Shaan Patel: How to Make a Book Pay for Itself

In this episode of Author Hour, Shaan Patel—entrepreneur, founder, and Shark Tank alum—shares how writing a book became a strategic asset for building authority, driving growth, and supporting a larger business system. Shaan breaks down why he approached his book with intention, how publishing fits into a long-term business strategy, and what most authors get wrong when they treat a book as an end goal instead of a tool. Drawing from his experience pitching on Shark Tank and scaling a success

Transcript

Sean, thank you so much for doing this. And I'm excited to finally be able to like talk publicly with you about a project that's been, you know, years in the making in private. Yeah, same here. No, it's been a really good experience with Scribe publishing my book and excited to talk about how that experience was as well as the results we've gotten from it since. Awesome. Yeah, you're a shining example, I think, of like an author that really made their book work for them and their business. But before we sort of can get into that, I feel like we got to set the scene a little bit.

So can you give us a little bit of background on like you and your business and kind of the ecosystem that this book was born into? Yeah, for sure. So my name is Sean Patel. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Prep Expert. We're essentially a test preparation for SAT and ACT courses. We do some one-on-one tutoring, college consulting, everything kind of in the education. It's based primarily for high school students and their parents. I've owned the business for a really long time. It's been almost 15 years and we've helped over 100,000 students now improve their test scores, get into top colleges, win scholarships.

It's been an amazing ride. The highlight of the company for me was when I pitched it on Shark Tank, made a deal with Mark Cuban. He's been an amazing investor, advocate, and partner for the company ever since. And, you know, I came to Scribe a couple of years ago now, I want to say almost two, three years ago. And, you know, approached, I've published books in the past, but I wanted to do more of a professional self-publication than the past. And we published a book called Prep Expert Digital SAT Playbook.

And it's been an amazing for my authorship, thought leadership, but most importantly, my business ever since. And so, yeah, that's hopefully gives people some context. Yeah. So you published a few times, like full DIY self-publish over the course of this business. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So the, my publishing story is kind of funny. Originally, before I ever started the company, I just wanted to publish an SAT prep book. And what ended up happening was I pitched a hundred literary agents and publishers.

This was back in like 2010. So 15 years ago, prior to, I'd say self-publishing was like, became really kind of mainstream. I mean, it was happening for sure, but it certainly wasn't at the level. That it is today. So, you know, if you really wanted to get distribution back then the real, the real play was to go through a major publisher. So I pitched a bunch of publishers, you know, Penguin, Random House, et cetera, ended up getting a hundred rejections. Every single one said, you know, SAT prep markets too competitive.

You don't have a platform to write the book, et cetera. And so I ended up taking all that content that I had written and I turned it into a prep course. And that's really how Prep Expert was born. And in my very first six week course that I ever taught, my students had an average score improvement of 376 points to their scores on their SATs. Yeah. And so it is well, because like for context for listeners, that's a equivalent of taking a student from the 50th percentile, putting them in the 90th percentile.

And so, you know, I had a lot more traction then I had parents and students who wanted more courses. And then one of the publishers that had previously rejected my book deal came back, saw that I was building a book deal. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm building an audience, saw that I was building a platform. And it was actually McGraw Hill, which is the world's largest education publisher, ended up, you know, giving me the book deal and what I had originally wanted. So it was kind of one of those funny things about life where you take this other route and you end up getting what you originally wanted anyway, which for me was the book.

So we published a book called SAT 2400 in just seven steps. I think he came out in 2011 or so and maybe 2012, I can get into my years mixed up. It's been so many, so long ago. But anyway, it ended up selling like over 50,000 copies, which is big for the test prep space. It went number one on Amazon for SAT prep. It did well overall, but I barely saw any royalty from it. You know, I was making like, you know, 30 cents, 50 cents a copy, something like that. And so after that first book, I ended up self-publishing a bunch of other test prep books, entrepreneurship books.

But it was very, I would say, you described it DIY. I didn't really know what I was doing. We went through CreateSpace, Amazon, KDP, et cetera. But it was not nearly to the level that my first book through McGraw-Hill was highly professional, highly, you know, worked with great editors, worked with great typesetters, et cetera. And so I always wanted to get back to that original level, but without having to, you know, take the kind of pay cut that you do through a major publisher. And so that's when I found Scribe.

And it was kind of the perfect match between self-publishing, but still getting that professional level of publication. Yeah. That's how I often describe it. It's like traditional publishing quality with self-publishing freedom and ROI. Like that's really like where we shine. And when we meet an author like you who has experience on both of those, it's like, wow, I really liked the polish coming out of a traditional publisher, but I didn't like the ROI or I've done the DIY and man, is it hard. It's, you know, it's hard.

But it's, it's, it's hard. And so I really like that. And so I really like that. And so I like building your own house. Like you can do it, but God, it takes a long time to get it right. And you gotta be willing to make some mistakes and spend a lot of time on YouTube and redoing stuff. And I mean, especially books of your complexity. I can't imagine doing an SAT test prep book on CreateSpace, like very hard, very, very hard. It was not easy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and publishing a book in the first place is not easy, but publishing a test prep book with like these diagrams that are highly complicated with these special figures and notations and equations.

Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's not as simple as just putting text on a page for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So like, tell me about this one specifically, like, are you publishing a new book every couple of years? Like what was the, you know, when you went out with this book as a project, like what was the, what were your kind of goals and expectations for it? Yeah. So really the frequency that I publish books is really the frequency with how often the tests tick changes. So the SAT or the ACT will probably change, I mean, not that often, like every eight to 10 years.

So we're not publishing that often. With that being said, you know, each there's two different exams. So, you know, it might be every three or four years that we're putting out a new book, a new set of strategies, et cetera, for, for parents and students. And so with this last book that I did with Scribe, there was a major shift in the SAT prep world, which is, you know, you and I, we took the SAT on paper and it went fully digital now. So it's a bright, there was a brand new format, brand new question types, brand new strategies to go through.

And so I thought it would be the perfect time to do this, like brand new polished book publication, brand new launch. And I was seeing, you know, book books had always been a lead generator for me, but I saw a much bigger opportunity this time around with the, the revamp of SAT prep with the book. I did a really big book launch kind of, you know, hermosy style, but more kind of in my particular style. So I was seeing, you know, I was seeing, you know, I was seeing, you know, I was seeing, you know, I was seeing, you know, I was seeing, you know, I was seeing, you know, space.

And then, you know, I saw there's some really cool marketing funnels I wanted to create. So it was just like the perfect storm of things happening at once that I thought it would be a really good opportunity to do it in a, in a really professional way with scribe. Yeah. So like, uh, this is where I want to kind of dive in deep, like your launch was very well done and you saw like great results from it. So I, I'm, yeah, I'm really curious, like what was the, you know, you had a very clear business case for this book.

Like you had published books in the past, you knew what it could drive to the core business. And we really like planned for that from the very early stages. Can you take us through as much of that as, as you can, or as you're comfortable with in public here? Yeah, for sure. So, you know, part of the reason or part of the strategy behind the book launch was, or part of the reason for the publication was to put together this really large book launch event, which would launch the book right before this new digital.

SAT came out and, you know, with the book launch event, we would register tons of parents and students. We would be able to sell the book, but also sell our main revenue driver at the business, which would be courses. And so what we did was we put the book launch event together, literally the week before the new digital SAT was coming out, we registered close to, I want to say 10,000 parents and students. We ended up selling, over a thousand books. So, you know, converting about 10% of those registrations, we ended up going number one in various Amazon categories, including SAT test guides, ACT test guides, education and learning.

And we were like in the top three for various other categories. We had our highest one day revenue ever since we aired on Shark Tank in 2016. We had our highest one week revenue in company history. Yeah. And we did more revenue, during the book launch week than we did all of the previous month. So, I mean, it was, it was pretty incredible. I think I highly encourage any authors out there listening to consider a book launch event. I think it's, it's really good. It helps gets the author's story in front of your audience.

And then on top of that, you get all the business results. If you put together a really good offer or package at the end of it that people can take advantage of. So what was that? Like, what were the specifics of that event? It was a, like a live webinar. How long was it? Like, what did you take people through? What was that offer that they converted on? Yeah. So the specifics were, so this is one thing I would also encourage is I didn't really call it just a book launch event. I mean, it was a book launch event, but I made sure there was some value that the audience was getting.

So in my particular case, I think it was seven strategies to improve your test scores and get scholarships. So it was some real good takeaways that parents and students could get. But those takeaways, I think, were actually be previews of what's inside the book, right? So it was a great segue at the end to offer the book. I think we did like a 30, 40% discount on it that they could convert on. And we had that offer going for a week. And then on top of that, we did a 34. So I had a built-in business, right? So I had 30 to 40% discount on our courses that just to celebrate the book launch that would, they could take advantage of during the week.

So, so that was really kind of the, the offer at the end. So like, if you have kind of a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a coach or consulting business, it's, I mean, a book is a no brainer because you're able to kind of pair that book with your coaching courses, consulting, whatever coaching you may be offering. I'm sure it works with other products and services as well.

I'm just not as familiar with them, but speaking from my own experience in the course consulting business, it works really, really well. Yeah. So were there any other kind of key components of that launch week itself? You know, it's really important to, to build up some anticipation. So one of the other things I was doing a lot of during that week and the week before and week afters was a lot of media. So media in the form of podcasts, in the form of traditional news, I think we did like a few local news and local news interviews are generally easy to get for authors.

We, I think we got some national news too. So I think being able to leverage some media, media coverage when you have an event and you have something really powerful with takeaways, it's no longer about the book. It's about all these, this great value that audiences can get from the event. So you're more likely to get media coverage that way. And that obviously promotes the event and the book. It's a win-win. Yeah. Yeah. And you did a great job. Like you planned for the shift. Like you knew when the media was going to be excited to talk about this.

And when, you know, when, when the test changes, that's a headline and the media wants to talk about it and you show up as an expert to help them talk about it. And then that, leads back to the business and back to the book and everything else. It would be hard to like, make this a headline without a change. So I, you, you correctly identified, like, this is my moment. Like I'm going to make the most of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not often the SATs in the news, but I figured out, you know, that eight to 10 years that every eight to 10 years when the test does a major shift, usually the news does want to cover that.

So, you know, I think the takeaway for audiences would be figure out how to make your particular impact. And I think that's a really good way to do that. And I think that's a really good way to do that. And I think that's a really good way to do that. And I think that's a really you know, something happening in your industry that's particularly relevant. I think it's, it's a good idea to capitalize on that. Yeah. And so this also was, I mean, a huge launch event, drove a lot of sales for the book, drove a lot of sales for the course, but I know that there's also like, I'm sure this is a book with a tremendous long tail where like every month, every year there's new students sort of graduating into the need for this product.

Have you seen like a long-term tailwind as a result of this? book? Oh, definitely. Yeah. We've sold more books in 2025 than we did in 2024. And 2024 is when we had the launch event. I think we've sold already over like 20 to 30,000, somewhere in that range of the books, which is, you know, to be a highly niche industry is pretty impressive to continue to do that. And then we constantly now more than ever before have, and we track this in our CRM, we have parents and students who originally bought our book, then sign up for our courses.

So it's been exactly what we had hoped the book would serve as a tremendous lead generator for our business. Yeah. You probably, I mean, at that level of sales, you're probably making money on the book as its own asset. Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, the book itself generates, it's tens of thousands of dollars in profit from the royalties every year, which is impressive for, you know, as I was mentioning, I was getting, you know, 50 cents a book before. Now I'm getting, I think it's kind of crazy.

Amazon gives, because the retail price on test prep books is pretty high, like, you know, 35, $39. I'm getting like $13 a book in, you know, royalty profit. So it's, it's a really nice profit generator just from the book without even, you know, adding on everything else. Yeah. Do you invest, do you spend money on Amazon ads? Do you like put marketing into the book specifically as a, as a product? It's a great question. So we've tested Amazon ads. It's been really hard for us and maybe we need to do some more testing to actually be profitable on the Amazon ads.

What's super worked super well, and this is more, I would say an advanced strategy for, it may not work for all companies or authors, but what's worked, better for us is to actually do kind of like a free book funnel throw through like meta ads. And so what we'll do oftentimes is we will run an ad that says, you know, get the book for free, just pay shipping, pay $5, $7, whatever it may be. But that generates us a ton of leads. And because of order bumps and post checkout upsells, we can often actually not only break even, but be profitable on those ad costs.

And so it's, kind of like we're getting leads for free, even if we can just break even, we're getting leads for free because you know, the shipping costs plus the order bumps and upsells end up paying back all the ad costs. And now I have all this lead information to be able to be in our ecosystem of emails and SMS and, you know, eventually buy courses and consulting and tutoring down the line. Yeah, that's a really, that's a great one. I get a lot of authors have questions about that, but it doesn't always like not every, book converts on that.

And it's still, I mean, a lot of people, I think skip straight to the, like, well, just download the free PDF and use that to convert the email subscriber on the lead magnet. They don't make that extra leap for like, I'll handle the physical fulfillment and you want to charge even a little bit to collect that payment information, but there's so much more signal in that. And I'm sure you see that in the, you know, the upsells and the conversion. Yeah. Yeah. That's the interesting part. Cause obviously, you know, the free PDF is obviously the classic free book model, but we found that actually, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, offering someone something physical and making people pay $5 or $7.

The lead is worth, I think when we calculated out like five times more, three times more than just someone who's going to download a free PDF. So it's like, you're getting a much more valuable lead on top of that. You know, people like people see free PDFs, free downloads all the time. It's like nonstop. So being able to actually, you know, fulfill a free book, even though I'm losing money on that book, I usually make it back in upsells in order. Bumps, et cetera. So I, if you can make it work, it's one of the most powerful, I would say lead generators for, for businesses out there.

Now, like you said, it's not applicable to everyone, but it, but it is something to test. Yeah. Well, especially for you, you know, your book is so directly correlated with the course, the offering, like it's all the exact same. So like, there's no risk that a person who needs that book isn't going to also need the course, right? Yeah, exactly. It's, it's my exact specific lead that I need is, it's perfectly targeted. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, we should talk more about the Amazon ads because I think that's, you know, when you know, for sure the same logic of like, you know, a lead is worth three to five X.

And if you're clever about the book sort of leading into the online ecosystem, which I'm sure you are, and I would like to learn more about how you did that. Like, even if you are breakeven on the Amazon ads, you are acquiring additional sort of potential customers. You don't gain that information right away. They have to sort of take that extra leap on their own. But yeah, when you've got a, you know, especially, you know, your margin of per book is so much higher than anybody else advertising on Amazon.

I would think you'd be able to kind of bid your way to the top pretty effectively. Yeah. I think it's just, you know, maybe my media buyer doesn't have as much experience. So it is a different platform. It is. Yeah. Most people are, you know, very familiar with meta Facebook, Instagram, Google, I would say Amazon, you really have to get a specialist in there. And so maybe we just haven't found the right person to run the ads yet. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So, so talk to me about, did you do anything in the structure of the book itself to like bring people into the digital ecosystem or upsells of the courses or anything like that? Yeah.

Oh, for sure. So, you know, I think we offered some, we offered a few call to actions. I would say like, it's a pretty big book, like three, 400 pages. And so every hundred pages or so there's a QR code with a call to action to, you know, a free checklist or a free, bonus chapters, free, whatever it may be. And really the idea there is to get parents and students to take that next step and hopefully give us their lead information in exchange for some value that we're giving them. And I think the goal of books really should be to nurture your leads over time.

And so if you can get enough people to into your ecosystem, you will make money as a business owner. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a, there's definitely like a very different level of service between like, you know, I bought the $40 book and I'll do the work myself versus like, I really want the outcome that this book is showing me as possible. And like, I'm willing to pay, you know, the 400 or $4,000 for the, you know, the more full immersive experience or personal coaching, consulting, whatever to like close that gap.

But the credibility that, that it takes to get to that, you know, four figure offer sometimes only happens as a result of someone spending, you know, hours or tens of hours, like in your book. And so I think that's a really good way to get that, you know, sort of coming along and be like, Oh man, everything this guy's given me is so helpful and so on point and I'm making progress, but not quite making enough progress. Like I really want to really want to smash this. Like, let's, you know, let's take the next big step.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I think some authors, including myself sometimes fear like, Oh, well, should I really put it in a book? It's going to cannibalize my sales otherwise. But the way that I've kind of found is it's actually the opposite. You end up getting more customers than you would have otherwise. I mean, it's just because they've been almost engrossed in your content for, you know, for so long, they know, like, and trust you because of the book. So, and then the other thing is a lot of people, you know, they may buy your book and they'll go through a little bit and they liked what they read, but it's, it's really hard, at least in my industry to go through a 400 page book on your own.

It's just a lot more valuable to have that one-on-one tutoring or some coaching, some consulting, some, some experts to help you through the way. And I think that's generally true for a lot of industries. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. It's, it's almost like a, it's like an audition. It's like a first date. It's, you know, somebody like getting a feel for you and your style and whether, you know, they think you're the right person to solve this whole thing. Do you have any sort of clever, like distribution hacks or partnerships for this book? Like, you know, exactly who your target audience is, right? Like, you know, where they are, you know, who they are.

It was probably hard to like get into high schools. I'd imagine. Like, pretty much relying on like the internet ecosystem and search traffic and ads, or is there any way that you've been able to like insert this book into people's lives at the right time? Yeah. So I will say that, you know, 15 years ago when the publisher said the SAT prep market is super competitive, that is a hundred percent true. And you know, the partnerships are few and far between because they usually stem from very deep entrenched relationships between school districts and certain people.

So it's very difficult to, you know, be able to crack that system. With that being said, I've found a lot of success on the direct to consumer side. So whether that be Amazon, meta ads, as I talked about with the free book funnel, and then honestly, just reputation over time. I think having been in this industry for 15 years, having that first book do so well. Now my latest book still gets notoriety from that. And, you know, I think for most authors, it's, you really have to think about authorship.

I would say, in a decade's game, not a year's game. And so I'm like in my second decade, I'm sure the third decade will be even better because you've built a great reputation over time that, you know, keeps me in the top 10 or 20 of the SAT prep names in the industry on Amazon, on other platforms, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. What's the breakdown of, you know, you say direct to consumer, like is your consumer more often the student or more often the parent? Like what's the breakdown there? Yeah. So it's a really good question.

So I'm in one of the, few industry, I mean, I'm sure there's plenty, but I'm in one of the more rare industries where the customer and the consumer are different, right? So the customer is the parent of the high school student and the consumer is the student. And that makes logical sense, right? A student's generally one, not going to have a credit card to pay for a course or a book. And then two, a student's not going to want to shoot you a course or a book. I mean, so it's usually the parent paying for it and encouraging the student.

Now we do have some students who are, you know, very motivated and they, they're the ones encouraging their parent, but it's usually the other way around. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Are there any other places that the business, that the book has sort of benefited the business? I often like explain to people like unexplained good things will start happening in a book. It'll just kind of be like a tailwind for all these other things that, that you do. It's sometimes people know, sometimes they don't, but it's always worth asking, like, where have things like felt easier or happened by surprise? Uh, like what else, what other ways that you maybe didn't anticipate that you've involved this book in your business? Yeah, it's a great question.

And I would say it's hard to pinpoint exactly where, but I know that it has had a net positive impact. And the reason for that is because we had record revenue the past year. We had record revenue that actually significantly record revenue. Like it, we doubled, we doubled revenue compared to 2024 in 2025. Yeah. And so, and, and this is like not a small business, like you don't have to divulge numbers, but like, I know enough to know this is a very significant business to be doubling. Yeah. So to do that at our scale has been incredible.

And, you know, I can actually pinpoint from the day that we did the book launch to, you know, ever since our revenue has never been down month over month and, or not, not month over month. I would say like when you, we're very seasonal business would be the, if you compare the same month to the previous year, we've never been down. So like you can't compare February to March, but you can compare February to February of the previous year. And so we've been constantly increasing revenue every single month, year over year.

We've doubled basically. I think we're slightly under double, but very close to doubling in 2025 compared to 2024. And I can pinpoint literally, my book launch event date from that. So what does that tell me? Like I can't track every customer, right. But I do know that the book has gender, you know, before that book launch, we were, uh, I can tell you the opposite story, which was our revenue was decreasing for a couple of years. We were having challenges, you know, there was this test optional environment.

Now we, we are getting some tailwind with, you know, colleges reinstating standardized testing requirements. Of course, there's some demand. Factors there too. Um, but we were kind of always struggling where to get leads from. Now it feels like leads, like you said, just get easier. It just comes freely. We have too many leads almost, you know, it seems like there's constantly a new inflow of leads and it's like, where are these leads coming from? You know, sure. It's some of the other marketing avenues and strategies we're doing, but I can attribute a lot of it to the book.

I'll be on webinars every month and, you know, where'd you hear about prep expert? Where'd you hear about, you know, where'd you hear about, you know, some people will say podcasts, some people will say this or that, but many people will say, Oh, I got your book. I got your book. I got your book. And I'll see that in the chat over and over. And so, you know, things get much easier when you have a really well put together book. You know, I made a lot of mistakes when I did the, the self-publishing on my own, you know, for example, a major mistake I had at one point, I think I only did eBooks because it was too hard, to do the print books.

And that was a major opportunity lost people, at least in my industry, really liked the physical book. And there's just, you know, I see the physical book sells way more for me than ever. So like, I was just missing a lot of leads. I was missing a lot of things when I was doing the DIY self-publishing and by, you know, now I have it with scribe. We did the paperback, we did the hardcover, we did the ebook, we did the audio book and I'm seeing audio book sales go up. I had never thought someone would do that.

I had never thought someone would listen to an audio book of an SAT prep book. And you know, I actually think that many of those people get more indoctrinated than anyone else because they're hearing my voice for, you know, 18 hours or whatever. And so they're more encouraged by that. And so, you know, it's, it's super interesting to see, like, if you do it at a professional level to the level that, you know, a major publisher would do in the traditional industry, you really do see positive long-term effects on your thought leadership.

Your business, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. Yours, this is a great example of like, yes, the book is profitable on its own and you can earmark that specifically. Yes. People who read the book and buy the book, then, you know, opt into bigger packages and drive more of the core business. But I bet there's also, you sort of talked about this earlier with the meta and how you drive the funnels, like having that book makes your ad spend more efficient. It makes your other channels perform better, which is a thing that a lot of people, I think, don't, really don't really fully appreciate.

Like almost everybody these days has multi-touch attribution and you need to hear about something so many times before you convert, but it's, it's just takes another creative leap to understand that like your meta and Google ads will be performing better because you have a book out there that like shows up with the Google, these search terms, or, you know, as part of your funnel or this, this self-liquidating offer, or it's the fact that they buy your book and then it sits on their desk for a month that like driving impressions, eyeball impressions from inside their house that then drive them to the next level.

Drives them back to your website a month later. That honestly, I think that's actually one of the biggest reasons that I give the book away for free is I think a lot of parents will get that free book offer on meta ads and realize their student never opened that 500 page book. And so they're like, okay, you know, we're going to buy a course now. So it is just sitting there. Yeah. So it's really funny, but no, a hundred percent, you know, the marketing ad spend the row as the on meta specifically, because that's where we've made a lot of money.

Mainly acquire customers has certainly improved and we've been able to scale. And a big reason for that is not only the free book funnel, but all of our other channels are getting those leads input that data input on, okay, who bought the book? Who's getting the book? Who's what leads are coming in there. Let's show them a webinar. Let's show them our black Friday sale. Let's show her X, Y, Z. So like improves the row as of every other campaign you do. Yeah. Yeah. And that flywheel, I mean, every, you know, if you get, if you double, the effectiveness of those ads, like the amount of cash that that frees up to then reinvest in more ads, like it's amazing.

Yeah. And look, we're not saying anything, I think, um, brand new, like everyone knows about free lead magnets. But what I would say is like, when you have a book and it's a good book, like this book was, it took me a ton of work to put together. And, you know, if you put together a really, really, really good book, it's a really, really, really good lead magnet, right? Like, because it's your best material. It's like, you're showing off your absolute best stuff. It's well put together. It looks good.

It reads well, et cetera. That's going to show up well versus like, okay, download this free checklist that took, you know, that AI did in two minutes or whatever. It's like, that's not going to create a great impression for you, your business. And you're probably not going to convert that lead into the, whatever other offers product services you'd like in the future. Yeah. Yeah. That is something I say very, very often is like, there's very little return to writing a crappy book because you're not going to be proud of it.

People aren't going to like it. It's not going to build trust. It's not going to drive conversions. But like, if you invest in writing a great book, it's, it is the equivalent of like, you know, getting a PhD or you have one, um, or like earning a gold medal or something like it is an objectively, it is an objective criteria that changes people's relationship with you, but it has to be that good. And, and, you know, a bunch of the, the decisions that you made in terms of like using your business's brand as the publishing imprint to like elevate the professionalism of it and to like create the sort of scale of, of the business and the professionalism of it.

I think all of that, especially when a lot of your competitors, I'm sure are like digital only kind of like slop products that really like sets you above them. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think it's a great way to compete against, cause you know, there's so many competitors in my industry, but I'm sure every other industry, when you write a really good human, book, people notice people can tell that, you know, this is, this is something different here in people I think are going to crave that human touch more and more.

And the more you can personalize and humanize things, it's actually a great differentiator in increasingly AI competitive markets. Yeah. So this might be tough given the, the amount of unexplainable, untrackable, good things that we we've talked about this book driving, but like, do you have any sense of the ROI of this particular book? Do you have any sense of the ROI of this particular project in terms of marketing spend to return in revenue? It's a great question. You know, I would say it's at least a 10 X at the very minimum, if not more than that, you know, it's hard to, to put, cause everything, the, the reason that I'm hesitating to answer the question is because everything works in concert.

So like, you know, this dollar over here isn't always responsible for this $3 over here. But cause it's like, you know, there's, there's so many things working together at once that it's very hard to, I think this is why attribution is so difficult in the marketing world. You know, you can, you can slice and dice it in different ways, but I would say at the minimum, the amount that we spent on the scribe project has generated a 10 X plus return ever since, if not 20 X, it all depends on how you attribute it, what you're attributing, et cetera.

In terms of like the meta ad spend, I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I mean, we consistently see the read of four X row as, which is really kind of the sweet spot you want to be. I would say for any marketer is you want to be in like a three to four X means like you're not scaling too slowly, not scaling too fast, and you're still scaling profitably. And that's really that sweet spot that I want to be and where we're at now.

Yeah. That's so awesome. Yeah. And, and we're, you know, for context, we're only let me less than two years since publication. Right. So, so this is, you know, if this, this trend line continues and the book continues to sell, like this is just going to keep bearing fruit for you for many, many years, which is really awesome. Yeah. It's, it's been amazing. Like, you know, when I met with you a couple of years ago and I gave you the idea for what I wanted to accomplish in this very short timeframe, it sounded impossible, but your team made it happen.

So I want to thank you and your team for putting the book together in such that short timeframe and then making all of that come to life in such a amazing and professional way. And I think that's, I think that's a really, really good point. I think that's a really good way that we can compete with the Princeton reviews and the Kaplan's and the juggernauts in our space without having to, um, you know, go through a major publisher and still keep, like you said, all that ROI for ourselves. It's been a really, really incredible.

That's awesome. I, I really proud that we got to be a part of that. I think we did our jobs well, but you also put in unbelievable amount of time and effort and hours into making this book what it is. And I think the whole team was like shocked at, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, your work ethic and throughput and all the things that everybody did to like make this timeline and make this thing work. Cause it's no small feat. So I'm really, I'm glad that the return is there.

And I'm so I've been looking forward to this conversation literally for years, knowing that you were going to hit a home run with this thing, that all that hard work was going to pay off and that, you know, we we'd see this, see this moment and still be excited for everything to come. That's awesome. Yeah. I remember how hard I was working. I don't think I've worked that hard again. I think I was writing like 12 hours a day at one point. It was crazy. But I, you know, that's the good thing for authors out there with, when you, once you have a book, once you got things going is like, now I don't work nearly as hard cause I have all the leverage from the book.

So it's like, you know, it's like a one time, not a one time, but you know, it's a few times in your life, depending on how often you want to write a book that you have to work really, really hard for this, like short burst. It's like a marathon. And then once you're done with the marathon, you could kind of relax and eat your pancakes or do whatever, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And seeing, you know, knowing that you can sell, you know, that, that file, that sprint for, you know, months and years to come and, and that it's an accelerant for the whole rest of the business is, is really cool.

I like, I learned a lot from this. I think a lot of authors are going to, and a lot of entrepreneurs are going to see what you did and, uh, and appreciate it and be able to apply a lot of this for themselves. So thank you for, for taking the time and sharing and leading the way, showing us what's possible. Yeah, no, thanks Eric. It's been a pleasure and hope to have another conversation in a couple of years and we'll be, you know, even bigger and better at that time with some, some more results to share.

Yeah. See if we can go another order of magnitude on that ROI. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Exactly. Anything else you would, uh, you, you have top of mind or that you'd recommend or that you'd send someone to go kind of get a closer look at some of the tactics you pull off? Not specifically. I mean, I think if you want to see my free book funnel, you can go to prep expert.com slash free dash book. I think it's a really good model for authors out there to see like how I first capture the lead information, how we first give the free book out.

We just asked for shipping and it works really, really well. You'll see also the order bumps on there and the upsells. So you can see like how we liquidate all the ad spends to get leads for free. So yeah, I would check that specific landing page out because it's been, you know, a seven figure earner for us. Yeah. That's incredible. Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Eric. Appreciate it..