Tuttle Twins Creator On His Best-Selling Series
Author of the Tuttle Twins series, Connor Boyack explains the importance of marketing, self-publishing, and knowing how to target your audience.
Guest on the latest episode of the Published Author podcast, Connor begins with a little truth bomb about his lack of educational tenacity during his years of school. In fact, he says his love of reading and learning developed after college.
Connor wasted no time in writing his first book, Latter-day Liberty, explaining why Christians should be libertarian, or at least support the ideas of liberty. This sparked him to launch his own not-for-profit company, The Libertas Institute. During the launch, he also wrote another book, Feardom: Why Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and How You Can Stop Them, to better explain the ideals and views of his company.
TOP TAKEAWAY – BE YOUR OWN EVERYTHING
One of the biggest challenges that Connor ever faced was either having publishers who didn’t do political books, or political publishers that didn’t partake in children’s books. He says: “It, for me, really reinforced the line of thinking that I need to self-publish my books, for many reasons.”
It wasn’t just self-publishing that Connor had to take on, but also the writing, and marketing of his books - a massive task. He had to work on building an audience, seeing who was interested in the books, and then start sourcing ways to publish this book himself without going broke.
While he admits that it was difficult at first, it became a rewarding experience in the end, and he implores other authors to consider taking this route as well. Who better to market your book, than you.
TUTTLE TWINS: ADULT PROBLEMS, CHILDLIKE UNDERSTANDING
Wanting to be able to explain things like free markets and capitalism to a much younger generation, Connor and his illustrator launched a book project starring the Tuttle Twins. These twins take adult subjects and complex issues and make them more accessible to children and parents. Connor also announces the plans to launch a Tuttle Twins animated series, hoping to extend the reach of these twins.
In this episode you’ll hear Connor and host Josh dive into the various complications with publishers and marketing, and how a writer can choose a different route, giving them the freedom to self-publish and market their books in streams that are most beneficial to them.
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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 Steimle. And today our guest is Connor Boyack, Founder and President of Libertas Institute, a free market think tank in Utah. Named one of Utah's most politically influential people by the Salt Lake Tribune, Connor’s leadership has led to dozens of legislative victories spanning a wide range of areas such as privacy, government transparency, property rights, drug policy, education, personal freedom and more.
A public speaker and author of 21 books, Connor is best known for the Tuttle Twins books, a children's series introducing young readers to economic, political and civic principles. It's now sold 1.4 million copies and is also spawning an animated show that we'll talk more about. An ad raising funds for the show says, Hollywood won't touch a show like this. Too many truth bombs, not enough f bombs.
Connor lives near Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife and two homeschooled children. Connor, welcome to the Published Author Podcast.
Connor Boyack:
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
Josh Steimle:
Thanks for being on. Full transparency, Connor and I go way back. We're friends. We align politically. And I also guest wrote a chapter for one of Connor’s books called Skip College, which we may or may not talk about here. But, Connor, before we get into talking more about the process of books and everything, give us a little bit of your background. I know your mother was an accomplished author. So I'm curious what kind of household you grew up in, and how that might have influenced your current career as an author and producer of all these books.
Connor Boyack:
So my mom is an attorney, specifically an estate planning attorney. So I do remember fondly like when I was high school age, I got very competitive with her about trying to be able to type faster than her. She was a very fast typer. And I was doing, I think back in the day was like Mavis Beacon teaches typing in a home. My kids today use typing.com, which is great. But I was really intent on typing faster than my mom. And I got to that point. I think it was 130 words a minute or something like that, where I finally beat her.
And however, at the same time while I was learning how to type very well, I was doing awful in my English classes in high school. I hated English. Couldn't stand it, cheated, took every shortcut I could. You know, it was like my least favorite subject to the point where when my mom ran into I think it was my eighth grade English teacher years later. Oh, hey, how's Connor doing? Right? The teacher asks, and at the time, I think I'd written like eight or nine books and the teacher's mind was just blown, like, how could Connor ever write a book, let alone that many?
And so for me, interestingly enough, it wasn't until after college when I was done with all the tests and assignments and everything else where I had kind of the intellectual free time, mental energy to learn what I genuinely wanted to learn outside of the structure of, you know, assignments and so forth. So I started reading a lot. It just had this little spark of curiosity that that really grew.
And along the way, I almost like I probably had like a foundation there back in the day from English, but I don't really think anyone learns well, from like, you know, memorize the past participle subjunctive of the, like, we did. For me, it was I started reading a lot, and I through almost osmosis was kind of absorbing how good writers wrote well, and I had a blog at that time. And that was my creative outlet, which I was awful at first, because I was very bad at English.
But then I improved. And that then really developed my skills. The fast typing helped me. I could do a lot of output very quickly. And then over the years, as I improved my writing through kind of public feedback on the blog, and learning that I needed to write more persuasively, that then later led into books. But looking back for me, it's odd that I landed where I did, because my kind of early start, if you will, was so unenjoyable, and non-productive.
Josh Steimle:
So your books are, we could say largely kind of activists in their theme. You have a message. You have an agenda. You're pushing that through your books. I mean, I guess you could say we're all doing that through our books. But yours are very politically motivated, or they connect to political themes. How did that become the passion? How did that become the thing that you said, I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life or at least a healthy chunk of it to this cause?
Connor Boyack:
Yeah, I think it was that blogging where I was engaged, kind of in pre-Facebook era, and a lot of intellectual debates about current events, war, all kinds of things that people are very opinionated about. And it really forced me to learn, you know, what are logical fallacies? And how do I write clearly? And how do you articulate an argument in a way that will persuade other people? And in part, because I think I improved very quickly, I gained a large readership. And so a lot of people started looking to me to help them express their own views. This continues to this day, as I articulate something on say, Facebook about a current event. That perspective is shared by many people I follow, who will then say, oh, you took the words out of my mouth in a way I never could have, you know, put them together. And then those people then use my words. They'll share the post, or they'll, you know, quote parts or whatever, because it's helping them articulate what they believe.
Over the years, I've found that there's a huge appetite for that market almost where there are people who want to, in the case of our Tuttle Twins children's books, they want to teach their kids about, say, how free markets work, or what is the golden rule or what is justice. But they lack the vocabulary themselves, or the confidence to do it. And so I've found a great opportunity to produce content that other people often already agree with. But it helps them better, articulate their own opinions, share them with other people, and then have conversations about them. And so for me, it's kind of a market demand that I've seen where I feel I'm providing a service to those people. I enjoy it myself, because it forces me to really think through things very clearly. And so it's something I anticipate will continue.
Josh Steimle:
So one thing that comes up a lot in this podcast is talking with authors about their platform and what platform they had created that allowed them to sell their books or sell their first book, especially when they come out with their first one. And you talked about being into blogging. How long were you blogging before you wrote or published your first book? And how did that platform feed into book sales?
Connor Boyack:
Great question. I dabbled first at blogging, I would say getting really serious about it. It was about three or four years before I wrote a book. I didn't know what I was doing. When I wrote a book, I was probably a little more audacious, looking back. But it worked out well I. In fact, I, my first book, I did with a publisher. My first two books, in fact, before I then went off and started self publishing for a lot of reasons. And in trying to pitch the publisher, right, one of their questions is, well, what's your marketing plan? What's your following? What's your audience? Do you have people who you can already sell the book to? And so, yeah, the blog was very helpful. I had email addresses of people who had been leaving comments. I had subscribers, email subscribers. So that was critical for me to market that first book and parlay that audience into subsequent books that I published. So blogging was very helpful. Facebook was just starting to kind of get off the ground. You know, and so it wasn't a huge outlet for me, but the blogging certainly very much helped to kind of spark that initial core audience that I needed to then grow over time.
Josh Steimle:
And what was the first book that you published?
Connor Boyack:
So my first book was one called Latter-day Liberty. And it's basically why Christians, particularly of my denomination, should be libertarian, or support the ideas of liberty. So it very much was a niche book. But I had been blogging in that niche for a while. So I wasn't trying to appeal broadly to everyone out there. I was attracting over the years an audience of people who wanted to talk about that intersection of, you know, two worlds. And so it became kind of the fertile soil to then market that first book and then help grow that audience.
Josh Steimle:
How much of the spread of that book do you credit to word of mouth, people passing that along to friends and family?
Connor Boyack:
So, initially, I would say maybe like, one quarter, I was doing a lot of the pushing myself and so forth. But then over the years, kind of the long tail marketing plan, right? There's been no sustainable marketing of that book. It's only word of mouth. And so now a decade later, people are still buying the book. And it just sits out there. I'm not really pushing it. And so, I initially, I wasn't thinking so much of that long-term plan. I was like, I got to get a bunch of people to read it. I want to boost it in Amazon or whatever. Right? And so I was doing a lot of the pushing. But that trickle as I then moved on to my next project, the word of mouth has been critical for kind of the long-term sustainability of the book’s interest.
Josh Steimle:
Now you founded the Libertas Institute. Tell us a little bit about that, and talk about how this got started, and how you transitioned from your day job that you had before to running this full time.
Connor Boyack:
So our group is nonprofit, kind of educational organization. And we're primarily focused in our state of Utah. But we're actually now expanding elsewhere our work. Primarily, we do kind of legal research, and advocacy, and educating people about the pros and cons of, you know, different laws and the status quo and what needs to change. You know, for example, police reform has been a hot topic over the summer with all the protests. And that's a big issue of ours criminal justice reform.
And so I started this organization right around the time I published my first book. So I was kind of entering these two worlds simultaneously. And fundamentally, our organization exists to persuade people to agree with and adopt our views, specifically, also elected officials, adopting our views by amending the law to better reflect free market ideas. And so it was right at that those early days when publishing my first book and starting this organization where I had to give a lot, seek a lot of clarity in how to persuade other people, how to frame my arguments, how to be approachable and likeable, how to, you know, appeal to people's better natures and selfish interests even, and how do you be effective.
And it's something where I became very focused on learning all of those tips and marketing and psychology and everything, because I wanted to succeed in this new organization that I was setting up. I also then had to appeal to donors who would find it worthy enough of an investment, so that I could raise enough money to quit my job and do this full time and then start to grow it, which is ultimately what happened. But in really investigating what are the ways to be successful in persuading other people, I found that immensely helpful for the books that I continue to write because I was able to incorporate all that same learning not only in the content itself, but in the marketing efforts around the book to get people to read it, so that everything would be more successful. And so that that's been a huge help for me.
Josh Steimle:
So when you started Libertas, it was started with funding from individuals putting money into it. Now is it supported just by the books? Or is it a mix? Or how do you fund everything?
Connor Boyack:
Yeah. It's a mix. So we do sell quite a number of books. And we kind of reinvest the proceeds into marketing the books even further. And so by and large, our core operations are still funded philanthropically from individuals or foundations or even companies who like what we're doing. But in terms of like diversified revenue streams to kind of not have all your eggs in one basket, it is nice to have the books out there for bringing in revenue as well.
Josh Steimle:
So before we get into the Tuttle Twins, what are some of the other books that you wrote? And what were some of the successes? Were there any failures? Any lessons learned?
Connor Boyack:
So one of the books that I wrote about five or six years ago is called Feardom, why politicians exploit your emotions, and how you can stop them. And that book is all about how we are conditioned through fear to surrender our freedom. When I wrote that book, I had the sad realization that because this pattern happens basically all the time throughout history, it would be an evergreen marketing opportunity. The book would never be irrelevant. And here we are recording this right now during, you know, Coronavirus stuff still happening. And the book’s message is extremely relevant. So that was kind of a win from writing marketing perspective about finding a topic, that’s kind of perennial interest.
You and I collaborated together on the Skip College book. That was targeted to young adults, teenagers looking for alternatives to college to at least be aware of what those alternatives are as they make their decisions. Wrote a book for youth. This was actually a very interesting one that I like to talk to other people about who are writing books. In fact, just last week, I shared this with a friend. I gave a presentation to a youth group in a different state a few years ago on kind of these topics, you know, Justice rights, proper role of government and so forth. And this kid approached me afterwards and he was like, hey, it's like, that was really good. And I was like, “Okay, yeah, thanks. Glad you liked it.” He's like, No, really. Like, that was really good. You should turn that into a book.
And I was like, huh, I hadn't even been thinking that at all. But here I had the entire framework already. Right? I had the flow. I had the main points, kind of the chapters, if you will. I had all the main arguments structured. I was like, I wonder what that would look like. I banged that book out so quick, because the skeleton was already there. What's amazing is when I was working on the presentation, I wasn't thinking about a book. I was just thinking, I got to give an hour-long presentation. That's not nearly as difficult as sitting in front of your computer and thinking, Huh, I got to write a book, How do I want to do this? And so that's a template that I've recreated that I've used again, where I don't think about a book. I think about and not just think about, I actually go give a presentation on a topic for which I like will probably do a book. And so I focus just on giving a really solid hour long presentation, maybe make some tweaks based on how that went. And then all it becomes is adding meat to the bones of finding anecdotal stories and data and other things to kind of supplement that structure and turn it into a book. And so I've shared that with a lot of people like, this is a very effective way, at least in my experience to write a book is to just give a presentation at first.
So anyways, lots of other books, then certainly the Tuttle Twins. I think, the next year, we're publishing nine additional books. So we're just we're pumping out a lot of stuff right now.
Josh Steimle:
Right. So you're at 21 books now, is that correct? Or?
Connor Boyack:
Yeah. Well, maybe next week, it'll be 22.
Josh Steimle:
Right. Got to make sure that figure’s updated. And then you're going to publish nine more next year. So by next year, you'll have over 30 books in your quiver.
Connor Boyack:
Yeah.
Josh Steimle:
Wow. Now, what does your team look like? You must have some help with getting these books cranked out?
Connor Boyack:
Yeah, I have an illustrator. So the illustrator for the Tuttle twins, he also as needed will design like covers for my other books or any little illustrations that I need. I've got a couple editors on tap, who I regularly work with to edit my stuff. For a couple of my books, I have done ghostwriting. And so I have identified writers that I trust and that work well so that they can kind of extend my voice. So in that I'm very much involved in kind of the planning and the vision and the oversight. But then they'll go turn out the content, and then I can tweak and edit it. And so I have started to delegate, if you will, in that regard.
Josh Steimle:
Tell us a little bit more about the ghost writing. Because for those who might never have really been exposed to ghostwriting, some people think ghost writing is where somebody else writes your book, and then you slap your name on it and publish it. But typically, that's not the way it works. There's a lot of collaboration and such with a ghostwriter. But in your case, you're dealing with a subject matter that is sensitive, and you have very defined ideas about what is right and what should not go in these books. So what are some of the challenges you face working with ghostwriters? And how have you made that work well for you?
Connor Boyack:
In its creative sense, you're exactly right. Someone else does the work and you take the credit for it. But to do it well, and to produce a book that is going to be consistent with your brand and your vision, you have to be involved. And so in my case, I have over the years been on the lookout for people who can write well, who share my values and perspective, and who would be open to this type of arrangement. And so I've been able to find who those people were where, you know, I set the vision. We sit down; have a bunch of planning meetings. Here's what I want to do. I make them, you know, they have to be familiar with my existing writings.
So for example, if they're going to work with me on a Tuttle Twins project, they need to be familiar with the Tuttle Twins book to understand the brand and the characters and the character development and so forth. So they have to be familiar. And then we map out together what the overall content is going to look like kind of that same structure as giving a presentation. Here's what's going to happen one chapter to the next. Here's what it's going to be. They'll then draft a chapter or two, and then I read that to make sure they're kind of going on the right course, and give input and feedback before they then go churn everything out. And then we have to correct everything. And so that early feedback is critical for them to make sure they're capturing my voice, and going in the direction I need them to.
And then after we've done that initial assessment, I let them run with the rest of it, because they have those early chapters to reference as they continue to work on everything else. And then we go through the editing phase where I'll dive in. And then I'll have my editors dive in. And so it's kind of interesting, like, I've questioned, like, for all the time that I spend trying to communicate to someone else, you know, and make sure they're on the same path. Had I just gone about doing the actual writing, you know, would that have been equivalent? Is at a time savings? I think ultimately it is. But especially as you say, we're talking about sensitive important stuff; I want to be very involved.
I know some business owners who just hire a ghostwriter. And, you know, share a one pager. And they just want a book. They just want to slap their name on a book. And for them, it's about the status and not about actually persuading people. They just want to say I'm an author. Come, you know, pay me a bunch of money for consulting. Whereas in my case, I'm very intentional about the content. I want the content to be effective and persuasive and educational. So to each their own, but so far, it's been an enjoyable process.
Josh Steimle:
So let's dive into the Tuttle Twins here. Where did the inspiration come from to create this series of children's books that teach capitalism and free markets and all sorts of things that some people say this should not be taught to children?
Connor Boyack:
Some people do say that. Some people also say many crazy things. So running Libertas Institute and working on issues like this all day long, I would find myself coming home wanting to tell my kids how my day went, because naturally, I would say, you know, tell me what you did today? How did your day go? And, you know, as they would reciprocate that question, or if I just wanted to, on my own share what I did all day, I struggled to find ways to explain, you know, say, eminent domain to an eight-year-old, right, or like, you know, how do you talk to a kid about, you know, bank bailouts that you're, that are happening, like, how do you help kids understand the world and its complex issues when they're at a young age?
And so turned to Amazon, and started searching for books that could help me talk to my kids about these ideas and came up short, there was like, nothing. There were some stuff for older kids, you know, like, Uncle Eric series of books. "Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?" is a good one. There's some stuff about the Constitution. But there wasn't really anything for this younger audience on these core ideas. And so teamed up with a buddy of mine who's the illustrator. He had young kids at the time as well, shared my interest. We did one book is kind of just a fun little side project. And it started selling like hotcakes. And that was kind of a clear market signal to us that there's demand for this. There's an interest in doing more. And so we did the next book. And then the next one. It’s very slow going at first. But it's really kind of had a parabolic rise after all that early investment in building the audience and producing content where now it's just exploding like gangbusters.
Josh Steimle:
So that 1.4 million sales figure, is that just for Tuttle Twins, or is that all of your books?
Connor Boyack:
That's just for Tuttle twins. Yeah. Across all my books, I'm over 2 million.
Josh Steimle:
Wow, that's incredible. So now, Tuttle Twins, I assume the some of the nine books that you're publishing next year are going to be Tuttle Twins books. Is that right?
Connor Boyack:
Eight of the nine are Tuttle Twins books. Yep.
Josh Steimle:
Okay, now, tell us about this animated series that you're coming out with that you're raising funds for right now.
Connor Boyack:
So at TuttleTwinsTV.com, that's the redirect over to the website, where we're doing an investment. This is a for profit investment. So what's cool about this is not only can people support a project like a Kickstarter, but rather than just getting a little bit of merchandise, or whatever, they're actually investing. And so as the show succeeds, they can earn a return on that investment.
So we've teamed up with the Harmon Brothers, very renowned marketing agency to produce an animated series cartoon based on the ideas and characters from the book, books plural, which is just going to massively extend the reach of what we're doing, which is just crazy exciting. And so I get to be executive producer. My role is just to make sure that all of the writing is faithful to the ideas and make sure that it's capturing my original vision. And now we've got a team of writers and these guys are expert marketers. They've really blown things up with so many of their projects. And so it's just it's an exciting new avenue to share. I mean, it's like, you know, any author who writes fiction would love their book to get picked up. Sorry, my table here, that was an unexpected little thing. We keep things interesting over here. Any fiction author would love to have their book picked up to be turned into a film, you know. And so it's just it's super fun to be at the point where we've been working on these books for a while. This is just a totally new medium now that we get to experiment with.
Josh Steimle:
So some people might say, gee, a kid's cartoon that talks about free markets and capitalism, that sounds really, really boring. How are you making this interesting?
Connor Boyack:
So what's fun about this particular project with the cartoon is that the writers are comedians. And so that is their main background. And so for me, I would say the books are kind of like 75% educational, and 25% kind of entertaining and story. And with the cartoon, they're actually flipping it. It's going to be primarily entertaining for the kids, and then a little bit educational. And so just to capture their attention a bit more and help them really tune in, their vision is to kind of be like the Simpsons where there's a level of entertainment that is accessible to the adults, and then a separate level where the kids kind of have kid humor as well. And so it's kind of fun to watch their process and see how they do it where they're trying to kind of layer the comedy so different, you know, audiences all find something appealing about it. And then along the way, they're kind of getting exposed to the ideas and the principles as well.
Josh Steimle:
So with Tuttle Twins, what are some of the lessons you've learned writing all these books? What do you wish you would have known when you were starting the series that you've only learned over time?
Connor Boyack:
That's a great question. I'm actually going to answer a little bit differently. I was able to apply to the Tuttle Twins what I had learned from my previous books, and not done very well. And that is growing an audience. I was able to tap into my existing audience for the early books. But the problem was the first two books that I wrote, I did through a publisher. So, you know, they were listed on Amazon and put in stores.
But the critical problem was, I had no idea who was buying my books, I had no idea who out there was, you know, acquiring the first book so that I could sell them the sequel. My first book had a little bit of a sequel to it, a follow up book that was very connected. And it did not sell well. I had no idea who bought that first book. And that was the early kind of awareness I had of like, that's lame, like, I want to know, I want to know who bought that book. I can, you know, tell them about the second one.
And so when the Tuttle Twins came around, that was very much back of mind. We ultimately, I did actually explore getting a publisher for the book just to see what that dynamic would look like. And here we are publishing kids books, teaching kind of political and economic type stuff. So I approached some children's book publishers, and told them what we're doing. They're like, “Hey, that sounds interesting. But we don't do anything political.” Right. And then I approached the political publishers that, you know, were kind of in my orbit, and that I knew. And I said, “Hey, guys, work on this project.” They’re like, “Hey, cool, but we don't do kids books.” And so even if I wanted to go the publishing route, I found myself in a little bit of a quandary. But it for me really reinforced the line of thinking I was already going through. And that was I need to self publish my books, for many reasons: control, revenue, all this kind of stuff.
However, the key thing was, I need to build an audience. As we do this first book, I need to know everyone who buys that book. So we did direct to consumer all on our website, TuttleTwins.com. We did not list on Amazon. We only allowed people to buy the book to come to us, which was amazing, because when book two came out, I knew everyone who had book one. And so we were able to sell through book two way more quickly. And that is just balloon, it was only three or four years into the project where we finally listed on Amazon. They're now about 2% of our overall sales volume. It's negligible. And so that's been super important for us to kind of build a community.
Josh Steimle:
And that is fascinating, because I don't think it would even occur to authors today to think, hey, there might be a strategy that doesn't involve Amazon, and that is going to be better for me. But when you put it that way, needing to know your audience, and knowing that you're going to do this long series, it makes a bunch of sense. But that's a fascinating case study.
Connor Boyack:
I would point out, we didn't know we were going to do a long series at first. It was a potential. But for me, it was like I knew at least I was going to be doing other projects. I didn't know that we would do so many Tuttle Twins books and that the series would be successful. And so if for no other reason than building my own brand, and having people familiar with what I'm doing so that if I did a totally unrelated project, I still had the Tuttle Twins first book customers to go tell all this to. I knew that there's power in the list, right? Even if it's for unrelated projects, here you are Josh, spinning up all kinds of projects, right, you build a community. And you can tell this one community about this other stuff. Maybe it's not perfect alignment. But you can still let them know. And then, you know, cross pollinate the people who have that mutual interest.
And so for me, there was power in the list, where now we got to the point where, you know, as subsequent books come out, we do print runs of five to 10,000 books at a time, usually, actually, now we're at 40,000. But up to last year, we were at about five to 10,000 per title that we would produce. And I can sell in 48 hours enough to blow through that whole first print run, because we've built up this massive email list of all of our customers who we can now directly communicate with via email, and SMS. And they immediately come back and want more.
And so fundamentally, what I tell would be authors when they come asking me for advice, I say, if you want to be successful, like sure, maybe you'll get on Oprah. Maybe you'll be a unicorn and you know, you can just sit in your, you know, man cave and write all day. And it'll just have this amazing success. Unlikely. So because that's online, if you want to succeed as an author, you actually need to think of yourself as a marketer. It's one thing to write the book, but the average book sells like, I think, under 500 copies. When you average all the books across the industry, you're not going to sell very much. And so if you want to succeed, especially if you have something persuasive, and you want to benefit people and serve them, you owe it to yourself to learn marketing, and to figure out how to sustainably market your book to extend its reach beyond just your core tribe that are going to buy it because they like you.
Josh Steimle:
So how did you figure out how to self publish this into it the best way? Did you go through multiple printers and working with different people? Because today, there's like Amazon KDP. But of course, that's for Amazon. And you've got Ingram Spark. And there are these people who help with self publishing. But most of them are focused on self publishing for people who want to get into Amazon or want to get into bookstores. But you're doing this whole different thing with this direct-to-consumer things. So how do you get these printed physically? What's that look like for you today?
Connor Boyack:
So yes, we priced out lots of printers. I did look into Amazon and Ingram owns one of their divisions is Lightning Source. And so we actually use them for some of our projects, for example, we translate our Tuttle Twins books into other languages. I don't sell nearly as many. So I do use a print on demand, Lightning Source’s print on demand through Ingram. And so I can print like 20 at a time, right? Here's the French version of our third book, you know, I only need to have a few dozen on hand. So that has been effective. But the price point there is like four to $5 per book, because you're doing small volume. And so to me the success that we've had relied upon me using traditional printer offset printing and large volumes. The first book we did, I ordered 5,000. And it was kind of an investment in saying, I hope people buy this. But it also compelled me to figure out marketing. I knew that I had product I needed to get off the shelf. It wasn't the risk wasn't on my publisher who has a warehouse full of books. The risk was on me. I had to be very confident what I was doing and figuring out a marketing game plan to sell all of those books that I could recoup my investment.<br/ >But the nice thing is, because price point was so low, because I ordered 5,000, and so I think on average, my price per book was like $2, right, I didn't have to sell the full amount to make the money back. I only had to sell back a portion. And then the rest became profit, which I could then recycle and reinvest in the second print round.
So for me, that was a much better play, because by driving the cost of the book down to $2, now we're at 80 cents with the 40,000 we're buying at a time. But the more I could drive the cost of goods down, the cost of the book, the more of a profit margin it opened it up so that I could have a marketing budget. The biggest problem publishers have today is they don't market books. I mean, maybe their sales people, they have their relationships. They'll try and get into the store. But they just don't have any budget to market your book. They don't understand your book, and got tons of other books that they're managing, right? No one knows your book like you do. No one knows your market like you do. And no one has the incentives that you do.
So for me it was, it's time to act on that. I'm going to figure out a marketing plan. And it took me a couple years to really figure out how to do it well. I will note, our greatest success came when we finally had three books, because then it's a series and that does something psychologically to people. It's not just a random book. It's like ooh, the Tuttle Twins series. So when we hit three books, something shifted, where our marketing started doing a lot better. And because it was a three-book set, the profit, that the amount of revenue I had to play with was larger, right? If these books are think 10 bucks a book, my print cost is 2. So that's $6 in print cost and a $30 retail Price. Now, there's a lot of other costs in there, especially where we were doing the logistics, we're mailing--
Josh Steimle:
You’re shipping on. Yeah.
Connor Boyack:
Yeah, so there's all those little costs baked in. But even if you say like $10 total costs, you still got this revenue, where you can then go start doing things like Facebook ads. And as long as your cost of acquisition is below that profit margin, that's just a sustainable thing that can run all day long. And years later, here we are with an 11-book set. And that's precisely still the same formula we use as long as our cost of acquisition is below the total revenue that we obtained. It's not even a marketing budget. It's not like we're just putting up a billboard and hoping people buy. It's direct to consumer where we're driving people to buy the books. Right now, we're selling over 4,000 a day, just because this self sustaining marketing engine is just on autopilot.
Josh Steimle:
Do you know what percentage of your customers are repeat buyers?
Connor Boyack:
I think right now we're at about 8%. And that's intentionally low because we so aggressively go out and reach new customers.
Josh Steimle:
That’s great.
Connor Boyack:
So we do have a pretty heavy marketing campaign. But typically, what we'll do is, you know, people bought the whole series a couple years ago, and there are several books behind. So they’ll kind of wait and then do a binge purchase where they catch up with the rest. I think that number is going to drastically increase here over the next year where we've got eight new books coming out. We're going to invest a lot in bringing those people back to make sure they fill everything out in terms of everything they own. But yeah.
Josh Steimle:
That's what we did. You had a special a few weeks ago or something on getting caught up with a whole set and I sent it to my wife. I was like, hey, like, this is really cheap. We should buy this. And so we just got all works.
Connor Boyack:
Nice. Good work.
Josh Steimle:
Yeah. So how many subscribers do you have on your email list these days?
Connor Boyack:
We just passed a quarter million.
Josh Steimle:
Wow. And so I get your emails. It's one of the few email newsletters I remain subscribed to because I enjoy reading them just for the sake of reading them. They're interesting and informative and entertaining as well. And so it's kind of one of my new sources. Your format reminds me a lot of Tom Woods’ format. And for those who don't know who Tom Woods is, he's another libertarian author, very prolific. He seems like he's written like 50 books or something. But he has a certain style to his email newsletters. Were you inspired by Tom's emails to adapt that style for yours or?
Connor Boyack:
Yeah. And Tom actually got his format from Ben Settle. So Ben Settle is like the email marketing guru. You guys can go look him up if you're not familiar with him. So Tom became a Ben Settle acolyte and started kind of following his format. Excuse me. And Ben Settle’s emails, I mean, they're kind of very short and to the point. I like to be more informative and a little more long winded to make sure I'm giving out a lot more content. But yeah, kind of through Tom and then learning a bit from Ben Settle, I think Ben Settle is more of like an email everyday kind of guy.<br/ >And I simply cannot wrap my head around emailing people every day, and then remaining interested. And so we keep it to two a week maximum. Sometimes we just do one a week, just because I like to think like, what would I prefer? And I actually unsubscribe from Ben Settle’s emails, because I couldn't stand getting email every day. But no, it is, you know, it's storytelling. It's reinforcing the brand. It's remaining top of mind for people so that they're like, you know, I've been meaning to get those books, right, and just kind of bringing people back into our funnel. It's been a very effective way for us to kind of strengthen our brand position and kind of the engagement of our community.
Josh Steimle:
Are there other marketing techniques that have worked out well for you? You mentioned Facebook ads. What are some other things you've tried? What's worked? What hasn't?
Connor Boyack:
So Facebook and Instagram is where we've primarily been marketing. We're just now starting to move into some additional channels, just in case we ever get shadow banned on Facebook or something like that. We're trying to over time decrease our dependence on Zuckerberg. You know, I used to do booths. Like, in the early days, I would go to like homeschool conventions and education conventions. And, you know, I'd be sitting there behind a booth with a few of our books on the table. And, you know, I’d sell some rarely enough to make back the investment of, you know, flight and hotel and booth fee and all that, let alone my time. And so, you know, I've tried stuff like that, in the past, that hasn't had nearly the same economic value of just throwing up an ad and taken half an hour to kind of optimize things and letting it run for a few days, and then coming back and taking 10 minutes to tweak it. Like that's been such a better use of my time.<br/ >We do do a lot of affiliate marketing. That's been actually very helpful for us, to give people that incentive, where there's already strong word of mouth for our books. But this is just kind of an added cherry on top for those who can then basically be our Salesforce at no risk or cost to us, right, where they only get paid if they sell books. And so the affiliate system has been a huge success for us. And we're just now starting to move into influencer marketing and working with some kind of bigger brands and, you know, mommy bloggers and stuff like that too, similar to the affiliate model, but to use the strength of their own network to recommend the books and generate more sales. So that's something we're just now getting a little more into.
Josh Steimle:
And I've noticed lately, especially a week or two ago, there was an article that came out, that was critical of your books. And you've effectively monetize to the haters, which is another technique that I see that you picked up from Tom woods, which maybe he picked up from Ben Settle.
Connor Boyack:
He did.
Josh Steimle:
But tell us a little bit about using your critics to as leverage for your marketing.
Connor Boyack:
So we did an ad about a year ago with the Harmon Brothers, a video ad where we went out on Amazon and found some different one star reviews of our books, which, you know, are very minor compared to the reviews. But they're out there. And so we did a video putting together all of the one star reviews right? Like, it's crazy that kids are learning, you know, entrepreneurship. Just let them be kids and so then we kind of follow up with our own little response to each one star review like yeah, crazy. We don't want any kids selling those lemonade stands, you know, and kind of like razzing the one star reviews. And that ad I can't tell you how many people reached out to me or like, I bought your books because of that ad. Like I'd seen all your other ads, but that one pushed me over the edge. And so I really started to realize like, hey, there's something to this.<br/ >And so yeah, we got written up in a current affairs magazine, which is like a pro-socialism lefty outlet. And they invested a lot of time. I mean, they did custom illustrations, like cartoons, like poking fun at our illustrations, and it was a lengthy article. And so they clearly invested a lot of time. And I read this thing. I had a smile on my face the entire time. In fact, for those watching the video version of this, right here on my wall in my office, I printed out the kind of conclusion of the piece where he just here I'll even read a paragraph.<br/ >“The Tuttle Twins series is among the most wretchedly contrived, grotesquely unethically indoctrinating cliche ridden heaps of steaming garbage I've ever had the misfortune to read.”
And so here I am, the author who's invested so many years of my life in this project. And this guy is just lambasting it. And I have a smile on my face the entire time, like, this is amazing. This is great. And so, yeah, we created a coupon code, Current Affairs, the name of their magazine, and we shared their article with our audience, right? It's all about the tribe, and you're planting the flag and, like, if you're against them, then you're with us, you know, come, come join the team. And so it was very effective from a marketing standpoint. We've now in the couple of weeks since that's been out, we've sold, I just looked last night, over 6000 books, just using this coupon code and the strategy alone.<br/ >And what's funny is on Twitter, our social media team, you know, was posting there and tag their account like, hey, the current affairs thing, so use coupon code current affairs. So then they replied, with a coupon code to their socialist magazine. They created the coupon code Tuttle Twins and kind of got back at us and get, which I thought was great. First of all, it's like, that's a very capitalist thing to do. It's not your socialist magazine, you're making people pay for. But no, it was just, it was funny. It was invigorating for our tribe. We had so many people engaging on social media really got kind of our base riled up, sold a lot of books. So yeah, monetizing your haters is, I think, very effective from a psychological standpoint to really consolidate the strength of your tribe of anyone who kind of disagrees with that perspective. It really rallies your base to say, you know, that's crazy. I don't support that. I support you. I'm going to go buy those books right now.
Josh Steimle:
Cool. As we're wrapping things up here for authors or potential authors out there who are cause authors or have something maybe political or something different, because we have a lot of nonfiction authors who are listening to this, but they’re writing business books or something, but your genre is different. You have this cause. You have this thing that drives you. For those out there who are looking at getting into that, what other words of advice might you have something that I haven't asked, because it just wouldn't occur to me, but that has been key to you and your success?
Connor Boyack:
So I have about a conversation a week on this exact topic, people who are interested in writing a book, they've seen what we've done. They're curious, you know, if you had to start where I was, what would you do? What I've been sharing recently with some success with these folks is a single book by Russell Brunson called DotCom Secrets. So if you go to DotComSecrets.com, you'll see his full pitch. It's a big landing page, where it's a funnel. He's selling you not just on the book, but after you sign up for the book, there are other kind of offers that he has as well.
Russell is the founder of ClickFunnels, which is a very kind of drag and drop simple ecommerce funnel system that works great for a lot of people. But what he does well, the book is great. It's got a ton of great content about how to do a lot of this online marketing, how to create a sales funnel, how to think about what additional value, right? It's like, hey, I've got a book. But I can also offer people the audio book and the PDF book, and maybe some at home lessons, or implementation guide, or what's the other content you can create where you can upsell people along the way, which is going to increase the amount of revenue you get, right? So you have to think like a marketer like this.
But looking back on this, like, it's so worth the investment, because we've grown a massive community, right? It's been great for my personal brand. It's been great financially. It's been great to serve so many more people. This has been such a critical way for me to achieve my goals. I don't want to write these books and invest all this time and have, you know, my core tribe read it. And then that's it. I want this book to get out there. And so I need to think how to sustainably market it.<br/ >DotCom Secrets is, I think, a great starting point for people to get into. You don't need to sign up for ClickFunnels necessarily. But it is helpful for a lot of people who don't have that expertise, right, but want to get started. If you go to DotComSecrets.com, what's interesting is, you'll see that's using his system ClickFunnels, but you'll see how he's selling a book. Right? And he says, oh, the book is free. Just pay shipping. Well, of course, the cost that he's charging you the $7.95 or whatever pays both for the cost of the book and the shipping. And then he's going to give you the opportunity to get the audio book and da, da, da, da, da, da, da.<br/ >But it's going to help you see how, once I'm an author, once I've written a book, how do I create a platform or a system, a funnel to get people to buy this and provide me the revenue where I can start to run ads and start to reach even more people. He's got other books kind of in the series. He's got a trilogy there. But that's such a great starting point. Because I found for people who are not marketers, but who are cause oriented or have a business book, they want to serve CEOs. They want to reach their core audience, whatever that is. You have to think through how to actually reach that audience. It's not on a hope and prayer. It's not a, you know, if only someone reads this, or I get written up in Forbes, or whatever, you need to think through what are the systems I need to build to actually go out and reach those people. And so starting with DotCom Secrets, I think, is a fairly good foot in the door to start thinking this way.
Josh Steimle:
Cool. Last question. You've been involved in politics for a while. As a commentator, you've also helped out on some campaigns and such. Been so involved in having as much influence as you do, I'm sure that you have people trying to pull you into a more active role in politics and saying, oh, Connor, you have all this influence. You have a platform. Everybody knows you. You should run for office. Is this something that happens? And if so, what's your response to these people?
Connor Boyack:
It does happen fairly often. And one day I sat down about three years ago, and I created a pros and cons list. For example, in this case, me running for office. And there were a few pros and a, like 10 times as many cons as there were pros. For me, like my focus is influencing as many people as possible. Politics is inherently divisive. You are going to, you know, piss off people who you otherwise could influence positively. And look, I'm still involved just in kind of backdoor different ways. I'm very passionate about being involved, but being more kind of directly involved.<br/ >And back in my campaign days, as one example, I would be on campaigns with people and inherently, the enemy of all the staff and the other people in those campaigns. So then here I come a few years later where I'm now in policy, right? Not politics. I'm working on ideas and laws and stuff. And I'm having to work with the people who used to be on those other campaigns and repair those relationships. And they, you know, had that perspective of me that was worked, and I have them.<br/ >So, for me, because I am so cause oriented, because I am obsessed with trying to extend my influence not at least I convinced myself for egotistical purposes, but because I'm on a mission to reach that many more people and serve them, that is my goal. And so I've kind of swatted away those kind of shorter term, maybe vanity inducing opportunities, like running for office to remain focused on kind of the bigger long-term goals.
Josh Steimle:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Connor, for being with us today and talking about your book process and the projects that you've worked on. Any last words?
Connor Boyack:
For those interested, check out TuttleTwins.com or for the cartoon, it's Tuttletwinstv.com. Love to have your support. And if you get little ones in your life, I'm sure they love the books.
Josh Steimle:
Great. We'll link to those in the show notes as well. Thanks so much for being with us today, Connor.
Connor Boyack:
Thanks. Appreciate it.