You’re Already in Sales. Being the Authority Just Means Neing Able to Charge 10x More.

For much of my life, I thought wanting to make money made you evil. Or at least shallow. Or at least a person with misaligned priorities.

I got such bizarre and mixed messages from my family about money that it astounds me I can make sense of it at all, even after all the talk therapy and EMDR.

In short, it was a hot mess. And honestly it’s a mess that I never really share about but I think I would here in a future newsletter since for some reason this little Substack group feels like the most supportive “public” space I’ve encountered outside of 12-step rooms.1

Anyway, I went out into the world to become a writer, despite my dad insisting it would never work and I needed to instead get a JDA/MBA.2 While I resented the lack of family support—the articles my grandmother would clip and mail me about how no writers made a living, my dad’s insistence that my goal was ridiculous—at the same time, my dad paid for my college degree in writing and helped me financially when I needed it early on. Also, in retrospect (and with so much more knowledge about their mental and emotional issues), I now see that they were trying to be supportive the best they could. They weren’t doing it to make me feel bad; they thought they were helping.

While I never thought being a writer would make me a millionaire, I didn’t care. I’d learned growing up that money didn’t make you happy and so I went and did my thing.

For a while, it worked. I got paid $50,000 for Party Girl, sold the movie rights for another $20,000, was getting paid $1 a word for the magazine stories I wrote and had a paid gig on a TV show. All together, this made me comfortable.

Then, seemingly overnight, it all changed. My book deals dwindled to almost nothing, publications went from paying me to write to allowing me the opportunity to write for free and movie options were, well, zero dollars. Also, I got replaced by a mannequin on the TV show.

I was in my late 30s and living in New York when I realized I was screwed. What did people like me—people with nothing beyond writing skills—do when there was no way to make a living writing anymore? I thought of Augusten Burroughs, who’d written about working in advertising. So I asked my neighbor’s girlfriend, who worked at an ad agency, for advice. She suggested I apply for an internship at her company.

Looking back, I don’t know how I didn’t break down. But I muddled around. Mostly I worked for intensely abusive men—first at websites and then ghostwriting their books.

That’s when I woke up to the importance of marketing and sales. I met my mentor and took advantage of every opportunity he provided (I still do). And I realized I’d always been in sales: what else could you call trying get a publisher (or the public) to buy my book or a TV show to hire me? I had just been selling myself for pennies. A radical thought occurred to me: what if making money wasn’t evil? What if I could do it and not be like my family—not allow it to make me sick? What if I could enjoy it?

I studied marketing and tried all the things the marketing gurus suggested. I killed myself creating courses and workshops but they tended to attract people who were, well, like my former newsletter subscribers. They complained that my courses were too expensive or that my workshops were bad.3 There were, of course, exceptions and some are still in my orbit. One even writes books for Legacy Launch Pad. (Hi Samantha if you’re reading!)

But still, I was broke.

At the same time, I’d written this New York Times bestselling book for an actor and so people were asking me to write their books. But my ghostwriting experience had been so traumatic that I didn’t feel I had another one in me. I tell this story all the time but one person who continued to insist I should write his book even after I said no is the reason Legacy Launch Pad exists.

Around then, I hired a coach who came highly recommended. She created complicated diagrams to show me that I needed to double down on course creation. So I did that. And then one day I was having coffee with a new friend (someone I met through a friend of someone my mentor had introduced me to; all roads lead back to Joe Polish). I explained my dilemma to him: I was creating courses for assholes and barely making a living.

He said: “Wait a minute…you’re creating courses for people who complain that $500 is too much and tell you that your courses suck while there are grateful people willing to pay you $50,000 to write and publish their book? What are you doing?”

From that moment on, things changed. I focused on getting book publishing clients. And it worked. Without doing any advertising, I attracted one client after another. They were thrilled with the results and recommended us to friends. I built up a team. And the business has continued to grow year after year.

It has not been without struggles. I’ve hired people who deliberately tried to sabotage the business so they could start competing ones. We’ve had clients get abusive, two of whom we had to fire.

But my point is that it’s worked…far better than I could have ever imagined. And it was sitting right in front of me for years.

Maybe that’s the case for you. Maybe you’re selling yourself for pennies when it could be for hundreds or thousands. Maybe you’ve believed that selling, and marketing, and money, is evil. I’m here to tell you it’s not. Marketing combines the same thing I love about writing: words and psychology. If I’ve learned anything in business, it’s these three things:

• It’s far easier to sell an expensive product to fewer people than an inexpensive product to lots of people

• People who buy expensive products want to work with authorities and the best way to showcase your authority is to publish an authority-building book

• We’re all in sales, whether we think we are or not

This was a super long way of getting to my point: I can help you create your authority-building book for FREE! We’ve created the COOLEST tool that allows you to answer a few questions and be presented with three authority-building book ideas just for YOU based on your experience and expertise. My team and I have tested and tested it and the results are ASTOUNDING.

You can check it out here. If it doesn’t inspire you to get started on your authority-building book so you can get paid what you’re worth, I can’t imagine what will.