Chapter 1

Books Change Lives

When I was seventeen years old, my dad handed me a book that turned my world upside down. I hated reading, but I respected his opinion, so I decided to give it a try. 

The book was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and it introduced me to a concept that I now wholeheartedly believe:

A book is a “$15 mentor”. The smartest, most successful people on the planet have written and published books with the best knowledge they have learned in their lifetime. 

To learn from them, all we have to do is pay $15 and invest a few hours to read the book. It’s the best, most succinct education you can get. 

Can you think of a book that’s changed your life for the better in some way? 

Books change the lives of readers who read them. They also change the lives of the author who writes them. It’s not about the book, it’s about who you become in the process of writing and publishing your book. 

At Self Publishing School, we help people write and publish quality books that sell more copies. In reality, we change people’s lives through the power of writing and publishing a book. 

Rich Dad Poor Dad also showed me that I wanted to run my own business one day. I started a couple of businesses in high school and then went off to college to get a degree in Entrepreneurship. Oh, the irony…

Once there, I quickly discovered I was learning how to run a business from professors who had never actually run a business. 

That didn’t make too much sense to me, so I decided to drop out. 

Just before I dropped out, I decided to do something crazy: write a book. Two and a half months later, here’s what happened…

 

Snowboarding To Seven Figures

I placed the cursor over the publish button, ready to hit “submit,” with no idea what I was doing. 

My original goal was to create a short PDF to help other aspiring entrepreneurs. This document evolved into a full book and I was about to publish it—something I never imagined would happen when I started.  

Click.

The book was published. 

It was a moment of excitement followed by a pit in my stomach and the feeling of “what have I done?” It was out of my hands now. 

I hoped the book could help people, maybe make a little money, and establish some credibility for myself as I dropped out of school. (More irony.)

Most of all, I hoped people would actually like it. 

Publishing your first book kind of feels like standing up in front of a crowd with no clothes on. It’s revealing, you feel vulnerable, and you really hope people like what they see. 

One day towards the end of my book’s launch week, I decided to go snowboarding with friends. It was a chance to take my mind off the book launch for a few hours.

Bing!

I received a notification from my co-author—The Productive Person, our book, had hit number one on Amazon in the “Time Management” category, topping David Allen’s Getting Things Done (AKA the “Productivity Bible”). 

I couldn’t believe it.

Frantically, I checked Amazon to see the stats for myself. He was right! 

While I was on the chairlift going back to the top of the mountain for another run, a friend asked about the book— he had seen my celebration when I found out we’d hit number one.

“I heard you published the book. How is it going? Is the book actually making any money? I heard books don’t make money,” he said. 

I thought for a few seconds and then replied, “It’s actually doing really well. I just found out that while we’ve been snowboarding all day, the book made $400.”

That’s when it hit me. It’s one of those lightbulb moments that once you see it you can’t unsee it. I had done work once to create this book, and I’d be making royalties from the book forever. In the publishing industry, it’s called “mailbox money,” a royalty check that shows up in the mail every month. 

Our book was downloaded 5,274 times in the first three and a half days, and it brought in close to $7,000 within the first month. Not bad for a little PDF we created with no intention of selling.

This wasn’t just my mom and grandma buying the book anymore. People were downloading my book all around the country and around the world, in countries I’d never even been to. The book was making a worldwide impact, changing the lives of people everywhere. 

Within this lightbulb moment, I realized a book is the best and the fastest way to grow your impact, your income, and your business (if you have one). 

Leveraged Impact

Publishing my book was also the first time I was exposed to a concept I now call “Leveraged Impact”.

With a book, you do work once, crystalizing all of your knowledge and lessons you’ve learned into the written word. Once you create the book, it can impact thousands, tens of thousands, or maybe even millions of people. That’s what it means to bring leverage to the impact you’re trying to make in this world.

When you publish a book, it impacts three distinct groups of people: 

1. Readers
2. Friends / Family
3. One Person Who’s Life Is Radically Changed 

Readers: For simple math, let’s estimate this number at 1,000 readers. These are 1,000 people whose lives are changed by reading your book. 

Friends / Family:  These are the people around you who are inspired by seeing you chase your dream of writing a book. We’ll call this 200 people. By writing and publishing your book, you inspire them to take steps towards their goals and dreams; whether it’s losing weight, starting a business, quitting smoking, or maybe even writing a book of their own. 

One Person Who’s Life is Radically Changed: This may be someone who also fits in the other two buckets, but their life will never be the same because of your book. 

Your Leveraged Impact looks like this:

When you publish your book, you’re impacting at least 1,200 people. The better you get at implementing the “Sell More Books” content in this book, the higher that number becomes. 

The Ripple Effect

A great example of this is Sean Sumner and his daughter Emma. Sean worked with SPS to write and publish two books. Shortly after, his eight-year-old daughter came up to him and said, “Hey, Dad. I want to write and publish a book, too.”

Sean said, “Okay. Why don’t you go and write fifty words and then come back and let’s talk about it.” 

To his surprise, Emma came back a couple of hours later with the fifty words written. 

For the next couple of months, Sean took Emma to Panera Bread every Saturday to work on her book. 

Today, Emma is the published author of The Fairies of Waterfall Island. 

Emma made over $4,000 in the first three months the book was for sale. She decided to donate all of the money to the organization Autism Speaks, who raises awareness for autism all over the world. 

Now, she is paying for school field trips using the royalties from her book. Her “allowance” also comes from her monthly book royalties. 

Her life is forever changed because at eight-years-old, she saw her Dad write a book. 

The cycle continues – lives being changed, and books being written. 

 

#1Book1Life

After dropping out of college, my brother Seth and I began preparing for the launching of a second book: Breaking Out of A Broken System. 

We envisioned this book as something that would make a difference, so we decided to give all of the proceeds from the book to charity. 

We didn’t have much time—Seth was, and is, a full-time musician on the road with his band NEEDTOBREATHE, and my business was in startup mode—so we got together and wrote the book in one week using a technique I’ll lay out for you later in this book.

This book meant a lot more to us than just making money. It meant saving people’s lives and making a big impact on the world. Its slogan was “buy one book, save one life” (#1book1life). For each book sold, the four-dollar profit was set aside to buy life-saving malaria medication for someone in Uganda.

 

Helping Others Unlock Leveraged Impact

After successfully publishing two books, people kept asking how I was doing it. So I decided to see if I could replicate the success I was having with my books with other people. 

I launched the first cohort of what ultimately became Self Publishing School (SPS) with forty-four students. To my surprise and amazement, 60% of them wrote and published a book in less than six months (a crazy feat since most authors take years to write and publish their first book). 

Once I saw the success we were having helping people publish books, I went all-in on SPS. 

Since then, we’ve helped more people write and publish books than any other company on the planet. We’re one of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in America—and one of the only companies on the list in the publishing world. 

Our Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG as Jim Collins calls it) is to help 100,000 people publish a book through our training programs at Selfpublishing.com and Self Publishing School. With Leveraged Impact, that means we’ll change the lives of 120 million people (1,200+ lives changed per book). 

My goal with this book is to help your book be the next one on that list. 

Updates Since The First Edition Of This Book

I published the first edition of this book at the end of 2016. The book has been downloaded and purchased by hundreds of thousands of people since then. I’ve heard from hundreds (if not thousands) of you who wrote and published your book just by reading the first version of Published. It’s incredible. 

Since publishing the first edition, we’ve helped 6,000+ SPS students write and publish their book, with millions of downloads and copies sold. We publish at least two books every single day. 

In that same time, I’ve done 1,000+ webinars and speaking engagements. Our coaches have done tens of thousands of coaching calls (we average about 1,000 coaching calls per month) and we’ve done hundreds of updates to our curriculum, with 5-10 major overhauls. 

We’ve also created a specialized curriculum for nonfiction, fiction, and children’s book authors, while adding an advanced marketing curriculum for people who want to sell more books. 

Needless to say, everything we teach has gotten significantly better, but this book stayed the same. So I decided to write a second edition. These changes, new frameworks, and new templates should save you hundreds of hours while writing your book and thousands of dollars in the process. 

 

An Overview Of What You’ll Learn

In this book, I’ll walk you through the eight milestones to go from blank page to published author:

After teaching you the Blank Page to Published framework, I’ll show you some of the next steps on your Author Advantage journey:

I’ll teach you how to sell more books beyond your launch, and how to land your Author Appearances. 

Then, I’ll teach you how to use your book to start a business and get your first customers, or the three ways to use your book to grow the business you’re already running. 

 

What To Expect From This Book

This book is a practical and in-the-trenches guide based on what’s actually worked for me and for thousands of others just like you.

As a C Level English student and a college dropout with ADHD, my superpower is making complicated things simple. Otherwise, I won’t understand them. My commitment to you is to teach this process in a fun, simple, and ADHD-friendly way. 

The content in this book will be mostly genre-agnostic, with a slight lean towards nonfiction. 70-80% of what I teach will work no matter what genre of book you’re writing. 

My goal with this book is to “drop the mic”. I want this to be the only book you need to read in order to write and publish a quality book that sells well (and the best book you’ve ever read on the topic). 

My hope is you’ll find this book so helpful that anytime you meet someone thinking about writing a book you tell them: “You HAVE to read Chandler’s book, Published.” 

For the people who want to go faster and further with your book, my hope is that Published. is the first step in us working together. Book a call with my team to see if you’re a fit to work with us, and we’ll map out an implementation plan to help you get started. 

Let’s get started by laying the foundation. 

 

VERY NEXT STEPS: 

At the end of most chapters, I’ll include a Very Next Steps section. This is a summary of the things you need to do to implement the contents of that chapter. Sometimes I’ll also include a resource or two to save you time and effort. 

1.  Download and print out the publishing journey milestones graphic: publishedbook.com/milestones
2. Hear me talk about “Leveraged Impact” in my TEDx talk here: publishedbook.com/tedx