For Entrepreneurs, Self-Publishing Is The Way To Go
British entrepreneur Chris Ducker has experienced the power of a book to grow his business not once, but twice.
His first book, Virtual Freedom: How to Work with Virtual Staff to Buy More Time, Become More Productive, and Build Your Dream Business, was published in 2014 and continues to sell well today.
Four years later, Chris wrote and self-published Rise Of The Edupreneur: The Definitive Guide to Becoming the Go-To Leader in Your Industry and Building a Future-Proof Business.
Chris is a serial entrepreneur and owns and operates several businesses, including the personal brand education company Youpreneur.com. He employees more than 350 full-time employees. Nowadays he spends most of his time coaching and mentoring successful entrepreneurs, as well as investing in and advising startup companies.
TOP TAKEAWAY: BE STRATEGIC ABOUT USING YOUR BOOK TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS
Chris tells Published Author show host Josh Steimle that when Virtual Freedom was published, he didn’t want to be tacky or overly obvious in promoting his business Virtual Staff Finder. “I did want to be strategic, but, but I didn't want to be seen to be strategic, if that makes sense,” says Chris.
In the approximately 280 or so pages in the book, Virtual Staff Finder is mentioned only four or five times.
“But this I know for sure is the big deal closer: At the back of the book, we had a resources section. And at the beginning of the book, I said, ‘You're going to see lots and lots of resources mentioned throughout the pages of this book. To save you time skimming back through all of the pages to find them, when you're done reading it, I put them all at the back in a nice convenient list for you, along with website addresses what it's for, etc’.”
At the beginning of the Virtual Freedom’s resource section a note appeared referencing a companion guide to the book, downloadable for free at Virtual Staff Finder’s website.
Placing the guide on his website meant that thousands of people signed up for it, and in doing so happily submitted their email address to Virtual Freedom.
Chris says his strategy “worked brilliantly. There are 1000s and 1000s of people who have opted in for the companion guide over the last six years. And many, many of them have converted to paying clients.”
He says Virtual Freedom has been so successful because it’s: “A no brainer for people to pick that book up, learn what they needed to do and then say: ‘I can either carry on doing what I'm already doing and being overwhelmed and not really getting anywhere. Or I can follow the advice in this book, and go out and find a VA and build my virtual team, or option C is, I can use the author's company to help me do it’.”
With this approach, Chris gathered tons of new clients and about three or four months after that book came out, he literally doubled the size of the team working at Virtual Freedom.
SELF-PUBLISHING IS THE WAY TO GO
Chris is a strong advocate of self-publishing, for a number of reasons. First of all, by self-publishing, an entrepreneur retains the rights to their book. Next, speed. With traditional publishing, it can take up to two years for a book to be released - a very long time-frame in the world of an entrepreneur.
USE A DEVELOPMENTAL EDITOR
Regardless of which route an entrepreneur selects, Chris says that: “My big piece of advice, whether you go traditional or you self-publish, is that you must hire a developmental editor to work with you on the book.
“This isn't an editor who will check for spelling and punctuation and grammar, and all that stuff. Yeah, you should definitely get somebody to look over that side of things as well,” he explains. “This is a developmental editor, someone who can read the book, chapter by chapter, and help you develop a better book.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle
Welcome to the Published Author Podcast where we help entrepreneurs learn how to write a book and leverage it to grow their business and make an impact. I'm your host, Josh Stiemle. Today, our guest is Chris Ducker. Chris is a serial entrepreneur and author of the best selling books virtual freedom and rise of the edupreneur. Based in Cambridge, England, he owns and operates several businesses, including the personal brand education company, youpreneur.com. And together his businesses house or hire or employ over 350 full time employees. And nowadays, he spends most of his time coaching and mentoring successful entrepreneurs as well as investing in and advising startup companies. Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Ducker
Thanks for having me, man. It's good to talk with you.
Josh Steimle
Yep. So this is not the first time that Chris and I have talked to each other. But the last time we talked, he was in the Philippines and I was in China. Now we're a little bit closer together. He's in Cambridge, England, and I'm just outside of Cambridge, US in Massachusetts. So we're getting closer and closer together here. And one of these days we'll actually meet in person.
Chris Ducker
Even if it's just by city name, what we're there. We're pretty close to each other already.
Josh Steimle
Right. We just need one of those Star Trek, transportation devices, we could meet him at night,
Chris Ducker
Right out the gate. We're going geeky. I love it.
Josh Steimle
All right. So Chris, for those of our audience who don't know who you are, and don't know your history, tell us a little bit about where you grew up and where you're from, and how you got to be an entrepreneur. What's your entrepreneurial journey? Yeah, man. Well, yeah, I was born and raised in, in London, there in England, Wimbledon to be precise, about 10 minutes away from centre court was where I was bore into the world as my, my Irish mother would have told me. And, you know, I guess I, you know, looking back on it, I guess I started to have those entrepreneurial tendencies probably around my mid teens. We over in the United States, you call them garage sales, we call them car boot sales here in the UK. And we used to do it. So the difference between the two, and for some of your, your listeners that are in the United States, this may or may not be a totally brilliant piece of advice, or information, or it could be completely worthless, but I'll give it up anyway. So in the US, when you do a garage sale, as you guys call them, you physically walk from house to house fundamentally, and you go into people's garages and their driveways and you buy stuff that they don't want anymore. Here, we don't really do the garage thing. We call them garage. So which is way worse sounding than the garage that you that you utilize. But garages is here in the EU in the UK, and not really that widespread. And so what we do is we we basically pack everything in the back of a car. And we head to like a playing field or community center or you know, something like that. And everybody kind of uses those, you know, you get those foldable tables that you use when you're kind of putting wallpaper up on your wall? So you get one of those tables out the back of your car, you put all your junk on there, and people come to you. And there's usually a couple of 100 people on this playing field. And that was kind of like my first. And I'm trying to set the scene here. My first kind of foray, I guess, into entrepreneurship and particularly selling and negotiating, which is a big part of being an entrepreneur. And so yeah, you know, and the thing was, we never had an issue selling stuff at all, like I could sell ice cubes to a snowman. I'm not worried about that. But what my dad didn't like, because I used to go with my father, I would take the profits that we made, and then I would go around buying other stuff. And negotiating to get cheaper prices from other people around, bring that stuff back, put a little sticker on it and sell it for more profit. So he he always wanted to pack up early and head back and watch the football on TV. But I was all about making that money, baby. So that was really kind of like the first start. I think. This was in the days before eBay. So you are literally selling this face to face.
Chris Ducker
Pretty much. Yeah, it was all face to face. And I'll never forget one day this is God's honest truth story. I was walking around and I picked up this green ceramic elephant. I'm in the junk that some people have in their homes, right and I negotiated the price down for this little ceramic elephant I think was like one pound 50 or something, just a couple a couple of bucks. And I brought it back to our store and and I marked it up at like three pounds 50 or whatever it was about an hour later this gentleman strolls by and buys it. And as he's leaving, she says my wife will be so happy. She's over there on our store and she's got one of these. So now we'll have a pair and we can take them off. I was like, I've literally just sold this thing back to this guy. I bet it's so good. It's such a great story. So yeah, you know, that's, that was always kind of like, I guess the beginning more than anything else. And as you go through, you know, the teens and you know, I quit college, about six months in, went into sales and marketing full time and a publishing company only ever had three jobs in my life. And you know, fast forward to your late 20s. Being in sales and marketing for over a decade opened up my own company. And the rest is a little bit of entrepreneurial history, as they say.
Josh Steimle
So what was your first company that you started your first legit company?
Chris Ducker
Yeah, well, it's still it's still up and running to this day. It's a company called Live to Sell. It's a call center facility that's based over over there in the Philippines. We have about 330 employees full time around the clock. And we are fundamentally a B2B, customer service and appointment setting company. That's what we do for businesses, predominantly, actually in the US in the UK. And so we started that company with 15 employees. In 2004. I think it was. And here we are. Now all these years later, we had our best year, ever. Last year this year been a little tough, because of has
Josh Steimle
It has been for many people.
Chris Ducker
Yeah, I mean, we're you know, don't get me wrong, you know, we're not, we're not kind of tiptoeing along bankruptcy or anything like that. Not far from it. But I think it's because of the fit, because we've been around so long. And because we were very smart with the investments that we made from a business perspective, we've got no debt, no creditors, all that sort of stuff, like we've done well to get through the year without any major issues, and still make some money. I know there are a lot of people in the same game, who have had to close their doors, because they just haven't, you know, haven't set things up as well as us. But that comes from experience as well, if we'd have opened the doors five years ago, we probably would have would have had to close ours this year as well, because it just it comes down to experience. So yeah, that's the big one. And then we have Virtual Staff Finder, which is the VA recruiting company, where we help entrepreneurs fundamentally find virtual assistants to work with them. That's been up and running for most 11 years now. And then there's a Youpreneur and everything that kind of, you know, personifies that brand with our live conference, coaching programs, the books and you know, everything else that we do.
Josh Steimle
So you lived in the Philippines for a while you just recently moved back to Europe, how long were you there in the Philippines?
Chris Ducker
Almost 18 years. Oh, yeah, almost a long time, most of my adult life over there, originally went out on a contract to work with one of the international banks kind of close that contract up and open up my own firm. And the rest, like I say, is very much history to certain degree. That being said, we're happy to be back in the UK. And, you know, I met my wife in the Philippines. So this is very new to her, although we've been back now a couple years, she's more than settled now. But you know, we've we've got our kids here, our businesses are so up and running in the Philippines, they've done great, we still go back regularly. But you know, this is where we want it to be. This is where we want it to be for the kids and for ourselves as well. So we're very happy to be back where we are on board a beautiful home in the English countryside. And I now get to sip English tea on a regular basis and don't have to have it imported.
Josh Steimle
How has living overseas changed you or affected your career as an entrepreneur? I know that for me living I've lived in Brazil and Asia and getting that perspective on a different culture has really changed me as a person, it's changed me as an author as an entrepreneur, how have you seen that affect you and help you?
Chris Ducker
I think well, ever since I got involved in with sales and marketing my career in my late teens, early 20s, I was always doing business on a quote unquote, international setting. And so I was thrown in the deep end very much. So by selling classified ad space into Europe, that was my first role. And so time zones, international dialing codes, all these things probably much like you anybody that's spent any amount of time working outside of their native country. These things are very simple, very easy currencies, everything I can, you know, pretty much round things up very easily. So, I was already kind of adapt to a certain degree to working internationally. But when you actually live, and particularly for that period of time, yes, it will change you for sure. I lost a lot of my very stern sort of British sort of mannerisms and all the rest of it became a little bit more transatlantic in the way that I use my slang and things like particularly due to the fact that we have so many clients in the United States, so many coaching clients over there. I travel there, I speak there very regularly. So, yeah, I often joke to say that, you know, I'm the most, unBritish Brit that you'll ever meet, probably. But I am a very proud Brit. And I've never lost that. And I think that comes through in my writing, as an author, in my style, as an entrepreneur and as a leader. And I think, overall, it's it's opened up a lot of doors. I mean, you never know what would have happened if I hadn't done it. But I'm happy that I spent the time overseas, I believe it as made me you know, the person I am today.
Josh Steimle
Likewise, for me, I think it's a great experience. I think everybody should do it. So what was the point at which you decided to become an author? You were running this business? And then you said, I'm going to write a book? What was that?
Chris Ducker
Well, I've always been a big reader. Anyway. And I think that, you know, as time has gone by, I've, I've always, I've always had always had a book, you know, when I was living in the UK, in Wimbledon, having to travel up to you know, Pimlico, which is kind of four or five stops on the underground. You always had a book with you. I mean, the mobile phones weren't a thing back in those days, you couldn't kind of just stare at a screen for your commute to work. So I was always reading books, and I've always had books around me. And to this day, I prefer real books. I listen to audiobooks every now and then. I never read ebooks because I don't like screens as a whole. So I'll never read a book on a screen ever. But I just there's something about putting what you know, particularly from a nonfiction perspective, right? So, you know, we're talking about being a published entrepreneurial author. There's something about putting that expertise into one volume that somebody can pick up, and almost springboard their own journey, based on what you're teaching them that a blog post, we'll never do a podcast we'll never do a video will never do. It has to be the book. And so I had started podcasting and blogging in January of 2010. And late 2012, I got an email from a publisher based out of Dallas, Texas, and they were like, We love your content on outsourcing and VAs as we, you know that there's a big hole, there's a big gap in the market for a book on the subject. Tim Ferriss lay down the tracks with the four hour workweek and the whole outsourcing life section in that book, we've scoured the internet, you've come up on more than one occasions when it comes to this topic. Will you write a book for us? we'll publish it for you. In the end, I didn't go with that publisher.
Josh Steimle
But it's pretty nice, though. When the publisher comes to you.
Chris Ducker
Oh, yeah. And if I'm to be honest, did I ever think of myself? How would I like to write a book someday? Yes, of course, I thought about it. As a lover of books. You always I mean, I think everybody does genuinely right? Particularly again, in non fiction, definitely, well, you've got something to share, whether it be your experiences, your expertise, your stories, you know, whatever it is, right. And so I always fancied doing it. Then the opportunity came along, I found a great agent who is based in New York, we put together like a 12 page proposal. We wrote the first chapter of the book, we shipped it to 16 publishers around the United States, and we got four offers, which is three more than the four hour workweek got, Tim, if you're listening. I just want to put it out there. And, and I actually ended up going with the second best offer in regards to advance. And that was because I really felt like these guys got me and what the title was all about. And so Virtual Freedom came out in April of 2014. And has done incredible; it is brought so much business my way. I can't even put $1 amount on it. Josh, if I had to if I had to make a guess, over the six years since it's been published, how much money it's made me. I would say close to a million dollars, probably.
Josh Steimle
We're not talking about book sales here. We're talking about the benefit here business. Right,
Chris Ducker
Exactly. Now I've sold. That book has sold probably close to about 100,000 copies across the three different mediums that it's in meaning paperback, audiobook, Kindle, right. So we've sold a ton of books, I've made some good money on it. Don't get me wrong. Well over 1005 star reviews on Amazon and it continues to sell every quarter I get a check and I'm like, wow, it's it's crazy, right? But it's the business. It's come my way because obviously I own a VA business as well. It was a no brainer for people to pick that book up, learn what they needed to do and then say, Well, I can either carry on doing what I'm already doing and being overwhelmed and not really getting anywhere, that's not much of an option. Or I can follow the advice in this book, and go out and find a VA and build my virtual team, or Option C is, I can use the author's company to help me do it. And so we've got a ton, I had to double our team, about three or four months after that book came out, literally doubled the number of the team working on that business, because we had so much business come in from it. And so it's it's been an incredible, incredible addition to our business with the VA side of things. And then
Josh Steimle
Real quick before before you go on getting really tactical and practical hair. How did you drive people from the book to your business? Did you have a specific set of pages or pitch within the book that you said, Hey, I run a business doing this, you can hire my business come here to this URL? Like how exactly did you move those people from the book to being? That's?
Chris Ducker
That's a really, really good question. And here's the thing. I didn't want to be pushy or tacky about it. I did want to be strategic, but, but I didn't want to be seen to be strategic, if that makes sense, right. And so I think in all of the 280, or something pages in the book, I think we mentioned the company like four times, five times, something like that. And it was just very kind of in a very kind of nonchalant, sort of backhanded manner, where we would just kind of drop it in, in conversation and a paragraph or something. But, and this, I know for sure is the big deal closer. At the back of the book, we had a resources section. And we said, you know, all the things. In fact, actually, at the beginning of the book, I said, you're going to see lots and lots of resources mentioned throughout the pages of this book. To save you time skimming back through all of the pages to find them, when you're done reading it, I put them all at the back in a nice convenient list for you, along with website addresses what it's for, etc, etc. So you know, if you ever need resources, just go to the back of the book, don't try finding it in one of the almost 300 pages. So right at the back, there's that resource section. And it right at the beginning of that resource section, it is, hey, you've just read virtual freedom. Thank you so much. I hope the book has helped you. If you want a little more help, if you want some more practical exercises and examples that you can work on and learn from, then we actually have a companion guide to the book that you can download for free, all you need to do is go to this URL, and go ahead and get it there two things happen. Number one, we were genuinely providing massive amounts of additional value there huge amounts of value, I think there was like a 30 page document or something with they could print it out and fill it all out. And there was stuff from within the book that they had to kind of go through in a very kind of structured manner. And then there was extra stuff that wasn't in the book as well. So everybody loved it. But secondly, to get the book, we needed their email address. Now, obviously, when somebody buys your book on Amazon, Amazon doesn't tell you their email address, right? And they probably never will. So we needed a way to be able to say, hey, if you've got the book, that's great, but how can we continue to serve these people? And more importantly, as a business, how can we make money out of it. And so we created that companion guide. And it's worked brilliantly, there are 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of people who have opted in for it over the last six years, it's just come out. And you know, many, many of them have converted to paying clients.
Josh Steimle
I love this. And I want to emphasize this point that you could have just put a URL in there and said, Hey, I run a company that does this, if you're interested, go to this link. But instead, what you did is you said I've got more for you, if you want it come and get it here. And then they had to give the email address. And then you've got you've got them on your list.
Chris Ducker
Don't get me wrong. It's not as if we didn't mention the company in that resource section as well. We did along with other viable options for them to be able to help or find help with getting their VA s on board. So you know it we weren't shining, you know, a tiny little spotlight on it singularly, we were saying hey, there's a whole bunch of different options. This is one of them. Plus here are some others. But yeah, it was without a doubt the companion guide has been the big game changer on that side of things.
Josh Steimle
Awesome. Now before we go on, so I want to talk about your next book as well and what you're doing now but you've done a lot of public speaking were you doing public speaking before you published Virtual Freedom or did the book mostly come first and then lead to the speaking that you did?
Chris Ducker
No, I was speaking. I can't remember the exact number of gigs that I had. The next couple of years, I think my first speaking gig within kind of the online business industry was probably very late in 2011. The book came out, like I said, April 2014. So certainly had, you know, probably at that point, I would have thought maybe a dozen or so gigs under my belt within the industry as a whole. But when the book came out, the kind of the big thing that I did, I wanted to do some signings, and because it was traditionally published, the second book is self-published, we can get into that. But because it was traditionally published, I knew that I could get it into bookstores. And I knew that I needed to do that, ultimately, in the first six months, like, you know, if I was to get the option to be able to do some signings and things like that, and predominantly in the United States. So basically, what we did is we did, I think I did like a 10 gig speaking tour of and it funnily enough, it ended up starting off in Sydney, Australia, when Darren Rouse booked me at the Problogger event, which wasn't on the list to begin with. So we ended up going from Philippines to Sydney, to LA, Vegas, Philadelphia, New York. I mean, it was crazy. I bounced around like a madman for about six weeks, and ended up doing a whole bunch of, you know, traditional media and radios and all that kind of stuff about it as well. But really, it was it was so that I could do some signings and do some additional gigs, specifically on the book. And for sure, I mean, you know, I was able to work into my speaker riders, my contracts, that everybody in the audience as a keynote speaker, was going to get a copy of the book. So then I sold, you know, 1000 bulk copies here. 2000 here, 500, there kind of thing. And it certainly helped shift a whole bunch of books in that first year for sure.
Josh Steimle
After you wrote that book, Virtual Freedom, did you see an uptick in the number of speaking engagements that people were reaching out for? I mean, what did that do for you in terms of your speaking career?
Chris Ducker
I saw what I say what I didn't see really an uptick in terms of volume of, of invites, but what I did see was an uptick in quality of the events, which I'm all about, if anybody knows me, I'd rather have quality over quantity any day of the week. And so you get paid more upfront, you get about audience, you sell more books, you close more business, and so on, and so on, and so on. So, yeah, maybe not a lot of volume uptake, but definitely quality for sure. I think just being a published author, and getting your book out there, even if you're self publishing, it ultimately, is like, it ends up being like a $20 business card, literally. And it's easily probably one of the one of the easiest, and one of the fastest ways, especially if you're self-publishing, to ultimately position yourself as an expert within your niche. And I think that's what a lot of people don't actually get, they don't see it, they don't understand it. They see all the work involved in getting the book together and getting it out there. And they think, oh, I've got to sell the book. Now. Yeah, you do need to sell the book. But also, if you self-publish it particularly you can get books printed for practically nothing. And you can use them as lead generation tools for you to be able to sign more B2B, B2C, coaching clients, whatever it might be. And so there's there's massive amounts of opportunity in not just book sales, but you know, everything that happens after that book is published as well.
Josh Steimle
Perfect. So take us to where you started thinking about your next book, what was the inspiration for that? What was the key motivation?
Chris Ducker
That that was probably actually more strategic than the first one, if I'm to be honest. So around probably late 2014, after the first book had come out, wrapping up that year, I came up with the term youpreneur. For the first time, I had been doing a keynote over the latter part of that year, called the business have you probably at that point, or done it maybe half a dozen times around the world, and it was really, really resonating, particularly with entrepreneurial audiences, and even more so particular, those within that industry that were ultimately focused on building a business based around their experience or their expertise, their career standing, whatever you want to put it, reputation, whatever. And so the term youpreneur was was born and then about a year later, we opened up the doors to the Youpreneur Academy, which was our membership where we kind of taught people how to be able to build up a, you know, profitable, personal brand and all the rest of it. Now, what happened was early 2016, it became very apparent to us when we surveyed our first kind of onslaught of members, we had about 250 people join in a space of a couple of months. So right out of the gate, we were doing very well in terms of member numbers. But I could see that they weren't watching the video, you get the analytics on the back end, they weren't watching the videos that they should be watching, or they weren't watching enough of them. And so we surveyed our guides, and we were like, what's going on? What's the matter? And they said, well, it's just there's so much in there, what I've watched is great, but I don't know where to go, like, I'm just overwhelmed, you need to give us a bit of a step-by-step here to kind of get us out there. And I realized, honestly, I just thrown them all in at the deep end, they said, Hey, watch what you want, when you want, choose your own Adventure kind of thing. And that was a bad move on my part. And so, early 2016, we relaunched the portal, and did the whole Youpreneur 2.0 thing with a roadmap. And what we found by putting all of the content into these three or four different categories, we were ultimately creating the perfect setup for the second book, because everything was going into either build, market, monetize or growth, when it comes to building that expert-based business. And that's exactly if you pick up a copy of Rise of the Edupreneur, which is the book, you'll see that I've actually broken it up into those main sections with several chapters for each section. And that's exactly what the you know, the the kind of the catalyst was for the book to come about. Now, I decided to self-publish this one, even though I easily could have got it traditionally sold off the back of the, you know, success of Virtual Freedom. But I decided to go self-publishing with this for two reasons. First and foremost, it was going to be much, much faster. And then late 2017, we were due to do the inaugural Youpreneur summit conference in London. And I wanted to gift it to all of my attendees as a thank you. So that was kind of like the driving factor, there was no way that book was going to be available by then, if we'd have gone the traditional route, because it it takes 12 to 18 months, usually, for a book on average to get out traditionally. The second reason was that ultimately, by self publishing the book as somebody who was then doing exactly what I was teaching, in the book, in terms of profiting on your expertise, I was ultimately, I was the ultimate guinea pig, fundamentally, and people really resonated with that. They were like, well, if you can do it, and it looks like this, then there's no reason why we can't do it. And so we did, we got the book out, it's done incredibly, incredibly well. But I think it's made me probably four times as much money as a lead generation source, than it has done from a royalty perspective. And that's saying something considering obviously if you self- published, you make a lot more money on the royalty side of it. But yeah, again, it's just a great source for bringing additional business your way, you know?
Josh Steimle
Perfect. I love that you go through the contrast there of the traditional versus the self-publishing route and the pros and cons there. Because this is what's coming up with a lot of other people I talked to is, even people who have traditionally published multiple times, and they could easily get a book deal with an advance. They're still opting to self-publish, because they say, I can't wait two years for my book to come out. Especially people in the technology field. They're saying by the time the book comes out, it's going to be outdated. I need to get this stuff out now. Yeah, but yeah, and then, yeah, I mean, you do give up the royalties, too. If you traditionally publish, the publisher comes along, and they'll take 80, 90 percent of that.
Chris Ducker
You know, I mean, when when I did virtual freedom, I gave up freaking everything. I was just your typical novice, rookie author, that kind of was just like, wow, I got a book deal. I'm gonna write a book, this is gonna be great. And I gave up the international rights. I gave up the audiobook rights and hey, audiobooks, that's money right there. And if you're a podcaster, like me, if you're not recording your own book, then, you know, you're just dumb. There's no other word to describe it. And so second time round, I knew I was going to keep everything. And that has obviously led us to more opportunities internationally with the international market. Virtual Freedoms done okay. Internationally, there are several foreign language edditions out already. But it just goes to show you that was six years ago, Youpreneur a, just a couple of years ago, and we're already kind of almost level pegging in regards to that side of things. And obviously, with Rise Of The Entrepreneur, I did record the audio book myself. With Virtual Freedom I didn't because my publisher while I was on that speaking tour, actually the year ago came out was like, we got to get the audiobook out. People are asking for it. When can you you know, we'll get you into a studio in LA or New York or something like you're here like, let's do it now. And I'm like, whoa, wait a minute, doing 10 gigs in six weeks, I don't have the voice to go into a booth for 10 - 12 hours and and record this book like you just have to wait until I get back to the Philippines. I know recording studios over there, I'll be able to get in and do it. No, no, no, we must do it now. And so I was bulldozed into allowing a voice actor to come in and read it and he did an an horrifically horrible job.
Josh Steimle
That's a shame, especially since you're such a great voice.
Chris Ducker
I know. I've never truly honestly forgiven myself for not standing my ground on that. Because I never asked people to buy the audio book ever. I always tell them pick up the paperback or the Kindle, I I outwardly tell them avoid the audiobook, you'll get the wrong experience. So I don't want to have to do that about one of my my own books ever. So I'm glad I did everything myself the second time around.
Josh Steimle
Ever thought about going back and re recording it yourself?
Not at this point, I think that ship has sailed by now. And you know, you look at your numbers, you look at the sales, when you get your royalty statements come through. Probably something around 60% of sales are on ebook Kindle version, about another 10, probably about another 20 or 25% are on paperback and the rest of audio. It's really not honestly worth it right now.
Josh Steimle
Have you ever thought about going and rewriting the book I mean, not rewriting but updating the book, it's been since 2014. A lots changed with technology, social media and such. And I'm sure that's impacted the virtual assistant arena.
Chris Ducker
It has. You're right. And I have thought about it once or twice when I've been approached by the publishers to do it. But if I'm to be honest with you, two times they've talked to me about it, I've gone back and actually picked up the book and genuinely gone through it again, there's not much other than a few resource mentions for different software or services. Other than that, there's actually not that much in the book that would be deemed out-of-date, not at this point anyway. And so I kind of feel like an extended or an updated edition right now is not really needed, I will never close the door on that. Because I'm still very passionate about that project. And about that as a, I guess as a, as a talking point, or as a solution to people's problems in regards to building virtual teams. And you know, people call it the VI, the Bible of virtual assistants, and the Definitive Guide and the encyclopedia and all these great terms. But maybe I'll update it at some point, I just don't feel like it's really needed right now, above and beyond anything else.
Josh Steimle
You know, it would be an interesting experiment, though, to see if you released Virtual Freedom 2.0 if that would, what would happen to the sales from that just because it would be a newer book and just the perception of Hey, this book is from 2020, or 2021 instead of 2014. So I'd be really interested to see what happens when you do that at some point in the future.
Chris Ducker
I will I like the way you're just assuming the close , they're like it's gonna happen. I think the only way honestly, Josh, the only way that I would consider doing it would be if I was able to get those rights reverted back to me, so that I could self-publish it. And I don't think the publisher is likely to do that anytime soon, due to the fact that the book is still selling quite well. So if I was to get the rights back, and I could do it myself and self-publish it, then it would be more commercially viable to me. But yeah, I wouldn't do it in somebody else's pockets. Not at this point in my career.
Josh Steimle
Yeah. See, the kids, this is why you tradition, or why you self-published so you can keep the rights and you have this latitude. Now Chris is locked into this with this publisher six years later, but Hmm. Well, this is interesting. So with the Youpreneur business that you're doing right now, do you have any plans for a next book that you might write next?
Chris Ducker
I do. And I've been planning it for probably the last two years or so there are pages and pages and pages of notes. And it might come as a little bit of surprise for people to learn that it's actually not going to be a book for entrepreneurs, not per se, not directly. Anyway. I've got to the point where I think in my career, I've got enough experience under my belt now where I can write, should we say a slightly bigger book, bigger idea or a bigger thought process, a bigger message. There's nothing wrong with the two books I've written they they provide a number of different solutions to people's problems in very different aspects of building a business in today's world, and one being building virtual and remote teams and other one, you know, marketing yourself as the business, not being stuck in it, but marketing yourself as that personal brand business owner, which is obviously becoming more and more popular with every passing month right now. But the next one is going to be actually more along the lines of business relationships. And it's going to be one of those books where it's not just sold to entrepreneurs, you know, this is, this is the book that I want to that I want to utilize to get myself into the Aston Martin AGM as their keynote, closing speaker kind of thing. You know, and this is the hey here's, you know, 3000 copies for your entire company. Thank you Mr. Branson. You know, that sort of type of thing. And that's, that's the next level, you know, and that's why I'm not rushing in. There are very unique stories, very unique tales. It could potentially even be a parable, a whole kind of movie, Who Moved My Cheese sorta type thing? Possibly. So yeah, we'll see what happens with it. But definitely, in the planning process, there's no definitive date in place. Because first and foremost, I'm a serial entrepreneur, I build businesses. Secondly, I'm an author, educator and everything else. So there are definitely higher priorities. But I certainly want to be able to get it out there at some point very soon, for sure.
Josh Steimle
Cool. Well, before we wrap up here, Chris, are there any final words of wisdom that you would pass along to that entrepreneur out there who's listening to this saying, I want to write a book, I think a book would be great for my business, what one or two tips would you pass along to them?
Chris Ducker
Well, Iwould say, look, if you've been creating any amount of content for any period of time, online already, whether it be blogging, podcasting, video, whatever the chances are, you've got a lot of the content that you need for the book already. You just have to rework it so that it works in a book format. And the first thing that I hear from people when I suggest that to them, they say, Well, why would somebody buy a book from me, where you know, 70% of it is up on my YouTube channel or on my blog already? And it's a very easy answer to give. And that is for convenience, plain and simple. Why do you? Why would you expect somebody to read, I don't know, 50 blog posts, that are 1000 words, each over just buying a book for 14 - 15 bucks and reading it all over the course of their, their, their long weekend away on holiday or something, right? So I think that a lot of people, when they start thinking about writing a book, particularly for the first time, they become a little overwhelmed, in terms of that process of writing, but look at what you've already got, and see how much of it you can actually utilize already. And then, you know, just fill in the gaps, ultimately. And my big piece of advice, whether you go traditional, or whether you self-publish, you must hire a developmental editor to work with you on the book. This isn't an editor per se, where you know, more along the lines of an inline editor who will check for spelling and punctuation and grammar, and all that stuff. Yeah, you should definitely get somebody to look over that side of things as well. But this is a developmental editor, someone that could actually read the book, chapter by chapter, and help you develop a better book. I've done that on both of my books. And I can very honestly say, that both of them turned out to be much, much better books, by utilizing the services of somebody to help me develop flush extra ideas out, go deeper on a few different examples or case studies or stories, much better books at the end of the day if I hadn't done so. And just go ahead and publish straight away.
Josh Steimle
So valuable, such good advice. Chris, thanks so much for being with us here today. What's the best place for people to find you?
Chris Ducker
Well, I wouldn't be much of a personal brand business coach if I didn't have Chrisducker.com. So that is the place to go and I'm at Chris Ducker on all the socials.
Josh Steimle
Perfect. Thank you so much, Chris.
Chris Ducker
Thank you. Thank you, man, and it's great to chat with you again.
Josh Steimle
It is it's so good to talk and I hope we can meet in person soon someday.
Chris Ducker
You got it.
Josh Steimle
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