The 5 Core Beliefs That Make Books Actually Work in 2026

Welcome everybody uh to our call this week. I wanted to to do something this week that I felt was kind of foundational. And I talk about some of these things from time to time, but what I decided to do is take these five kind of core beliefs, what I’ll call our author or my author manifesto. And these are at least the ones that I could kind of think of my five core beliefs about being an author, writing your book in this day and age so that it will be successful.

All right, our author manifesto five core beliefs and this is kind of our these are our pillar beliefs. All right, core belief number one. Writing your book is only the starting line of your writing journey. And I’ll even say completing your book is really only the starting line of your author journey. Most authors treat their finished manuscript, their published book as the finish line. And I’m talking most authors do when truth be told, it is just the beginning of the journey for you. And if you follow along and create a successful book, then it is going to feed and fuel your internal flame to want to write more and more. And guess what’s going to happen as you write more? You’re going to get better. You’re never going to write your greatest content the very first time out. You’re going to get better and better in creating content. And I’ve seen this over and over with authors. They treat the completed book as the finish line. I understand it. I understand the emotional pain of writing a book even with help right I understand how difficult it is and because of the difficulty of it we want it to be the end [laughter] but it’s not the end it is just the beginning even a great book let’s say that you wrote a great book even a great book does not sell itself it requires strategy and an engine a marketing and sales engine to move it yes Amazon is a part of that sales engine, but there’s a lot more strategy that goes into it that we talk about on an ongoing basis. A few years ago, a client came to us, Ted Coleman, who is an agile consultant, and he had written a book. Fortunately, he wrote a book to a narrow niche because he wanted to use this book to kind of plant his flag in the ground of how he believed manufacturing firms, yes, very specific. How he believed manufacturing firms could become more profitable, more successful, manufacture a better product, faster, cheaper, etc., using his brand of agile consulting. So he wrote this book, really narrow space, really small universe, and published the book and it was total crickets. Nothing. No sales, no reviews, nothing going on. Now, for a lot of authors, for a lot of people, it would end right there in disappointment. And all you have to do to prove my statement correct is type in any genre, type in any content into Amazon and then just go look at the books. Just scroll down and look at the number of reviews on the average book. It’s like a graveyard. It’s people who wrote something, they poured their heart into it, they poured their soul into it, they clicked publish, and then it didn’t explode. And so they moved on to something else. What a mistake. And prove it to yourself by simply going to Amazon and checking. And you will see the vast majority of authors, it is a graveyard for them. Well, Ted didn’t want that to happen. And he had made some crucial mistakes. Obviously, just pushing publish and crossing your figures is no strategy. So, he came to us and he said, “Okay, you know, I’ve seen the stuff that you do. Why don’t we go through, we have five kind of core pillars of publishing. I’ll talk about that in a second in one of our other core beliefs. Let’s do that. Let’s relaunch the book and can you make it successful?” And I said, “Absolutely we can. I know we can help you to build some momentum with your book.” So we took him through the the process, helped him with his content, helped him with his search engine optimization, helped him with reviews, did a full launch on the book. Within the first couple of weeks, the book went to number one. Over a period of about 7 months, it remained at number one or at least in the top five during uh those first seven months because of the momentum that it had built up. Now, he was doing some other things to market it as well. It led to multiple opportunities for him. He got a client that paid him $80,000 that found him because of the book. And I I talk about th this story more specifically in other places, so I’m not giving you the the details. And he wrote me this beautiful long testimonial on Facebook, which is somewhere on our our Facebook page. And uh it ended up being about a quarter of a million dollars in revenue to his company just from the launch of the book. And even because of the successful launch of the book, his book was found by a traditional publisher and a traditional publisher wrote him close to a six-f figure check. Not quite six figures, but high five figure check for him to write book number two. All of that because he didn’t give up because when he published it and it didn’t go well, he looked for other avenues for his book to be successful. Writing the book is the starting line. It’s the beginning. It’s the ante, right? I’m not a big gambler. you know, maybe on golf when I play, right? You know, I’ll I’ll bet a few bucks with my friends just for fun. But my understanding is when you sit down in Las Vegas at a poker table, you’ve got to Annie up just to get in the game. Well, that’s what writing your book is. It’s your auntie. You’re just getting in the game. Now, you’ve got to play the game. Now, you’ve got to work the game. So, what are our belief statements around this? Well, number one, 95% of authors are going to stop at the manuscript. So, don’t be them. The successful 5% know that the real work begins after the manuscript is done and completed. Now, somebody’s going to be listening to this going, “Man, I wish I’d have heard this three years ago when I published my book.” It’s not too late. It’s not. If you’re still serving the same audience, and I’ll talk about this more in one of our other core beliefs, but if you’re still serving the same audience and you have content that is published, then just clean that content up. Relaunch that content right back into a brand new audience that doesn’t know you. So, it’s not too late. Core beliefs. 95% of authors will stop at the manuscript. Don’t be like them. Core belief. A finished book. Your finished book is just a paper weight until it’s paired with launch and growth strategies. Okay? We don’t want fancy paper weights. We’re not in this just for ego. And I say just for ego because it is kind of cool to be a best-selling author and there’s ego involved in that. But you can have ego and impact and income if you don’t stop at just the manuscript. Don’t let your hard work just sit on the digital shelf. Finish the book, yes, but results come from what you do afterwards. That’s our core belief number one and what to do with it. Core belief number two, your real profits, especially in the beginning, your real profits with a book come from the niches. Your real profit lives in the niche, not in the broad categories. Trying to appeal to everybody with your ideas is the fastest way to appeal to nobody. And that’s a fundamental marketing principle, which is true in marketing, but it’s true with your book. Owning a narrow, specific category. That’s how you can dominate your genre and attract really high value clients. So, what does that mean? Well, I’m asked this a lot. We do these hot seats and I I started doing these. I’ve done a couple now. And this is a question that has come up in each one of those and it comes up a lot to me. It’s something like, “Hey Rob, I have all these book ideas. I have all these things that I can write about.” I was in uh Los Angeles last week for a conference and I met uh the founder of Comic-Con. I did a a workshop and a breakout session on marketing your message on this very topic, marketing your book. And uh he came up to me right afterwards and he said, “Hey, I wrote a really big check to a company that will go unnamed, six-f figureure check, to have his book, ghostwritten. It never actually got completed, never got done.” And he said, “But Rob, I I have like so many different ideas.” Like he founded Comic-Con. He uh started like an an MMA type organization. He has all of these different ideas. So many people would say something like that. So, here’s my answer to you with all of these different ideas. Take your absolute best client avatar. Like, think about who is my best client, the one that I serve, they love me, I make the most money, I make the most impact in their life. Think about the magic that brought them to you. And write about that. Why can you help that specific client? Now, somebody’s gonna say, “Rob, I I wanna I want to branch out. I want to do more.” I understand that. If you’re still serving that avatar, that really specific narrow niche, and you’re writing your first book, start there. Just start there, please, because that’s going to give you the absolute most best, is that even English? Most best opportunity to make money with your book. It’s going to give you the best shot at it. And if you make money with your book, you’re going to get excited. If you start serving people and you’re making an impact in people’s lives, you’re going to get excited. And you’re going to then have an opportunity to do what? Broaden out. You can then branch out. Nothing wrong with that. But don’t start there. Start as narrow as possible. Financial advisors will come to me and you know, Rob, I want to I want to write about my success principles. Okay. How much are you paid on a monthly basis to teach your success principles in your financial marketing company or your financial services company? Nothing. Zero. No one came to you for your success principles. They came to you for your magic, whatever your magic is regarding your financial advice. We did a book a couple years ago. A client came to us, Colin Plume of Noble Gold, and he has a very large precious metals company and he believed really strongly that silver was like going to blow up. This is two years ago. And so he wrote a book called Silver is the New Oil. And we helped him with that book. We published it. We launched it. The book was massively successful. By the way, what a amazing call, right? Cuz I mean, silver, what did it do? Like 6x or something in the last year. Of course, it dropped back down, but it’s still like 4x higher than it was even just 6 months ago. So, silver’s quadrupled over that period of time. Guess what? He marked himself and his company as the absolute experts in the precious metal space. He made the call. Gutsy call. Narrow. I mean, talk about a narrow book. Silver is the new oil. The whole book on silver. What a gutsy call that absolutely marked him and his company as the as the experts. And as you might imagine, things have like gone through the roof for him. Now, he can broaden out from there. He can do more. He can write more about the precious metals or commodities space. Next, he could broaden out into financial services. You can even go to success principles later on down the road because as you build your audience and as you build your market and as you’re making money and as you’re making an impact, there’s so much more you can do. But don’t start there. Start in the niche. Start with the specifics. Broads get lost. And I don’t want your book to get lost. I want your book to own your space. Own your category. You don’t need a million readers on your first book. You need the right thousand, the right 10,000. You can have a million dollar revenue from your book with the right thousand people reading your book. That’s it. If you think that way, and I I know you want more than that. I get it. I know you do. But be patient. Start in the niches because that’s where the real opportunity is for yourself and for your book. That’s core belief number two. Core belief number three has to do specifically with Amazon. And that is that your book sales page, call it your Amazon listing, is a landing page. It is a strategic landing page. It is not a hail Mary. It is not a cross my fingers and hope somebody buys my book. Okay? When you go to buy supplements online, if you ever do that or anything online, let me tell you something. When you go to the page to buy that thing online, you are going to something that is absolutely every color, every place the button is, every testimonial on that page has been tested and split tested to ensure the highest percentage of people will buy that supplement or will buy that product. Do you know that whatever the product is, that page online has been tested and split tested and narrowed in to get the absolute most positive response from the highest number of people. And with Amazon, we just throw our book up there and cross our fingers and hope it goes well. You’re competing against 17 million other books. Most authors ignore, you know, what I would call the foundational five. Your cover, so important. Your title, massively important along with your cover. having a search engine optimized description and keywords, having Amazon A+ content, which is newer, and having great reviews on your book, which I know are hard. All of these things take work and effort and energy to do well. It’s why one of the reasons we exist, cuz we’re good at doing these things. If your Amazon page doesn’t just pop, look awesome, professional, then no amount of people going to it will save it. Eventually, Amazon will say, you know, we don’t have a good click-through rate. We don’t have a good buy rate on this page. You know, they check all of that stuff. They know all of those numbers, all of those metrics. I launched my book, Write with AI, behind me, about 18 months ago, maybe even a little longer ago than that. That book, Write with AI, has been a top five bestseller in its categories every single week now for longer than I can count. 80 weeks in a row, something like that. And I just checked before I came on this today and it’s the number two bestseller in its category. And this is with no outside marketing for me whatsoever. Zero. I don’t run Amazon ads. I’m not running Facebook ads. This none. Zero. So somebody’s going to hear us go, “Well, Rob, that’s a that’s a great category, right? I mean, writing with AI, that’s a killer category you have there. So of course you’re going to get away.” Well, let me tell you, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books on writing with AI. Hundreds. In fact, there are dozens with the exact title, Write With AI, as my book. Why does my book continue to be in the top five bestsellers every single week? Well, because I’ve checked off all of the boxes that are necessary. Yes, it’s a wave and I’m riding the wave 100%. I get that, which is cool to do. But all those other people that are trying to ride the wave that actually have their book titled the exact same title as my book, they aren’t experiencing any success with theirs. Why? Because they didn’t build the foundation properly in the beginning and they threw it up there hoping that the wave, the number of visitors, the number of people interested would actually help them to overcome any deficiencies in their publishing. It doesn’t work that way. You need to correct the deficiencies in your publishing. You need to have a rockolid cover and title, description, keywords, A+ content, reviews, all of those things. And that’s before we do a launch on the book and send any traffic to it. So, just understand your Amazon listing is something that Amazon is looking at. They split test it. It’s it’s a strategy to them. It’s not a just push the the publish button and hope Amazon sends you traffic. That’s not enough. Okay, that’s core belief number three. An important important core belief. All right, number four. Some of you going to love this, some of you not. Number four. Core belief number four. Traditional publishing is a failure for those without an audience. Traditional publishing is a failure for those that are audienceless. What do I mean by that? Well, traditional publishers don’t build your platform for you. They harvest from your platform. When a traditional publisher deems you worthy to work with them, what they’re really deeming worthy is not your idea. It’s not even your writing because in many cases they don’t even have other than maybe a 50page like proposal. what they’re deeming worthy is that you have an audience that they can sell their book to, that they’re insured you will sell your book to. If you don’t have that audience, then you’re wasting your time trying to get a traditional publishing deal. Now, here’s the cool thing. Since Amazon, and I’m talking 20 years now at this point, 15 years at least, many successful authors that already have a built-in platform have moved away from traditional publishers. big ones that you know Seth Goden, you know who Seth Goden is, author of a dozen national international bestsellers, millions of copies sold, author of Purple Cow. He moved away from traditional publishers almost 15 years ago. Why? Because he knew they did nothing for his message. They did nothing to sell more books for him. Tim Ferrris, author of the 4-Hour Work Week, most of us know who he is, moved away from traditional publishing the same way. Why? because these guys have an audience already. Stop waiting for traditional publishers to pick you. You don’t need them to pick you. Use your book to build your audience. That’s what I’ve done over the last 15 plus years. Use your book to build your platform and they’ll come after you, which I hope you’ll say no to, unless they want to write you a really big fat check. But in most cases, you know, there’s a reason they have their names at the top of really big buildings. I mean, they’re they’re making good decisions. And believe me, you’re going to be better off keeping the majority of your royalties and profits and rights, big one, and rights, rather than selling that off to a traditional publisher. A traditional publisher pays you initially upfront and advance and advance. So, you will sell your book to your audience. So, you will sell your book to your list. They’re not putting you in front of a brand new audience. Why give them control? It’s not worth it. Traditional publishing is a myth. Don’t believe that lie. It’s unnecessary. Core belief number five. And finally, and this I referenced earlier, and that is every book deserves a second chance. Every book deserves a second chance. A failed launch or publishing unsuccessfully or or you’ve heard me say the things that I’ve said today. You’re like, “Oh crap, dog gone it. I wish I’d have known this.” It’s okay. Like, you can still do something about it. It’s not a death sentence. You can relaunch your book. You can fix the mistakes. you can put a new coat of paint on it. If you serve the same audience today that you did when you wrote your book, then why wouldn’t you correct whatever is wrong with it and relaunch your book? I don’t talk about this very much. Maybe I should, but I don’t think it’s that necessary. But I think it is a good example for this. But my book, Publish, Promote Profit, which hit the Wall Street Journal USA Today bestseller list and has sold, I don’t know, 75 to 100,000 copies. That book actually hit the Wall Street Journal list one year after I originally published it. One year. How did that happen? I relaunched it. I mean, it did really well in the beginning, but it didn’t hit any of the big list. I think it was the number one business book on Amazon at the time, but I wanted to hit some big list. I wanted like a big splash. I wanted Wall Street Journal. I wanted USA Today. I wanted those things. I wanted top five Barnes & Noble, which it did. And so I relaunched it one full year after I originally published it. And guess what? I hit all those things. I had sold I don’t know maybe 10 maybe 10 to 15,000 copies through my own funnel at that time because I was using like I do today. I have my bookfunnel and I also sell on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and everywhere else. That’s what I recommend most people. Maybe not everybody, but most people. And so I had a list of I don’t know 10,000 15,000 people that actually spent money with me to get a copy of it. So I said, “Hey, I’ll do something special for you if you go ahead and buy another copy of it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or whatever.” And so I did a lot more than that. But that was one of the elements to the launch. So I already had this platform in place. I relaunched the book. The book hit all those big lists and continued on doing exceptionally well. You can do that. And why wouldn’t you? I continue to market, publish, promote, profit today. Today, that book is for sale with paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram today, 7 years after I originally published it. And it’s basically the same. Why? Because I still serve that client. I still serve you. So, if you’re in the same business as you were in when you originally wrote your book, clean it up. Change the cover, fix the description, make it search engine optimized, get a bunch of reviews on it, send a bunch more traffic to it, or work with a company that can actually help you to do all of those things like many of you are. Just because your your book didn’t sell initially, doesn’t mean it’s bad. Maybe it is, and you need to have it looked at, but it doesn’t mean that it is. It just might mean that you didn’t do what you needed to do to give it an opportunity to sell, to get it in front of the right audience, and it’s invisible. And now what we have to do is we have to make it visible. Every book deserves a second chance. So what are the five? I’ll give them to you again. Five core beliefs. Writing your book is only the starting line. Remember that. Really important. Number two, your real impact and income lives in the niches, not the broad. I don’t mind you going broad. Do it later. Do it with book three, book four, book five. Number three, your Amazon page, your Amazon listing is strategic. It’s a landing page. It is not a push the button and hope Amazon solves all my problems. Doesn’t work that way. Number four, traditional publishing unnecessary for you. It’s a myth. People without audiences are crossing their fingers hoping that a traditional publisher is going to solve all their problems. They never will. It’ll be a waste of time for you. The most successful authors, even today in non-fiction, move away from traditional to self-publishing because they have the thing that traditional publishers don’t have, and that’s an audience. You don’t need them. Number five, and lastly, every book deserves a second chance. Let’s make sure that we give your book the second chance that it deserves. And by the way, if your book is 85% good, meaning that maybe in 5 years since you originally published your book, some things have changed. Great. Then write a second edition. You don’t have to change the entire book. Add a new chapter. Make some adjustments to it. It can be a second edition book on Amazon with the changes that you’ve created. Now you’ll have two books up there that are competing.

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