? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/book

Interested in working with a selective hybrid publisher that focuses on strategy, authority and long-term business growth—not just publishing a book? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/apply

And if you just want to know more about me, 👉 www.annadavid.com

Remember, if there's anyone in your life who you know could be considered an authority in their field if they were better known, share this show with them!

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

Gary White is a Scottish marketer who spent years building funnels for Russell Brunson at ClickFunnels before he got obsessed with one specific kind of client: people who cared so much about a subject they wrote a book on it. He turned that obsession into bookfunnels.io, a company that's helped hundreds of authors stop selling books on Amazon and start using their books to acquire actual paying clients.

I have to admit something. I got on a call with Gary, hung up, decided to poke around his site to see what he was about — and within an hour I had entered my credit card and signed up for things I did not need or really understand. That is how good his system is. So I figured the only responsible thing to do was have him on the show to explain exactly how he did that to me, so all of you can do it to your readers.

The framework is called the TINY Book Client System. The T is the perfect bait, meaning your book has to attract the exact person you actually want to work with, not just any reader who might buy a book on your topic. The I is the independent selling system, which is how you stop renting your readers from Amazon and start owning the relationship. The N is the never-ending traffic source, and Gary has a story about spending five days making a YouTube video that got 82 views, then taking a single iPhone photo of a box of his books and selling hundreds the same week with a 30-second Meta ad. The Y is the implementation offer, which is the thing your book is secretly selling the whole time.

We also get into "cash cycling"—the mechanic where every dollar you spend on ads comes back on Day Zero so you literally cannot lose money, why he thinks LinkedIn ads are a waste for most authors even when you're targeting CEOs, his case for "tiny books" of around 120 pages (just thick enough to have a real spine and an ISBN) and the warehouse-in-California-while-he-lives-in-Scotland setup that lets him sell physical books he has literally never touched.

In this episode:

• The TINY framework Gary built after running funnels for Russell Brunson at ClickFunnels for years
• The 5-day YouTube video that got 82 views and the 30-second iPhone photo that sold hundreds of books the same week
• "Cash cycling"—why every dollar you spend on Meta ads comes back on Day Zero so you cannot lose money
• Why Gary thinks LinkedIn ads are a waste even when you're targeting CEOs (and where to find those CEOs instead)
• The "tiny book"—roughly 120 pages, real spine, real ISBN, none of the months-of-staring-at-a-blank-page
• The audience-capture trap Gary warns every author about before they write a single chapter

Want to know more about my company? Legacy Launch Pad Publishing is a boutique hybrid publisher for entrepreneurs and established founders. We help clients create books that build authority, attract opportunities and grow businesses. More info 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com

Want to ask me how to build authority with your book to generate seven-figure returns, speaking opportunities and high-value clients? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/book

Interested in working with a selective hybrid publisher that focuses on strategy, authority and long-term business growth—not just publishing a book? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/apply

And if you just want to know more about me, 👉 www.annadavid.com

Remember, if there's anyone in your life who you know could be considered an authority in their field if they were better known, share this show with them!

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

In 2023 I opened my book On Good Authority by saying AI wasn't going to replace writers.

Three years later, I still believe that. But so much that I thought about publishing in 2023 has shifted that I'm re-releasing the book—two new chapters, an updated audiobook and a free upgrade for anyone who bought the original. Because the gap between what was true then and what's true now is the whole story.

There are three main things that made me feel like a new edition was necessary.

First, AI went from a hallucinating curiosity to a tool I use all day every day—not to write books, but for design, for thinking partner work, for the personal-relationship triage I sometimes do when I'm about to send an email I shouldn't. I would argue that AI has made it so that mediocre writing has become more irrelevant, not less, since anyone can prompt their way to passable now.

Also a 2026 study finally proved what I've been saying for years: entrepreneurs with books charge 37% more than competitors without one.

But the point I want to land hardest in this version is one I couldn't fully prove in 2023 and now can: book sales matter less than they ever have. A New York Times bestselling author profiled in New York Magazine this March makes $49,000 a year, and that figure includes retreats and recording the audiobook.

A writer I follow sold 150,000 copies of her book and made $87,000 over six years after subtracting for editor, publicist and agent fees. My own New York Times bestseller didn't cover the cab fare to the launch party.

So it’s even more true now that the book isn’t the product but what makes everything else possible.

This new version also gets into AI discoverability, why your website needs to speak to robots as much as humans, why Wikipedia and Reddit and GoodReads matter more than they did three years ago, the LLM test I run on my own company every month and the niche-audience playbook my clients are using to land $20,000 speaking gigs. Which makes the new edition of On Good Authority the field guide for the season I've been running on the future of publishing.

P.S. — If you bought the 2023 edition, email assistant@annadavid.com to get the 2026 version on Anna.

Other links I promised:

The Ask Me Anything page where you can indeed ask me anything about On Good Authority: www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/book

The general book information page with links to where you can purchase: www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/good-authority-book

Want to know more about my company? Legacy Launch Pad Publishing is a boutique hybrid publisher for entrepreneurs and established founders. We help clients create books that build authority, attract opportunities and grow businesses. More info 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com

Curious how entrepreneurs use books to generate seven-figure returns, speaking opportunities and high-value clients? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/7-figures

Interested in working with a selective hybrid publisher that focuses on strategy, authority and long-term business growth—not just publishing a book? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/apply

Want to get my book that breaks down 30 years of experience and hundreds of interviews with publishing experts and authors—newly updated for 2026? (You can even ask the book questions. [Really!]) 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/good-authority-book

And if you just want to know more about me, 👉 www.annadavid.com

Remember, if there's anyone in your life whose wisdom you deeply admire, or who you know could be considered an authority in their field if they were better known, share this show with them.

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

Steve Sarner spent eight years at Amazon and was VP of sales at Goodreads, which means he understands something most authors don’t:

Book sales are not the point.

What Steve focuses on now is something I think more people should be talking about: not selling books, but seeding them—that is, getting them into the hands of the exact people who can turn them into something bigger.

This, you could say, is my obsession.

We get into:

• How many books you actually need “out in the wild” before anything starts working
• Why giving your book away can be more valuable than selling it
• How books turn into $10,000+ clients (and the rough math behind that)
• The surprising places he’s putting books—from niche events to inside massive companies
• Why reviews matter…even though getting them is borderline impossible

There’s also a story about someone finding their company through AI, requesting the book, reading it and becoming a client—which is basically the entire thesis in action.

Find out more about the company where Steve works, ShelfLife, here.

Sign up for ShelfLife’s 3-2-1 newsletter here.

Want to know more about my company? Legacy Launch Pad Publishing is a boutique hybrid publisher for entrepreneurs and established founders. We help clients create books that build authority, attract opportunities and grow businesses. More info 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com

Curious how entrepreneurs use books to generate seven-figure returns, speaking opportunities and high-value clients? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/7-figures

Interested in working with a selective hybrid publisher that focuses on strategy, authority and long-term business growth—not just publishing a book? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/apply

Want to get my book that breaks down 30 years of experience and hundreds of interviews with publishing experts and authors—newly updated for 2026? (You can even ask the book questions. [Really!]) 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/good-authority-book

And if you just want to know more about me, 👉 www.annadavid.com

Remember, if there's anyone in your life whose wisdom you deeply admire, or who you know could be considered an authority in their field if they were better known, share this show with them.

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

Rex Sorgatz is one of those people who has been early to everything—blogging, digital media, startups—and now AI storytelling.

We go way back to Lower East Side readings, when I quickly discovered that he was surrounded by people building the future before I really understood what that meant.

This conversation is about AI and publishing, but not in the way people usually talk about it. Not “AI will write your book” or “everything is over.” More like: what actually changes when technology shifts how we interact with ideas.

We also get into:

• Why most “AI writing” isn’t writing at all
• How he actually uses AI (and why most people are using it wrong)
• Why talking to your computer might be inevitable, even if you hate the idea
• The product he built to remember everything he’s ever read—and why 100,000 people built the same thing a day later

Also: a brief detour into an erotica reading I made him do years ago that I’m still not sure I should have been responsible for.

Check out the AI company Rex co-founded here.

Want to know more about my company? Legacy Launch Pad Publishing is a boutique hybrid publisher for entrepreneurs and established founders. We help clients create books that build authority, attract opportunities and grow businesses. More info 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com

Curious how entrepreneurs use books to generate seven-figure returns, speaking opportunities and high-value clients? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/7-figures

Interested in working with a selective hybrid publisher that focuses on strategy, authority and long-term business growth—not just publishing a book? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/apply

Want to get my book that breaks down 30 years of experience and hundreds of interviews with publishing experts and authors—newly updated for 2026? (You can even ask the book questions. [Really!]) 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/good-authority-book

And if you just want to know more about me, 👉 www.annadavid.com

Remember, if there's anyone in your life whose wisdom you deeply admire, or who you know could be considered an authority in their field if they were better known, share this show with them.

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

Charlie Hoehn worked for Tim Ferriss for years and got the job in a way Tim has actually written about (worth the click). Then he spent a decade watching publishing promise everything and deliver almost nothing, until he built Author Inc to fix it.

Most people in my line of work make me want to lie down in a dark room. Charlie is the opposite. I would venture to say that he knows more about the topic of book publishing and where it’s going than anyone else out there. So this episode is less an interview and more a look at how someone I respect is actually building the thing.

There are so many parts of this conversation that I love but none more than when he shared about the Bullseye reader test. See, I always struggled with those “avatar” exercises marketers were throwing at us a decade or so ago, where you’d have to answer a bunch of questions like, “What does my avatar drive and read and drink?” I always either felt like I was either answering the questions myself or simply making things up.

That's why Charlie makes every author he works with name a single specific person they could text. Not a composite, not a Pixar character built out of demographic data, not "ambitious female founders, 35 to 50." A real person with a real phone number you know. In Charlie’s world, if you can't name them, you don't have a book yet.

We also covered the four planning exercises his company does before a single word of the book gets written, his company’s two-day recorded-conversation process in a downtown Austin hotel suite that produces a 50,000-word first draft about an hour after the sessions wrap, his American Idol critique of traditional publishing, the book ROI calculator he built because he got tired of explaining how lucrative a book done right can be and why everyone should be able to name a non-fiction book that changed their life.

Want to know more about my company? Legacy Launch Pad Publishing is a boutique hybrid publisher for entrepreneurs and established founders. We help clients create books that build authority, attract opportunities and grow businesses. More info 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com

Curious how entrepreneurs use books to generate seven-figure returns, speaking opportunities and high-value clients? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/7-figures

Interested in working with a selective hybrid publisher that focuses on strategy, authority and long-term business growth—not just publishing a book? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/apply

And if you just want to know more about me, 👉 www.annadavid.com

Remember, if there's anyone in your life whose wisdom you deeply admire, or who you know could be considered an authority in their field if they were better known, share this show with them.

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

I was a snob about AI in publishing. I'll just say it. When companies started popping up in late 2022 promising to use AI to write books, I had the same reaction I once had to self publishing when I was still in the traditional world: I want nothing to do with these people. Dan Curran has made me reconsider—some of it, anyway. Not because he convinced me AI can match what a skilled ghost writer or developmental editor does (I don't think it can, at least not yet) but what he’s building at Chapters may be as interesting as the manuscript.

Dan spent a decade running a company that interviewed scientists and PhDs for technical writing. When ChatGPT launched, he didn't use AI to replace writers. He used it to organize, deduplicate and structure the words that were already coming out of real people's mouths—recorded in conversations, timestamped and attributed, so every sentence traces back to the person who said it. The result is a manuscript in 90 days. Chapters has started over 100 of them in 16 months with a team of 14 people, and they charge $25,000—or as low as $18,000 on a payment plan—to do what a ghost writer charges $60,000 to $150,000 for.

But what I really wanted to talk about is what Dan's actually building, which is not a book company. He calls it a "living library"—a vault of authenticated IP that can generate Substacks, LinkedIn posts, speeches, white papers and documentary frameworks from the same corpus. And he's timestamping and chaining custody of every piece of it, so that when the large language models come scraping for new knowledge, authors can prove what they said, when they said it and demand to be paid for it. Can a 90-day AI-organized manuscript compete with a book that's been through months of human developmental editing? I have my doubts. But that's arguing about the wrong part.

We also get into why about half of Chapters' clients come from publishers who offer them as an alternative to a $150,000 ghost writer, why Dan thinks 90% of digital content will be synthetic by next year and his case for why the publishing industry needs to "widen the aperture." Plus where Dan sees authorship itself going when AI can authenticate content faster than any human can, which is one of the strangest questions driving this whole season.

In this episode:

• Why I was a snob about AI publishing and why I'm now willing to listen—even if I'm not fully converted
• How Chapters turns 12 weeks of recorded conversations into a 50,000-to-80,000-word manuscript without AI writing a single sentence
• The "chain of custody" system that timestamps every idea—and why Dan thinks authors will eventually get paid when LLMs scrape their IP
• Why about half of Chapters' clients come from publishers who offer them as an alternative to a $60,000-to-$150,000 ghost writer
• Dan's case for why publishing needs to "widen the aperture"—and where I think he's right and where I'm still skeptical
• What he means by a "living library"—and why it might matter more than the book

Want to know more about my company? Legacy Launch Pad Publishing is a boutique hybrid publisher for entrepreneurs and established founders. We help clients create books that build authority, attract opportunities and grow businesses. More info 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com

Curious how entrepreneurs use books to generate seven-figure returns, speaking opportunities and high-value clients? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/7-figures

Interested in working with a selective hybrid publisher that focuses on strategy, authority and long-term business growth—not just publishing a book? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/apply

And if you just want to know more about me, 👉 www.annadavid.com

Remember, if there's anyone in your life whose wisdom you deeply admire, or who you know could be considered an authority in their field if they were better known, share this show with them.

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

Stefanie Wilder-Taylor sold over 120,000 copies of her first book. Her most recent royalty check was for $95. That's not because people stopped reading—she's published five more books, launched four podcasts and now teaches memoir writing. It's because selling 120,000 copies doesn't actually pay the rent. Which is the fact almost nobody in publishing admits out loud.

When Stefanie wrote Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay in 2005, she was a new mom, a former game-show writer and completely unknown as an author. Her publisher told her she'd been declined everywhere for publicity. Her husband cold-called some old talk-show contacts and got her on the Today show; by April of 2006, she was a bestseller with a $30,000 advance she thought made her rich. Every subsequent book—and there have been five—has failed to earn out.

But what I really wanted to talk about is how she finally cracked her sixth book deal after years of being told she wasn't "sought after" anymore. Stefanie pitched Drunk-ish using her podcast stats—who her audience is, how loyal they are, exactly what kind of woman listens and exactly what kind of book that woman buys—and the publisher bought it. Which, for anyone under the delusion that publishers still do the selling, is the whole story.

We also get into the COVID storytelling podcast she recorded episode by episode and then abandoned, her theory about why new moms buy parenting books and school moms don't, the agent who told her "never compare yourself to the exception" after she brought up Sex and the City and the weird fact that Down with Love with Renée Zellweger ruined her idea of what the writing life actually is. Plus: where Stefanie thinks traditional publishing is actually heading, which is the question driving this whole season.

In this episode:

• Why selling 120,000 copies of a book still isn't a living wage
• The $30,000 advance she thought made her rich (and what happened to the royalty checks)
• How she used her podcast stats to pitch her sixth book deal after years of rejection
• Why people accused her of getting sober just for the publicity (and the real reason she got sober)
• The COVID storytelling podcast she recorded and never released
• The agent advice that should be tattooed on every aspiring author's wrist

Want to know more about my company? Legacy Launch Pad Publishing is a boutique hybrid publisher for entrepreneurs and established founders. We help clients create books that build authority, attract opportunities and grow businesses. More info 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com

Curious how entrepreneurs use books to generate seven-figure returns, speaking opportunities and high-value clients? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/7-figures

Interested in working with a selective hybrid publisher that focuses on strategy, authority and long-term business growth—not just publishing a book? 👉 https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com/apply

And if you just want to know more about me, 👉 www.annadavid.com

Remember, if there's anyone in your life whose wisdom you deeply admire, or who you know could be considered an authority in their field if they were better known, share this show with them.