After graduating from Iowa State University with a degree in mechanical engineering, Paul Shirley embarked on a nine-year professional basketball career that included stops on three NBA teams, five teams in Europe, and several minor league outfits, some of which even paid him on time.
While playing for the Phoenix Suns, Paul started a blog that led to a book deal with Random House. That book, Can I Keep My Jersey?, was released to wide acclaim in 2007. Paul has since written for Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, ESPN.com and for FlipCollective.com, a website he started.
Paul lives in Los Angeles, where he runs a co-writing space called Writers Blok. His second book, Stories I Tell I Dates, was released in 2017 and developed into a podcast of the same name in 2018.
But more relevantly than any of that, he was the first person I've ever interviewed LIVE—yes, this episode was recorded in front of a live audience in Los Angeles. Considering the fact that it's nearly impossible to get anyone in LA to go anywhere at rush hour, I was blown away that people showed up to listen to two authors talk about book launches on a Friday night.
If you're looking for an incredibly funny episode, this is it. YES, a show about book launches can not only gather a crowd on a Friday night in LA but also make people laugh.
If you listened to the episode, you know that I promised you a deal at Paul's "writing studio" Writers Blok. All you have to do to get 30% off membership for up to 12 months is go to the Writers Blok site, purchase a membership and use LAUNCHPAD as a coupon code.
WANT MY FREE GUIDE TO WRITING A MEMOIR? GO TO WWW.MEMOIRDOWNLOAD.COM.
Originally from Dublin Ireland, David Nihill is the founder of FunnyBizz Conference, bestselling author of Do You Talk Funny?, winner of San Francisco International Comedy Competition, runner up in the Moth’s largest US Grandslam storytelling competition and the first-ever Irishman to have a special on Dry Bar Comedy. His work has been featured in Inc, The Huffington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, Lifehacker, The Irish Times, TED, The Irish Independent, Today FM, and on TV3.
He and I met through friends a few years ago and I was immediately impressed not only with his barely indecipherable accent but also with how much knowledge he possessed about marketing, books and how to make them successful. This impression was only solidified when, a few days later, he sent me an email packed with all the strategies he'd used to make his book so successful that he was able to then sell it to a major publisher.
In this episode, we go through all those ideas and more. If you listened to the episode, you know that I promised I would give you the email he sent out to his launch team, which you are welcome to copy and steal (he will never know, unless he's reading this, in which case I say hi David!) You can get it by grabbing the show notes by going to https://www.launchpadpub.com/blog/david
WANT TO WRITE YOUR OWN MEMOIR? GRAB MY CHEAT SHEET BY GOING TO https://www.launchpadpub.com/memoir-download.
Re Perez is a seasoned Brand Strategist, International Speaker, Author and CEO of Branding For The People.
He's also someone I met last year and adored from the get go.
As the founder of a leading branding agency that builds and manages brands for funded startups, high-growth entrepreneurs, Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies, and expanding small to midsize businesses around the globe, Re's shared his insights at numerous conferences.
And with his book, Your Brand Should Be Gay (Even If You're Not), he's sharing them with you.
He also shares, in this interview, the strategy he used to increase pre-orders—namely offering a series of bonuses to anyone who ordered ahead of time. His strategy—offering consulting calls with him and his team to those who ordered multiple copies—resulted in the book launching to #1 immediately.
WANT TO WRITE A MEMOIR?? DOWNLOAD MY FREE GUIDE TO HOW TO DO IT HERE>>>https://www.launchpadpub.com/memoir-download
Dan Peres was editor in chief of Details for fifteen years, starting in 2000, when the title relaunched under his leadership. During his tenure, the magazine won many awards, including two National Magazine Awards. Before taking the editorship of Details, Dan spent nine years at W magazine, overseeing bureaus in Paris, London, and Milan. While in college, he worked as a copy boy at the New York Times and later as a research assistant at Esquire. He is the author of Details Men’s Style Manual. He lives in New York and has three sons.
He's also someone I've known since he first started at Details. As a freelance writer for the magazine (who also happened to worship every word published in it). I grew accustomed to allowing my month's rent to be determined by Dan's final decisions (if a magazine decided to kill your story because the editor decided the topic was no longer appealing, that meant suddenly getting paid 10% of what you'd signed up for). It's therefore fascinating to witness him joining the other side—learning what it's like to be at the mercy of an editor's whims and having to hustle to get people to care about your book.
In this conversation, we cover the whole transition...and also get into maybe WHY some of the Details decision-making was so impossible to predict.
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