34. How we wrote the book part 2: process, tools, publishing, ads...

But you also have to keep the whole mental model of the book in your head. It's like writing software essentially. If you disconnect yourself from it, do something else for a few days, well, good luck getting back into the flow. Or you may be repeating the same thing that you have already written because you've forgotten, because you disconnected from it, or that you may be writing it again in a different part. But you're going too much into detail in this part, yeah.

Makes sense. It is like software, yeah. All right. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to episode 34 of Metacast. This is the podcast where Ilya and I talk about our journey building a startup. We're building a podcast app. Last episode, episode 33, was part one of our foray into Ilya's book, Pragmatic Podcaster. So we talked about what the book is about. We talked a little bit about the content, where you can buy it and all that. And it was getting too long.

So we decided to break it up and talk about his process of writing the book, his experience of going through it, how we are trying to market it, the experience of like configuring ads and all that. We decided to do it in this episode. So here we go, part two. Yeah. And if you're watching this on video, you might have seen that we haven't even changed since the last recording. Because we finished the recording of part one just five minutes ago. We decided it's going to be too long.

So we intentionally stopped the recording and then restarted again. It was kind of weird to do the intro just one hour after we did the previous intro. But we are recording this on August 29th, on Tuesday. So yeah, there was a week delay between when we record this and when you're listening to this. So last episode, we talked about the book, what it is about, the content, how we think about things pragmatically.

Oh, actually, one thing we forgot to say last time is I borrowed a lot of the conceptual ideas from the Lean Startup methodology as a product, basically doing the MVP and then pragmatically growing it into something better. So anyway, if you haven't listened to the last episode, that's what it was about. Very quickly, where can people get that book and leave a review? Yeah, pragmaticpodcaster.com. Or you can just go straight to Amazon and search for Pragmatic Podcaster right there.

And in the beautiful orange cover, you will see that's our book. Right. I love the cover. Actually, you and I were riffing on, and I think you were, you had a few options out there.

And this one was like immediately, I love this, right? This is the one that I said, I love this. This is it. Yes. Yeah. And then we just adjusted a few minor details. But otherwise, it's the same cover we came up right away. And it's the same cover we use for our YouTube videos and also the podcast. Right. You also talk about like doing this for a podcast itself, the artwork and all that. So we won't go into all the details.

If you want to listen to like how Ilya does the artwork or what tools he uses and all that, it's in the book. How did you like do it? I think we were talking about some time back that it would be nice to do a book like this. Yeah. Our original thought was, let's do an episode about how to start a podcast with the expectation that YouTube will promote it to people more and people will watch it and that will help us get some visibility, some reach.

And at the back of my mind, I also had this thought that this episode could be converted into a book. And that's an interesting thing about content creation. You create, let's say, a video and audio episode and then you use the same outline and the same things you talk about to the microphone and write them up in the book in a much more structured form with pictures and all that. So yeah, we recorded episode 25. Yeah, it's been about eight weeks ago, right?

So yeah, it's about a couple of months and then gotten to writing from that. I think that episode is one of our top 10 now after like 33 episodes still. It's like number six or seven or something. I think so. Yeah. And I think it's also one of our top episodes on YouTube. But you did distill all that information down into like even more concise, but I think a more engaging fashion into the book.

Yeah, I feel like when I watch the YouTube video and I listen to that episode, it's too dense. It's too dense and it's a bit haphazard. Whereas the book, I was much more intentional in terms of the structure and very demanding towards myself to keep it brief. Actually, when I edited the book, I removed more than I added. I probably cut 20% of the content after content being like extra sentences, extra paragraphs

that were repeating, you know, themselves. Same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I like the structure of the book in that I don't know if the day zero one two is actually possible for somebody starting brand new. But if you have even a little bit of experience in this area, or you know what kind of podcast you want to create, I think that's a template that could totally work, right? Yeah. Maybe we should talk a little bit about the template.

So when we were creating products at Amazon, we use that framework of day zero, day one, day two, meaning that day zero is the things that you do before you even start using the product. So from a user perspective, so you have a problem, you have a need, let's say you need to do accounting for your business or for personal finances. So day zero is like you have a problem, you research solutions, you fiddle with stuff, but you actually haven't started doing anything yet.

So from the company creating the accounting software, you target that customer at their day zero to kind of sell them the solution that they have. And then day one is when you started using the software, you are just a total novice. You are still learning the ins and outs. Things are slow. And as a company, as a product developer, you give those users tools for like, you teach them, treat them like a student, like a child and teach them how to like get the basics.

And then day two is like, you're comfortable at the core functionality of the product. And you're starting to look at ways to improve your processes, you know, how you use the product. Maybe you start to connect your accounting software to whatever Slack to send you budget notifications, you know, stuff like that, right? Which is more advanced. And that's how we were thinking about user journey at Amazon and in our team. And I approached this the same way for the book.

Like day zero is before you even start the podcast, what do you need to think about? You need to think about like why you're doing this, who you're doing this for, what's the name of your podcast? Because you will have to say your name in the first episode, stuff like that. But it's actually very few things that you have to think about. But day one is when things really start.

Day one is when you record your first episode, is when you use all of the software, you buy the microphone and all that stuff and you post-produce your first episode. So you have to get through that initial hurdle of publishing the very first episode, which is, I would say, 80% of the things that you need to know to run a podcast. And then day two is how do you take what you've learned and episode two, three, four, five, how do you improve over time?

And the whole point there is when you think what many companies don't do well or many book authors don't do well is that they overload you with content, with information right away. So it's like, oh, we don't know if you're just getting started or if you're just researching. Here's how you can send budget notifications to Slack. The AWS experience you mean. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Throw you into the deep end. Like, here's all the APIs, everything you need to know. Go figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, here's a token to send budget things to Slack. And you're like, I don't know what the budget is. So yeah, that's what I try to do. Like, what is the absolute minimum things you need to know progressively and in what order so that you ramp up to become a proficient podcaster? So you wrote the framework or the template first, right?

Like, here's how I'm going to structure the book. And then you went into it. I remember back from those days when you were writing it that the first few days you said, oh, I'm like struggling through it, right? Like, like I spent the whole day. Like, I think once you told me you spent the whole day in a coffee shop or at least a few hours and came out with like after editing half a page or something like that.

Towards the end, you were like, I did the last three chapters yesterday or you were in like a total flow, right? So how did that process go? Yeah. So I started with that outline that we've created for the podcast. Then I restructured it, split the topics into day one, day two, day zero framework. And then I started writing. I'm like, it doesn't sound right.

So basically what I was doing a lot in the first few days is as I was writing, I was actually restructuring the table of contents too. And I think, I don't know if I would be able to work with a publisher because I think what publishers do, they require you to create a table of contents and then you just like fill in the blanks. I sort of did it in parallel.

You followed the lean startup model of developing a product versus the waterfall model of here's what you're going to write about, go write it now. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. I was very agile in this regard. So, but at some point it became very clear what the table of contents is. But the reason I struggled in the very beginning was that the first few chapters were like the introduction and some motivational stuff, some inspiring stuff, which I couldn't quite find words for that.

Because what I'm good at is not necessarily technical writing, but like writing about like the facts. The hard technical parts, but writing it in an easy to understand way and you excel in that. Explaining things. I guess I'm good at explaining things, like breaking things down into like stuff that anybody can easily understand. But something like an introduction, it doesn't yield itself to being like a framework kind of thing. It has to be a story. And I had some stories in mind.

Actually, I forgot what the story was that I wanted to. I think it was a story about cooking a meal that I started to write about how you like cook it and how it becomes a podcast. And I read it and it was just so lame. Actually, I wish I saved it. Maybe somewhere in the version of history, maybe I can still recover it. But it was very lame. So I had to like scratch it all, start over. Because I wanted to actually make it a thread of the entire book.

But then I just realized it's just too ridiculous. It doesn't work. At least it's not how I speak about things. But at some point, I really focused on the problem of a hypothetical aspiring podcaster. And like you were saying, you don't know where to start, right? There's just so much stuff. And like breaking down that stuff into digestible chunks right away and inspiring that confidence that you can master all of that. And I'll help you do that. And that's how I approached that.

And then after that, things started to flow. So I was also reading the book by Patrick Winston called Make It Clear, which is an amazing book. It's about communicating thoughts clearly. If you don't want to buy the book, which I think it's a pretty expensive book, actually, you can watch his video. I think it's called How to Speak on YouTube. It's one of his MIT lectures. Okay. We should link to it in the show notes. Yeah. He unfortunately passed away, I think, about 10 years ago.

But that video is an amazing video. So I used a lot of his recommendations while writing the book, which hopefully, I mean, you already said multiple times, it was clear and great, so people should buy it.

I thought the part that you struggled with the most, I really enjoyed that a lot, right? Which is the beginning. Okay. So it was worth the struggle. It was worth the struggle. And I think what I really liked, I've said this multiple times already in the previous episode, the quotes that you pulled in. Now, again, you and I, we know each other for a while. So it might be because of that, but it resonated with me quite a lot. So yeah. Yeah. Okay. Did you use ChatGPT?

No. So every time I try to use ChatGPT, I just absolutely despise what it outputs in terms of like actual way of expressing thoughts. The voice and tone of ChatGPT is, it can't mimic me. I'm not famous enough as Corey Quinn so that I can tell it to write in my voice and tone. So whatever voice and tone it outputs is not my voice and tone. It's very social media-y, if I could explain it in some way. Very Gen Z-ish.

Yeah. I think what it really excels on and what I use it for is I have some rough thoughts and I say, hey, I want to write about this and I give it like three, four bullet points. Come up with something. It comes up with something, I hate it, but I have the structure of like where to put what

and all that. Then I write it myself and then I say, here's what I wrote, like copy edited. And then it says, oh, you did a great job covering all these points. Here's what I would recommend and comes up with something. And then I hate it again, but much less than the previous one. Then I do like a final edit of it and post it. What do you use it for? Let's say I'm writing about a LinkedIn post, for example, right? About whatever it is that I'm thinking about.

Okay. So in this process, what were some of the big learnings for you? Yeah. So one thing that was very unexpected is that I could hardly focus on anything else while writing because I was thinking about it all the time. I just got so obsessed about, so immersed in the structure because unlike, let's say, social media posts, social media posts is self-contained few paragraphs. Maybe max 30 minutes of thinking about it.

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, even if you spend the whole day thinking about it, once you wrote it, you're done. You don't write a social media post for two weeks. And this one ended up being, I think, 148 pages of pure text, like the Kindle version or PDF version. That's a lot. And it has to flow in a coherent narrative. And as I was editing the book, I proofread it twice.

I found things where, let's say, I mentioned something before it's time or when I restructure chapters and then things get out of context a bit and you have to edit this. It's very difficult. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, but you also have to keep the whole mental model of the book in your head. It's like writing software, essentially. If you disconnect yourself from it, do something else for a few days, well, good luck getting back into the flow.

Or you may be repeating the same thing that you have already written because you've forgotten because you're disconnected from it or that you may be writing it again in a different part, but you're like going too much into detail in this part. Yeah. Makes sense. It is like software. Also, it's very intense. It's not like you can just sit down and write for eight hours. You just can't.

I mean, maybe some people can, but I came across a short clip of a Stephen King interview where the host was asking him, how is he able to write so much? He has so many books because he has, I don't know how many books, 50 probably. And he said that he writes consistently for three to five hours every day.

And no matter how much he can accomplish, he just sits down and writes. And I think this is a great advice. You just get into this and you get into the flow. But I think once you miss a day, then you're screwed because you have to get back to the same flow. I think his stuff arguably is even more complicated because he does world building. Character development. Character development. Yeah. All of that. But yeah. So that, that was hard. Where did you do the writing?

I started working in my home, but I was not able to do any work at my usual desk. I somehow needed a different place outside of my work desk. So I mostly wrote on the couch. But what I noticed after a while is because I was holding my laptop on my knees. And when you type a lot, there's a lot of these micro movements of the laptop. And my eyes start to hurt after a while because you concentrate on the text. It's like a white background, you know, black text.

And like those micro movements, they made me sort of almost sick. Then I started writing on dinner table. And after a while that became almost like my desk. I couldn't write there anymore. I started going to the coffee shop and in the coffee shop, you can change tables. Like one day I see that one table, the other day I see that another table, like sitting outside. So I think some of that change of scenery really helped me be more productive for some reason. Right.

I feel the, pretty much the same. So when I am in a relaxed kind of work, kind of mood that I know this is the plan for my day, I want to build this, or I want to fix this, or all of these things, I feel like I'm most productive in a space like a coffee shop, not at my desk. And there are some like, I think, physical causes for that. Also like the temperature and all that. I'm in the basement.

It's usually colder here because if I warm this up, the upstairs like bedroom becomes like super hot. And I don't like that. I like to keep the bedroom at a more comfortable, which means this place is a bit colder. So I kind of like wrap my feet or something like that without thinking about it. And I don't like it. Those are the physical things. But the environment itself, for some reason, when I go into a coffee shop and I put my headphones on, everything else just blurs. Right.

There are people there, but I just forget about them. I think after a point and I get into a really good zone. The contradiction to this is when I'm under pressure. Like the last three, four days before we took the one week break, right? Where we were basically going to launch the beta and we had some problems with the background app crashing and all that. And I was trying to figure out what's going on. That it didn't matter where I was. I worked here on this desk.

I worked on the bed and I was like super productive everywhere. But that's not my like regular norm. And I think maybe that's what you're saying too, that when you're in that relaxed, calm kind of work mindset, a place like a coffee shop or somewhere like that, it helps you more. Yeah. I also feel like when you write something, it's a very creative endeavor and it's very hard to do it when you are stressed. So it's not like you can just push yourself to write more.

Well, I guess you can, but it's not going to be any good for most of us.

Not for me, obviously. Whereas if you do some more technical work, I mean, some of it is obviously creative, but some of it is just pure debugging and troubleshooting. I don't want to diminish them, but I feel those differently too. Like when I'm super stressed and I know that I need something to get done, I just do it. And, but I wouldn't be able to write much under those conditions. And you won't be able to sustain that for like more than a few days, I think.

No, no, no. And I think you are going to talk about it too. I see it in the notes, but walks. And I think it's more than the walk. It's the rubber duck effect that helps me quite a lot when I'm writing software, right? Like when you're deep in something and you can't figure out what's going on and you're like, you've tried everything, all sorts of debugging, nothing works. Take everything out, go for a walk.

And I think you will probably have much more clarity thing from a different perspective or a different higher level about the problem. And you'll probably come up with something else at that time. Yeah. I have a difficult relationship to walks because on one hand, just like you are saying, right? They help get out of whatever the mental state when you're stuck or maybe not creative enough.

But at the same time, let's say if I know I need to do something and I go out for a walk, I feel stressed for not sitting down and working and going for a walk instead. And I don't have a dog. So it's not like I'm forced to go for a walk, right? It's a conscious act of just like going out and doing nothing. You feel like you're wasting time. I feel guilt. Okay. And I know it's not healthy. I know it's not good.

That's why I mostly walk very late at night when I'm already done with work. Yeah. And I think maybe our CDO helps me in more ways than I realize because it is, if you think about it, you have to go on at least two, three walks, at least two usually per day, right? But I do get a lot of clarity while doing these walks. And sometimes I'm listening to a podcast and I'm learning something or getting some information.

But sometimes I just put on some like ambient music sort of thing and think about, especially if I'm, if I have been working very hard on a problem and I'm not making progress or something like that, that's when I feel like, okay, let me just put on some ambient chill music, some music that I know really well already so that my mind is not distracted by the music. And then I go on a walk and I usually come back with like, okay, yeah, there's a completely different way to solve this.

Yeah. I'm totally with you. More recently, what I started doing is when I go for a walk, usually it's like 10 or 11 PM at night. I leave my phone at home and basically the only electronics I have with me is my Apple watch where I track how much I walked and all. So I either go for a run and then walk a little bit, or I just walk. And a couple of days ago, I walked for six kilometers, which is about four miles. And yeah, I didn't listen to anything. You know, I didn't have the phone.

Like there was nothing to, there was no external noise coming into my head and sort of had to process all of the noise that there was already inside. So I had this random thoughts. It was just like a stream of randomness. I just let it be like, I almost sort of meditated while I walked. Right. But then at some point, all that noise started to go away and I started to get a lot of kind of insights and some thoughts.

And actually I was about to go home, but then I walked for another 20 minutes and I just had this stream of cool ideas and thoughts and all that. I had to record them into my voice notes on the Apple watch. Otherwise I would just forget about that. Actually, that's a great point. I usually take notes on the notes app, but I dictate them when I'm like walking.

Maybe voice notes would work equally well. I don't know if it works, if the transcription works without the phone nearby. I don't usually, I mean, the quality of that note is so bad that I can't like copy paste it anyway. Right. So I read it back and then I rewrite it or rephrase it anyway. It's just more like, here's a thought. I don't want to forget about this. This is a really interesting thing that I want to talk about. So tools.

And I think this is also for creative endeavors, the tools that you use, even in software, right? Like if you ask me to do this in a different tool than the one that I love, I would struggle a lot and I would be less productive and I'll be distracted by the tool itself quite a lot. I know you have a favorite. What was the experience of writing a book in that? I just use Google Docs because I wanted to write in a way that will be easily exportable to PDF without any extra work.

So I initially set up the fonts and all of the header styles and all that because I actually learned this from Neil Gaiman's masterclass. He was talking about comics and how the placement of the frame is very important. Like which page of the frame is on. Is it on the left or is it on the right? Like do you have to like flip the page to see the next frame? Because it becomes part of the story. Like basically like the positioning on the page is part of how you unfold the narrative.

Obviously it's not as sophisticated in my book, but like I didn't want to have like half a paragraph on kind of hanging over to the next page. So I'm like, I'm figuring out, okay, so this chapter is going to be two pages. So I try to keep it to two pages in that formatting. So again, you know, I use the agile process here. I won't be surprised if many people will tell you just write whatever and then figure out the formatting later. Formatting is not important.

It just doesn't work for me this way because then I have to edit more afterwards. So I would rather do it in the right formatting right away. And then I don't have to edit so much. So I use Google Docs. I know the Pragmatic Programmer book was written in Markdown and then somehow processed from Markdown into a book. That was very interesting. But I'm like, okay, so I don't want to learn any new tools. So I'll just stick with whatever I want. And then I used Kindle Create, which is a...

Piece of shit. Piece of shit. I remember you struggling to do it for like three, four days. So there's a piece of software called Kindle Create by Amazon, which is a Java app for desktop. Terrible user experience where you import your Word file. I had to export Google Doc as a Microsoft Word doc X extension file. Import it into Kindle Create. It messed up a lot of bullet points and headers. So I had to go through the entire thing and sort of reformat parts of the document.

And then it gives you the preview for Kindle. And one of the things that was absolutely infuriating is it wouldn't get the padding on bullet lists right. So you have to type X number of spaces to make it look right, as if you're using a typewriter. I did not like that part. But it took me maybe a couple of days, maybe two or three days to get it right in Kindle Create. But it was a struggle. What I really find even more crazy about this is I asked you, right?

Like you're struggling through it quite a lot, right? Creating this Kindle specific version. If you make major edits or even minor edits to the original, like your canonical book in Google Docs, are you going to have to redo all of this? Because you can't import like one chapter or anything like that. You have to import the whole thing. Okay, you can copy-paste a chapter or copy-paste a word.

Actually, I made a few type of corrections, so I had to make it into places, which was a nightmare. Because you forget about those the next day. Anytime you have to do the next edition, I'll have to do it again. Maybe you can find somebody and pay them for doing this because that was not an easy task. It was too mundane. But the thing is, like, if you export EPUB from Google Docs, it is a piece of crap. It is just like absolutely not usable.

So you have to use some software that actually formats it specifically for EPUB, for eBooks. And actually, even that EPUB that I created in Kindle Create, it looks perfect in the Kindle edition. I mean, on the Kindle device. But when they open it in Apple Books, it looks okay. It's like a B+. When you use it on Kindle, all of those indents and all that stuff, Kindle corrects it all for you.

But the most interesting piece of software actually I used in this whole process is Adobe InDesign that I used for formatting the paper book, which was, I was, wow, this is an amazing piece of software. I think it costs something like 20 bucks, 30 bucks a month for a subscription. But there's a seven-day trial. And I actually did it in six and a half hours. Maybe did a few more, like, edits the next day. But overall, I didn't have to pay for it at all.

By the way, Kindle Create is also a free piece of software. But, yeah, Adobe InDesign, you have to pay for it, but I just canceled the trial and I didn't have to pay for it. So that's a tool that publishers use to format books and magazines and all that. And, oh, my God, it is powerful. I imported that same, I think it was either DocX or PDF. I don't remember which one it was. I think it was DocX. A few things got kind of out of whack a little bit.

It had to do a bit of edits, like with images and stuff. It took me maybe a couple of hours of watching YouTube videos to figure out how to do certain things. Interface, like images, like there are some concepts that were not familiar to me that I need to learn. The reason why I couldn't do it in Google Docs is that when you print a book, the margins, for example, the inner margin needs to be more than the outer margin. Because that inner margin goes into the spine of the book.

So if you leave too little of a margin, you can't read there. And the thing is, like if you look at the document in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, you just have one page at a time. But if you look at the book, you have two pages. You look at two pages at the same time, right? Which means that the inner margin is on the right side for the left page and on the left side for the right page. So you have to have this alternating margins, right? It's just not possible in Google Docs.

And that would change the flow of the paragraphs and all that completely. Yeah. Exactly. And you cannot export what I did in InDesign to PDF because it would be like out of whack because those margins are not correct, right? So it's a tool meant for like paper or like physical book production. Yeah. Physical books, magazines, booklets. I guess just like any Adobe tools, very powerful. What I was very positively surprised with is, I don't know if you used Photoshop.

I used Photoshop version 5, I think was the first version I used before the Creative Suite and all that back in the late 90s. Maybe even Photoshop version 4. You know that arrow tool to select items? It had a keyboard shortcut V. It is still a keyboard shortcut V even in the other tool. So it's like their user interface is very consistent across the tool suite and across decades at this point.

Right. I mean, you can't change something like that. If you change, there's going to be a revolution. Right. Yes. But yeah, so Adobe InDesign, great tool. I did it all like in one day. Learned a lot. And I know next time I need to do something like that. I mean, I'll happily pay them 30 bucks a month to just finish this. But I also came to appreciate so much about book design in general. I also had to use a separate tool for cover design.

The cover designs were tricky because for Kindle, you have to have a certain ratios between width and height. And you know that the first time I got it done, I messed up. I used the same formatting I used for the PDF version, but the page size was different. So it kind of looked weird on Kindle. So I had to redo it again. Right. It looks smaller than other books on Kindle. Yes, exactly. So I had to re-upload a new one.

And for the paper book, you have to do basically like the whole thing with the front cover, back cover, and the spine as a single image. Where you have like the cover on the right, you know, the backside on the left, and the spine in the middle. And they give you the template because when you print the book, there is a thing called bleed. You don't know where exactly the cut of the page will be.

So you have to make sure that a couple of millimeters on each side are a safe area that you can just lose if it's printed a certain way. You have to think about all of that when you do that. Actually, I used a free version of Canva because there was nothing in the paid version that would help me there. So I didn't even have to pay for Canva for that. So yeah, that was very easy, just tedious because I had to do like different for hardcover paperback, PDF, and EPUB.

There are four different versions of the book I had to do for that. So what was the publishing experience, right? How did you choose to go with like Gumroad and yeah? Yeah, so Gumroad is the website, the platform where anybody can publish any digital product. People do courses, they sell PDF, they sell checklists, you know, video stuff. Any kind of content like that. That's the only one I really knew.

I looked at alternatives and like none of them seemed too much different. So I just went to Gumroad. It's very easy. You just create an account. You set up your bank account where you want the money to be transferred once somebody makes a purchase, which we use our company bank account for that. It's a very easy setup. Basically, like because you put all of those tax numbers and stuff, I think they have some kind of system in place to verify you. So it's very easy, very straightforward.

And then you choose from one of the designs. I had to create a couple of images in Canva to conform to their dimensions, which I basically use exactly the same cover, just like reformat it for different dimensions. Yeah. And then connected our domain, pragmaticpodcaster.com. And it was published within, I think, a day because there are no approvals, no reviews. I actually don't know how they do it. You could put all sorts of scam there. And I don't know how it works.

Yeah. And they pay us every Friday when there is something to pay us. Or you can also create discount codes, which we created a few of. Like I did one discount code for my Instagram followers, one for my Telegram followers, and then one for LinkedIn. So code Metacast gives you 30% off. And yeah, all the sales we had were from people using one of those discount codes. And you could actually see where people are coming from based on the discount code.

Yeah. It's a very straightforward, very pleasant experience. And then Amazon, how did the experience of publishing for Amazon go? So Amazon has this thing called Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP. Yeah. So you basically just go create an account. I wanted to create a separate account, like a company account. But turns out you cannot create a separate Amazon account with the same phone number. So I had to use my own account. But KDP is essentially like a sub-account.

You can even put a different name in there. But it's just attached to the same login and phone number. So yeah, I put all of our company details. I use Metacast Inc. as the publisher. I put our bank account details there, all of that. It was a pretty straightforward experience. I would say user experience is kind of clunky-ish. Gamma Road was a lot simpler. It's almost like an internal tool for Amazon. So yeah. Yeah. It is pretty good. I would say it's not powerful.

It does its job. Again, like B minus, C plus kind of. But it gets the job done. There's probably about 200 people working in there only. Yeah, only in some like 5,000 people org. So yeah. And then you submit your Kindle version and then it goes into the review. I suppose some humans look at it. Mine got approved right away without any hurdles. It took maybe two or three days. And then based on the Kindle book, you also create paperback and hardcovers. Oh, okay.

So you have to do the Kindle first? No, you don't have to. I don't think so. But I started with Kindle because I already had the EPUB. And then I created that PDF in Adobe InDesign. And then I used that for paperback and for hardcover. Then I had to upload different covers. I think description and all that data is the same. They let you choose the price point for all of the marketplaces being like .com, .mx, .canada, .eu, whatever they have.

Where basically I tried to make sure that the margin is five bucks everywhere. Except for I think some of the countries like India and Argentina or whatever. They offered to list it for a lower price. Maybe because the purchase power is different in those countries. So I lowered those prices as well. And then, yeah, again, those go through the two or three days review and then it just gets published. Was there anything specific about designing the cover for the hardcover one?

No, but you just have to account for all of those bleed margins and all that.

I got the hardcover sample. It's pretty good. I think our Metacast logo with all of the background lighting. I would say the quality is a bit lower than I expected. I think it's still decent. But lower than I expected. On the hardcover specifically, but not on the paperback. No, both hardcover and softcover in paperback. So next time we do another edition, I'll probably look at that logo, maybe make it less glowy, neon-y. Less glowy, yeah.

And so since publishing, you have put on some Google Ads and stuff like that. How is that working? What are you learning? So I started Google Ads last week for the Gumroad. These are like keyword ads? Keyword ads, yeah. So if you search on Google for how do I start a podcast and a bunch of similar queries, actually, there are no other ads there. So if you do that, basically, our ad is the only ad. I personally have not seen it.

I think Google doesn't show it to me because I'm the owner of that ad. Maybe that's why. And I only do it in the U.S. for now. So it will show our ad. You input a few headers, you input a few descriptions, and Google sort of mixes and matches them and tries to optimize. And I set up a Google Ads tag and a Google Analytics tag on the Gumroad website. You just give them a tag ID and also inject some of the code for Google Ads. And that enables Google to track how those ads convert.

That allows Gumroad to track how it's performing. It allows Google Ads to track how it performs on Gumroad because it allows data to be sent from Gumroad to Google. So I set the campaign to optimize for conversions, which means like if people are buying, it will do something differently. So far, there have been about 30 clicks costing $1 each. It's just over $1 each. That was the crazy part for me. Yes. Like there are no other ads.

We are still getting charged like $1 per click because it's auction-based. Like I don't know why it's so much. And zero purchases. So we have pretty decent click-through rate. So about 7% or 8% of people who see the ad actually click the ad. And I made sure that everywhere in the ad, I put the price so that people don't think like it's like a free thing. I'm just going to click on it. Free booklet, yeah.

They see $9.99 and then still they click in to get to the page and then they don't buy it there. And then they don't buy, they don't add to the card. I've changed the copy of the page to make like added review there and like added those five stars. Emojis, try to make it more enticing. There's still no change. And then yesterday you and I talked about why don't we just make it free and see if people download it, even if it's free. Like what is not working there?

Because it's, you can't talk to those people. You can't ask them. Because the click-through is happening, it's the final buying is not happening. And you'd assume the click-through is already knowing that it's a $10 book. So something about that page that they're landing on is not working. We're trying out various things in there, yeah. Yeah. And so we made it free now just to see if that leads to any conversions.

Because if it does, we could explore an option where we offer maybe a free booklet, shorter version. And then people can buy a full version after they read the short one. Even though it's like $1 per click, I don't think it's going to be sustainable. Given that you have a margin of, I think, $7 on Gumroad. So my hypothesis is that one of the reasons why it doesn't work is people land on some basically random website. They're not familiar with Gumroad.

Yeah. And they ask to put their credit card in. It might be a bit of a hard sell. So Amazon might work better for us. I mean, that's the hypothesis. So we will exhaust our options with Gumroad first because we get higher margin there. And we also have more control there in terms of analytics. But then we'll try and do Amazon ads. And with Amazon, I think it's very important to have some reviews. So, so far, we have two five-star reviews, verified purchases.

So if you buy our book, please leave us a review because that helps gain credibility. Not just for Amazon, right? But for people who are looking at a book, if I see zero reviews on the product, I'm not going to buy it. So that's why we need to have some more reviews. So that's why we'll keep experimenting with Gumroad.

But the next step will be to try more stuff on Amazon with maybe like directing Google ads to Amazon, which we will not be able to track effectiveness of, unfortunately, and also trying to do ads on Amazon itself and see how that performs. But yeah, so, so far, it's going a lot slower than I thought. And I think eventually, you know, we might change our strategy towards the book altogether. Once we make money with the app, the book could just become a marketing thing.

We just give away for free to gain visibility and to build a reputation, right? Right now, we are still trying to make money. We're also learning quite a lot about the ads ecosystem and how all of this works, that that's going to be very valuable. If you have to pay like $1 per click to acquire new users, that's not going to be sustainable.

We don't have VC funding to afford that. We don't have millions to pour into just like buying users. Yeah. Okay. So that was a great episode. 53 minutes recording as we speak, which originally we had planned the whole episode. Like the thing that came out last week was part one. This is part two. We have decided, okay, we'll do it as one. And that would have been like almost two hours long. Yeah. So I think it's good that we split it up. All right.

So to close this up, Ilya, what podcasts are you listening to right now? Can't you answer questions for once? I need my voice to rest. What are you listening to? Yeah. So right now there are two things that U.S. Open is going on. So I'm listening daily, almost daily to the tennis podcast. That's soccer, right? No, that's tennis. Give more context. Yes. U.S. Open Tennis Championship. One of the four Grand Slam events of the year that's going on right now.

As we speak, it's going to be almost the quarterfinals. I mean, as you're listening, it'll be the quarterfinals going on. So the tennis podcast, that's what I'm listening to every day. So they go through the entire day's play. I love the way they talk about like, it's more emotional than factual about what happened in the matches. It's more behind the scenes, kind of like what happened in the interviews and all that. I'm not spending each and every moment watching tennis, right?

Maybe I watch an hour or so every day. But this podcast keeps me up with like what's happening behind the scenes. And it also tells me about maybe some of the matches that I did not watch. What happened in there? What were the big points there? So I like that during the Grand Slams. The other one was Hard Fork. There is a new episode. So the latest episode, as we were recording on August 29th, was they had a story about New York City basically stopping Airbnb.

And there is a really nice article or like podcast on the effects of that, why it's happening and how Airbnb is trying to do, what hosts are thinking. Very different, all sorts of perspectives in there. So I really like that. Other thread in that episode was about the GPU shortage right now and what crazy things startups and companies are trying to do to acquire GPU. So it was overall a really good podcast episode. That's cool. So I want to share two things.

So last week, actually the week before last, I binged on the entire catalog of six or seven episodes of the podcast called The Really Good Podcast by Bobby Althoff. I discovered Bobby just accidentally on TikTok, just got recommended to me in the feed. And she was talking to Mark Cuban, who is a famous investor and he's the owner of a basketball team in Detroit, I think. Oh, he was on Shark Tank. I mean, I never watched Shark Tank, but that's probably where people know him from, right?

He's one of the sharks there in the tank. Feeding on those poor startup fish. Yes. Yes. Yeah, but he comes across as a very nice, generous person, by the way. He is one of the nice people in there. Yeah. So they're sitting on the concrete floor somewhere in the parking lot. It's like dirty socks and all in that clip that I saw on TikTok. And she asks him questions like, can you give me some money? And he's like, no. She's like, why not?

And the whole flow of the conversation is like this. So it's almost like she just blurs out questions, sometimes switching the subject in the middle of the other person answering the question. And it's just so bizarre the way she does it. For me, it was like a puzzle to crack, right? I'm like, what am I seeing? So there is something very wrong about the whole conversation, like the flow of it. But there is also something very captivating.

So yeah, I was doing some stuff before my family came back home to the US. And I was like doing stuff in the house. So I listened to all of her episodes. And that Mark Cuban is one of the better ones. But the other ones... So somehow she got to talk to Drake. I don't know any of his songs. I mean, if you sing me his song, I'll probably remember it. But I don't know if any of his songs are... But I know his name. I know he's like a big shot kind of performer.

So she somehow got to record with him. I watched that interview as well. And then he started introducing her to his friends. So I think she has like three or four episodes with like rappers. And this whole thing just feels so either staged or like absolutely bizarre. But yeah, somehow I just got into it. But actually last week, I saw another clip in TikTok. She was a guest on somebody else's thing. And they asked her and she couldn't kind of contain laughter.

And like I never saw her laugh in her own videos or her own podcast. So maybe it's a character that she portrays in those podcasts. And she creates this kind of whole artificial like total weirdness. Persona, yeah. Yeah, that persona. So anyway, so Bobby Althoff, the really good podcast. I'll keep listening to that. Some of those things like I'm almost embarrassed to recommend, but I personally really like it.

Yeah. And then just very briefly, I haven't finished listening to this yet, but it's a very great episode on the show, How I Built This by Guy Raz. Probably everybody knows this show. It's about Tetris. The game that actually came out of the country I was born in from USSR. And I listened to about 40 minutes of it so far. There's this guy called Dirk Rogers or something. It's one of the newer episodes, right? Like in the last month or...

It's the latest episode based as of today, as of the time we were recording this. So this guy, he was working with the Russian creator of the game. He brought it to Game Boy. That's how it got like insanely popular everywhere. So the interesting thing that I just want to call out from that episode, the reason they knew the game was going to be a super hit is in Russia, whoever worked in front of computers in the late 80s, when we were playing Tetris.

It basically came to the point where it started to disrupt the productivity of government organizations. Like Solitaire was for a while later. Later on, because Tetris was before Solitaire. Yeah, like on Windows, yeah. I think Windows was actually after this. It was like a DOS time still. Right, right. That's what I mean. Like later on with Windows 98 or something, Solitaire was built in and everywhere on Office Desk, you would just see people like flipping the cards on that.

The really cool story that I really enjoyed in the podcast is when, so this guy, his wife is Japanese and also his parents moved to Japan. So he works in Japan. He's like Dutch American or something, but he lived in Japan. So he got an audience with the Nintendo CEO, owner, basically the chief of Nintendo. They did a bunch of stuff. And then at some point he came to him and pitched him Tetris. So this guy, he doesn't play games.

He calls in this guy, I forgot his Yamamoto or something, the guy who created Super Mario. And he asks him like, is this game any good? And he says, yes. And I think Yamoji is the name of the Nintendo CEO. And he's like, why? Well, how do you know this? And he's like, because your accountants and other people like who work for Nintendo play this during lunch breaks and after the workday is over. So like people play that game when they don't have to play games.

And yeah, so that's how they got the deal and all that. And it was just so interesting to listen about how business was done back in late 80s, early 90s. And also in that culture. It's actually the point that I'm on right now is he came to USSR to negotiate with the Russians about the licensing terms. And I haven't finished listening to this yet. So yeah, it's just a fascinating story. Like any story on Guy Raz's shows, I think it's incredible. Highly recommend.

Okay. That was a very long answer. I think that's the wrap for episode 34, part two. Yeah. Next week, we'll do an episode on inerts of our startup. Some of the subscriptions that we've been using, the tools that we're using, and some of the

struggles that we've gone through. It'll be an interesting one. Some of the products of some very popular, world-known company that has no clue how to do UX across different products. So, but you mentioned wrap. I didn't. You did Drake. Okay. So I thought, is the chicken wrap or is it, you know, when like people wrap things? Okay. But so my kids are back home, right? And my younger one listens to the artist called Video Game Rap Battles. It's actually pretty cool.

This guy, or guys, I don't know actually, it's multiple people. They have something like Pikachu versus Eevee. Eevee is another Pokemon. It's like a rap battle, which is pretty cool. Kids love it. But what I discovered recently, following my kids, like using Spotify, there is a band called Howdy Toons that has an album called Heavy Metal Dinosaur Songs. And man, I like listening to those songs myself.

So those are basically like heavy metal from the 80s, early 90s, like very like shred, kind of lots of guitars, very professionally made. But it's songs about velociraptors and spinozaurs and T-Rexes. I like listening to those. And I think we've crossed that era of like Baby Shark songs into... Into dinosaur heavy metal. It's so funny because like when in mid 90s, when I was listening to the 80s music, like heavy metal, it was still very edgy. It was marginal.

You know, when I was growing up, people like frown at you when you listen to heavy metal. Like you would never hear heavy metal playing out of shops or like on the street, right? Right now it's like kids songs are shred heavy metal. Yeah. One last thing now that you've talked about music and YouTube is the last segment of the Hard Fork podcast episode that I just talked about. The latest one is of August 29th. The last segment is about AI music.

And it has some really incredible things in there. Like their point of view is like somebody started AI music based on the voice of a well-known artist. I won't go into all the details right now. And what's the legality and all of that. But they also play a lot of interesting music in there. It's a fascinating listen. Go give it a listen. Oh, nice. Yeah. I should take a listen. Actually, now I wonder if the heavy metal dinosaur songs are produced by AI or not.

And actually, with this kind of music, I don't care. Okay. All right. Cool. That's the wrap. See you next week. Chicken wrap? Or dinosaur wrap.