RHS 019 - Joe Pulizzi: What the Godfather of Content Marketing Learned While Writing a Thriller

Ryan Hanley: They call him the godfather of content marketing. And while Joe Pulizzi is the entrepreneur who founded the Content Marketing Institute, one of the marketing industry's most well-read and well-respected media publications in history, he has now taken his entrepreneurial journey in a whole new direction, writing his very first fiction novel, *The Will to Die*.

Today on the podcast, we don't just dissect some of the best practices of marketing and content that Joe knows inside and out. We dive into the mindset it takes to transition from one entrepreneurial endeavor to another, especially one that goes from real-world marketing tactics to the creative fictional world of writing a thriller novel.

Today we have Joe Pulizzi on the podcast, and it is absolutely my honor to share him with you. Let's do this.

Ryan Hanley: I'm good. I'm good. I got my little... So I know you have the new book out, and I obviously want to ask you a lot of questions about that. But is there anything else you want to talk through? I have a bunch of things I want to talk about, whatever you like, because you're doing some great stuff from what I've been catching.

Joe Pulizzi: Well, I don't know about "prolific."

Ryan Hanley: Well, you're creating a lot of content, especially on Instagram. That's where I've been seeing you.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I'm trying to find my place. I took a job as the CEO of a fitness company, so I stepped out of marketing for a while. It was in my hometown, and it was one of those things that comes to you where you think, "Is this going to be a really bad decision, or is this fate putting something in front of you that you have to say yes to?" So I said yes and took it on, and it ended up being that thing that I shouldn't have done. Which is okay.

Ryan Hanley: Really? Yeah. So when did... I took the job in January. I was a chief marketing officer for a technology company and was doing a lot of other stuff in the space. I ran that company until September, at which point the founder came back in and said, "I want to be the CEO now. Thank you for your time. Have a nice day." So it was like, okay. I learned some valuable lessons there, which is all good in the hood.

But yeah, basically coming back into the space and finally doing what I probably should have done a decade ago—starting the kind of marketing company that I wanted to start all those years ago and never did. I've just been creating like crazy. Sometimes the floodgates open and there's no way to repress it. So I've been doing social media, an article, a video a week, a couple of podcasts. I've just been nuts.

Ryan Hanley: Do you have a newsletter?

Joe Pulizzi: I just reworked it. I had it set up kind of like Seth Godin's, where when I published something on the website, it went right out to them. I've been watching my stats, and what ended up happening was people were finding me in other places and didn't want me to fill up their inbox. I was getting about 15 unsubscribes every time I would publish a new piece of content. People would write me notes like, "I'm unsubscribing because I follow everything on LinkedIn," or "I follow everything on Twitter."

So I sent out an email last week and said, "This is our current setup. Based on what I'm seeing in terms of how people are operating with this, it doesn't feel like this is the best way to use email to communicate with you." The feedback I got was that's 100% true. Everyone basically said they'd rather have a roundup email once a week with some insights or exclusive stuff. So I'm changing that up.

Ryan Hanley: It's weird because with everything I'm doing here, I'm starting over. I sold the 200,000 emails, which was fine, but I'm starting over now building an audience around the book. I started the e-newsletter, and now that I'm putting out content in all these different channels, I have one hook: get them to sign up for the e-newsletter. It's starting to work. I'm doing about a 47-48% open rate consistently. It's working really well, but it's different. It's a different experience—you won't get it anywhere else. I'm basically copying Ann Handley's model. If you're going to copy anyone...

Joe Pulizzi: Well, you know, I asked her how she did it. I'm where she was four years ago with starting hers. Now she's got 20,000 and it's working really well. She can monetize and do whatever she wants with it. So that's worked for me. I'm getting five, six, or seven subscribers a day. Hopefully it'll start really kicking into gear sometime soon.

Ryan Hanley: Can I ask you about your hook for the newsletter? Are you letting them know there's exclusive stuff, a downloadable, what is it?

Joe Pulizzi: I'm totally an open book. You go to joepulizzi.com, all my calls to action are around "The Random Newsletter." You get my three success tips for life and marketing. It's a 22-minute audio thing that I put together, really easy to do. And if you sign up for the book stuff as well, you get a free book chapter. That's how I'm doing it. I tell them exactly what they're going to receive every other Thursday. It talks about month writing, marketing, and money, and random stuff I think is interesting. So far, I get more people with nice feedback on that than almost anything I've done.

I built the base of it, and now I've just got to put the marketing juices on and see where it goes.

Ryan Hanley: That's really interesting. One of the things I've struggled with is that what I can get paid for and what I'm most interested in are two completely different things. I have a family, got to pay the bills, got to make the money. That comes from marketing, consulting, speaking, workshops. That's how I get paid. The things I'm most interested in—writing, researching, diving into things—not that I'm not interested in marketing, but it's not your passion.

Joe Pulizzi: Well, what do you most like writing about and researching?

Ryan Hanley: I love diving into human behavior. How do we get the most out of ourselves? Not so much habit hacks like James Clear—that stuff's cool and I'm definitely into it—but I'm so far down Brian Holiday's stoic trail, mashing that up against Jordan Peterson and being an individual. How do we have our own thoughts? There's so much stuff smashed against our face every single day. How do we actually operate as our own unique people? A hundred years ago, even though there were plenty of distractions, there was still so much less that you were able to operate in your own head for small bits.

When I talk to people, this is the question. I have a book I'm starting to work on, and the initial question was, "Why do we hesitate?" Why do people hesitate to do anything? I've been pounding insurance agents over the head for a decade to do very simple things. I've been teaching "They Ask, You Answer" before Marcus wrote that book—which I love, by the way. I always bust his chops because there's a decent chance I taught him "They Ask, You Answer." He's just so smart that he wrote the book.

Joe Pulizzi: That's actually how we found each other. We were doing similar things and I was like, "Oh my God, look at this pool guy doing that. We must be onto something."

Ryan Hanley: But I would talk to these agents and say, "I've been teaching you guys this for a decade, and nobody's doing it. Still no one's doing it." Then I started hearing their responses, and that put me down this trail. I started researching stuff. Long story short, marketing tactics are great, and I can talk tactics all day long. But not knowing the tactics is not the reason people are not successful at marketing. The tactics are never the issue. They're a symptom of what the issue is. Does that make sense?

Joe Pulizzi: Yes, it makes perfect sense. Here's my take. If I were you, I would mash those two together. I'm not going to say call it "The Stoic Marketer," but there aren't a lot of people out there doing that. You're really interested in this other side, so why don't you take all that you're really passionate about and position it to the marketing professional? There's not a lot out there. You could be the guy who talks about that. That way it fulfills your creative side, and all you're doing is putting it out to these people you already know really well. That can still drive your marketing consultancy business and how you get paid. And if you do it well, which you will, that becomes your speaking. You can still drive consulting revenue by speaking about how marketers need to think, act, and behave in this society.

Ryan Hanley: See, this is why I do this podcast—free consulting from people who are smarter. I'm serious. While you were talking, I was getting chills. I was like, "Oh my God, that's his tilt." I agree with you. I feel like I've executed it very poorly thus far. You're right. Right now it has felt very "this side or that side." I wrote an article the other day... and again, we're just chatting. We probably should just hit record.

Joe Pulizzi: I already did.

Ryan Hanley: I already did? Okay, good. Then you can just do the whole thing. This is really just a solo podcast. That's it. An audience of what?

Joe Pulizzi: Oh, man. It's just funny these things. To hear you say you're restarting brings up a lot of memories. I very much felt that way. Before the CEO job, I had built an audience of almost 20,000 people by email. We were doing close to 50,000 unique visitors to our website a month, just insurance content. I was doing marketing videos specifically designed for insurance agents and getting 3,000 to 4,000 views on an individual video. Then I go from that to three months ago, I post my first video after this little break, and it gets like 200 views. I'm just like, "Wah, wah, wah." You've got to start over.

Ryan Hanley: I know. It was funny hearing you say that. When Robert and I restarted this marketing podcast—we're on our 12th or 13th episode back since we took a break. We did 200 episodes before. The first one back did great, and I thought, "Oh my God, you can take a year and a half off and it's all fine." Then it dropped, and I thought, "Oh geez, I'm going to have to actually work at this. I've got to work to get the audience back." I wasn't devastated, but I was like, "They went somewhere else."

The other thing I found—and I'm interested in your takes on this because it feels like we're in similar spots—my very first podcast was *Content Warfare*. I built that up in 2011, 2012. Distributing a podcast in 2019 going into 2020 is incomparable to what it was like in 2011, 2012, 2013. The amount of competition and high-quality competition in the marketplace is crazy. It's awesome—I listen to a lot of those podcasts—but there was a time when *Content Warfare* was one of like 30 marketing podcasts. Now there's 300,000.

Joe Pulizzi: I still have it on my iTunes list.

Ryan Hanley: You know what? I need to put out a couple of unique episodes to that. It still gets about 100 downloads a day. I need to put some stuff out to that list and say, "Hey guys, this is moving over here."

Joe Pulizzi: Don't move it. Just keep that because you keep all the subscribers that way. If you change the name and change the image, that's fine. But the great thing is if you have a new episode coming out, it goes right to the top. I'm already subscribed. Don't have people move when they don't have to. Just say, "Hey, this is whatever." You get all the subscribers. Don't relaunch, my friends.

Ryan Hanley: This is why Joe has often been described as the godfather of content marketing, because these are the stupid mistakes I would have made if we weren't talking today.

All right, man. I want to talk about so many things about your journey. You founded Content Marketing Institute, and for so long you sat at the beating heart epicenter of all things content marketing and the digital marketing revolution. All things passed through your ecosystem. I mean that in a very positive way. You knew the players, you helped them, you put a lot of people on stages who got their message in front of a lot of people who needed to hear them. I've always respected you for how hard you worked to launch many of the thoughtful people in our industry. That's incredible work.

You then sold that company and transitioned into this next phase. I'm not so much interested in your decision to sell—I completely understand that part, and anyone in business would. I'm interested in the next day. When you wake up that next day and that part of your life, which was a decade of what you probably thought about every morning when you woke up, is now someone else's. Not that it's not part of who you are—it will be forever—but now it's the next phase. What was that day like for you? What were you thinking about?

Joe Pulizzi: First of all, thank you. The next day came a year and a half later. We sold in June of 2016. My wife and I owned the business. We were really ecstatic about the whole thing. UBM, great company. We did our research. We knew they were going to take care of Content Marketing World, the brand, the employees. All that was great. But then you have something that's yours, and I still worked there for a year and a half. I'm not giving the orders anymore. Being an entrepreneur, as you know, you get a little itchy.

It wasn't until January 1st of 2018 that I was like, "Wow, we did it." That's when we really had the celebration. I know it probably sounds weird to say that because we had already sold and were compensated for the majority of that. So going back a little bit, in November of 2017, I penned my blog post to the content marketing community on the CMI site. It was called "The Love Letter to the Community." I typed why I was leaving and going on to something else. I didn't really say what that something else was. Everybody was like, "Joe, what are you going to do?" It was weird. I was like, "I don't know. I don't know what the next phase is going to be." I had to be honest.

That's where I got this whole sabbatical idea. I talked it over with my wife and read a lot on taking a sabbatical. I said, "Nobody gets an opportunity to do something like this. Let's go big here. I'm going to take a year off doing no work and nothing I don't want to do, no speaking gigs, all that kind of stuff." January 1st, I did that. I started telling people I'm going to do nothing. I'm going to take the year off, be with the kids, be with the family, be present. The first 30 days of that, I took the electronics-free sabbatical. No social media, no email, completely offline except for messaging with my kids. Then the other 11 months, I started to get into the creative side. I wanted to challenge myself a little bit, do something different. I started writing what became *The Will to Die*.

It was a weird journey. I always loved marketing and I still do, but I was more interested in being an entrepreneur. The marketing angle is just how you get there. That's how we made the money and built the brand. But I love the people. The people in the content marketing community are the best ever. Seeing some of these people grow up and become superstars in the marketing area—they haven't changed. These people are still salt of the earth. You email them, you call them, they'll still do anything for you. I'm just happy they still allow me to stick around.

Ryan Hanley: That part doesn't surprise me. I'll reiterate what you said: the community that gravitated around Content Marketing World—to do that work, you have to have a level of empathy to work with clients who are struggling to tell a story, to understand how their business intertwines with their clients, how you pull the most value out and deliver it back. It would be really tough to be an a-hole and do that work. It just would. It's a tremendous community. I'm to a certain extent an outsider, but I love to see them. I'm lucky enough—and I know you're in there too—that the Speak and Spill community, a lot of them are in that community. It's phenomenal to be part of that.

Joe Pulizzi: The reason why, to follow up on what you're saying, is that if you're in the content marketing industry doing consulting or you're a marketing professional trying to create content, you have to be empathetic. You have to understand the audience's pain points to develop the kind of content that's going to make an impact on their lives. Nothing against the ad folks in the world—I know a lot of really good ones—but go to the whole Mad Men side of the house, the "we're going to create this big campaign, this big interruptive thing." It's way different thinking. You really do need nice people on the content marketing side.

Ryan Hanley: Because they understand humanity. I don't want to get too deep on it, but it's true. The first thing you and I do when we go into consulting is say, "Okay, who is the audience?" I don't want to know necessarily what you're selling. I need to know who the audience is and what they're challenged with, because that's where you start. Then you can figure out down the road what you're going to end up selling. That's the issue most people struggle with in marketing. Marketing has completely changed from that standpoint. You don't start with your product anymore. Some people still do it that way. I don't. I want to start with the audience first. It's all about them. Then how do we get our message across from a persuasive standpoint once we build a relationship with them?

Do you think that content marketing and some of its principles have started to leak into the advertising world? In the last year or so, it sounded to me like content versus advertising eating content marketing. Even though advertising budgets are often higher, the principles of content marketing have actually started to eat advertising. Do you see that?

Joe Pulizzi: Oh, yeah. Somebody asked me years ago, "Will content marketing just become marketing?" This was back in 2008, 2009. I said, "Yes, I think it's just the right way to communicate with people." Marketing aside, this is how you should communicate with other human beings. You should be thoughtful. You should care about what they care about. You should try to provide value outside the products and services you sell. Very simple.

Now go to today. Look at Procter & Gamble. They've turned that advertising machine on its head. What are they doing in their 30-second spots? Tutorials. It's around this brand called "Home Made Simple." People don't realize that's a content marketing brand they started back in 2008 or so. They started it with a blog and an e-newsletter, and now they've integrated it into their ad program. They have a product line called Home Made Simple and a whole research facility around it. Brilliant. This is the way it should be. Is Procter & Gamble alone in this? No. We've seen Red Bull go into that area. We've seen Aero Electronics go into that area. We'll start to see more of that happening because how is it going to work if you don't do that? The 30-second spot is still alive. It's not going to die anytime soon, but it's a lot harder than it used to be.

Ryan Hanley: I'll be honest. My son turned six today.

Joe Pulizzi: Congratulations. Happy birthday.

Ryan Hanley: It feels like an achievement that I've kept him alive this long. It's way more his mom than it is me. It's almost in despite of me rather than because of me. But I look at the way he consumes content in any form. He doesn't care nor does he even try to learn how to use the regular TV remote. What he wants, he goes to Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube. He knows how to navigate them via the talk button on the TV. He presses a button, TV turns on. Right now he's super into Michael Jackson. "Play Michael Jackson, 'Beat It,'" and he starts dancing around the room. The one thing he wanted for his birthday was Alexa, so we got him the kids account on Amazon Alexa. Hopefully he's not listening to crazy stuff, and he can't order any toys. But he'll sit there and say, "Amazon, play some song from Frozen. Amazon, tell me how long until my birthday." He said that yesterday because we let him open a present early.

The way he consumes is completely content driven. To try to shove an ad in the way he views the content he's consuming would be impossible. An ad came on—one 30-second spot during a Bills game the other day. There was a quick injury, and they played one 30-second spot. He looks at me and goes, "Dad, these commercials. Oh my God, they're so long." It was one 30-second spot on an injury timeout. They have no patience for it.

Joe Pulizzi: What's great about what you're saying is that I've been seeing it. This whole thing about voice is huge. They're going to look back in 10 or 15 years and say, "What were we doing using our fingers to search on things? This is crazy." Everything's going to go voice, at least from a business perspective. You have to start thinking about that because who's not going to use this? I get frustrated if I'm on my Roku, fiddling around on Amazon Prime or Netflix, and I want to search for something but I don't have my voice set up yet. It is frustrating. I've got to scroll over to whatever I'm searching for.

Ryan Hanley: I almost think they make that system difficult so that you'll use the voice. The computer's like, "I don't want you typing things in here. Just tell me what you want me to do."

Joe Pulizzi: All right, we've spent the first 30 minutes talking about a bunch of different things, which are interesting, but really what I want to get into is this novel you wrote. There are a bunch of parts to it. You are absolutely an entrepreneur. You phase out of one entrepreneurial journey and into this next chapter—probably not the last by any regards, but certainly the next. The thing you decide to do is write a fiction novel, a thriller, *The Will to Die*. It's that sexy project that probably every creative wants to do but never actually ends up doing. Talk to me about one, the decision. Is this something you've always wanted to do? Two, talk to me about the process and maybe the business of a novel book. I'm so interested in it.

Joe Pulizzi: You want to know about the gut-wrenching process of creating a fiction novel. First of all, as you know, I've written or co-written five nonfiction marketing business books. A couple did fairly well. Some of the best in business.

Ryan Hanley: Well, thank you.

Joe Pulizzi: But my wife never read any of them. She read the acknowledgements page of all of them because she wanted to see what I said about her. That's it. I almost took it as a challenge. I really wanted her to read something that I wrote. I thought, "Well, what does she like to read?"

Joe Pulizzi: She likes to read thrillers and mystery novels. That's her jam. So I thought, well, if I'm going to get her to read something that I put together and create, I have to create something for her.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: So that was my thinking. So in January of '18, when I went on a sabbatical, that's when I started writing this thing and getting it together. That's the primary reason. I really wanted to do something for her. As sappy as it sounds, I wanted to give her a gift, hoping she would like it. I also wanted to challenge myself creatively. I don't want to make it sound like... I've written probably 5,000 blog posts on content marketing. I've written a lot of stuff on it. It comes very naturally. If you said, "Joe, write a content marketing article, 1500 words," I could have that thing done by the time we're done talking and just do a nice edit. I've written a lot on it. I don't want to say it's easy, but it's a lot easier than actually creating a world, which is what I did in *The Will to Die*.

Ryan Hanley: So the process of it...

Joe Pulizzi: I started in January with an idea: a marketing agency guy whose father passes away and ends up taking over a funeral home. I know both those worlds. I come from the marketing side, been in it for over 20 years. And I grew up in a funeral home. I didn't live there, but my grandfather and my uncle owned one. I was around it growing up all the time. I thought, "Okay, I've got the premise for a story. I know sort of what's going to happen." I started typing it up, and then I just stopped. There were no creative juices. I thought, "What am I going to do with this?" I talked to a lot of really smart friends of mine who are writers who had written fiction. The consensus seemed to be, "Put together the outline, get your chapters set up, then knock out the chapters as you go. Put it together, and that's your first manuscript." I thought, "You made it sound really easy." I drew a blank. I had absolutely nothing. I would sit in front of the computer and nothing would happen. I couldn't bring the story together from an outline standpoint.

Ryan Hanley: Wow.

Joe Pulizzi: Fast forward 10 months. Not kidding you. Nine, ten months of writer's block. Nothing. Then, I was running and listening to a James Altucher podcast. I can't remember who the guest was, but he was talking about how to get over writer's block. I was really interested. He said, "Don't overcomplicate it. Just sit in front of however you write and start writing about anything. Just start writing. What do writers do? Writers write. So set a goal: 250 words, 500 words, a thousand words to write." I thought, "That seems really easy. I'm going to do that." The first couple of days, I just started writing gibberish to get to my 500 words. Then I started to get into the rhythm of telling the story, and it started to come together. I remember one day I wrote 3,500 words. I was going, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe it." I came downstairs to talk to my wife after typing for hours. I said, "I can't believe what the character did today. You'll never guess." She said, "You didn't know what the character was going to do?" I said, "I had no idea. It just happened." When you get into the flow, those are the kinds of things that happen. So I restarted in October and finished the manuscript January 21st of 2019. Basically, three or four months from when I just got out of my own way and wrote at least 500 words every day.

Ryan Hanley: So the initial manuscript...

Joe Pulizzi: The initial manuscript had almost 100,000 words. I sent it to some reviewers and multiple editors, a copywriter, another editor, another round of reviews. The final final was probably April or May before we got into figuring out who was going to read the audiobook. It ended up at 85,000, 86,000 words almost on the dot, and eight hours and four minutes of narration time for the audiobook.

Ryan Hanley: Wow. Did you read it?

Joe Pulizzi: No, I tried. I read all my other books. But it's very difficult because you have to do the other voices and mannerisms. We hired a great guy named Kyle Tate. Kyle did a fantastic job with the voice acting. He's done tons of thrillers. Best money I've ever spent is not reading it myself.

Ryan Hanley: I've heard that from other fiction authors. The audience almost prefers the author to read nonfiction because you can inject some thoughts. But with fiction, they say, "Please author, don't read it. Hire someone who knows what they're doing." It's like acting.

Joe Pulizzi: It is absolutely acting. I would recommend that if you're doing a nonfiction book, try to read it yourself if you can.

Ryan Hanley: So in writing fiction versus nonfiction, what's one non-obvious difference? Maybe something that was easier or similar that people wouldn't realize?

Joe Pulizzi: The one thing that comes to mind right off the bat is the importance of editing. Whether it's nonfiction or fiction, 25% of it has to come out because we always tend to write more than we need to. That's with business writing, with anything. The differences? I can't tell you how different it is in creating a story and a world and keeping it straight. I had notes all over the place trying to keep track of the world. Who's in it? What's going on? With nonfiction, you're just telling the truth. With fiction, you're lying the entire time, so you have to keep track of all the lies. It's very difficult. What was a horrible thing—we almost published it this way, but I caught it on the last run through. My dates were off. It all happens in May of the present year. I had May 13th or May 9th, and they were off in how the story was working with sunrise and sunset. I thought, "I can't believe it. Someone would have called me on that." So you really have to keep track of those things. My advice is to keep track of characters. Write down, "This is Jack Miller. Jack Miller was born in Texas. His kids live in Dallas." Because you talk about that in the beginning setting up the character, and at the end when they come back, you'll either catch it on re-review or you have it in front of you. It's like putting together the buyer persona of each of your characters.

Ryan Hanley: That's actually why George R.R. Martin never got to book six of *Game of Thrones*. Not to bash on *Game of Thrones*, but the last two seasons were pretty horrible.

Joe Pulizzi: I never watched one episode.

Ryan Hanley: My recommendation would be to read the books and then watch the shows. The books he wrote are ridiculous. They're so good. I used to get made fun of all the time in college because I was part of a fraternity and played baseball. From the outside, I was a bro-y jock guy, but at night I would go up to my room and read fiction novels. I love sci-fi stuff. It was like, "Hanley reads books with maps." That's what I used to get made fun of for. One of the reasons Martin gave for never getting to book six is that each book took logarithmically longer to produce because the world had gotten so big and expansive that he couldn't keep track of the characters to bring them back in. He had an army of almost a thousand readers of *Game of Thrones* that he would call upon. He'd send out emails and say, "I have no idea what color this character's eyes are who lives in this part of the country." The world had gotten too big for him. It's really interesting to hear you say that because I always thought, having never gone through the process, you wouldn't think that. Then you hear this guy say it, and you think, "He's so dialed into this world, he must know everything." But you can't remember what someone's eye color was from chapter three of the first book.

Joe Pulizzi: Plus, when you're writing, you're in the zone. You don't necessarily know all the details you just wrote. Somebody asked me the other day about the character Brenda in more detail. I was like, "Brenda?" It took me a while to say, "Oh, Denise's girlfriend, Brenda." It just took me a while to get there.

Ryan Hanley: That stuff even happens in nonfiction books. I was listening to Robert Greene on Joe Rogan's podcast. He was telling a story, and Rogan followed up with a question. He literally had to say, "I don't remember. It sounds like something I wrote." It's so dense, and he just was like, "I believe I wrote that, but I have no ability to recall it for you."

Joe Pulizzi: That's so funny. I was on a live podcast when *Epic Content Marketing* came out in 2013. There's a chapter on the six aspects of epic content marketing. The host said, "Joe, in chapter whatever, you talk about the six aspects. Can you quickly run through those?" I said, "I don't know. I can name four of them." He said, "All six?" I said, "I can't. How about you tell me what they were?" I said, "Well, I don't want to go through all six right now, but here are the three key ones I would remember."

Ryan Hanley: That's great. Someone called me out the other day because I have this story I tell a lot. They said, "The last time you told that story, it was different than this time." I said, "I got to be honest. At this point, if you told me that story didn't even happen, I might believe you."

Joe Pulizzi: Have you listened to *Revisionist History* by Malcolm Gladwell?

Ryan Hanley: Some of it, yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: There's a whole episode on Brian Williams and the helicopter incident. It's fascinating because it talks about memory and how our memories absolutely change. They argue that Brian Williams didn't lie, but as his memory changed, he started to believe he was on that plane in that position as he told the story over 10 years. They talk about how we forget most things. We're telling stories right now that we believe in our hearts are true, but really didn't happen that way because we've been telling them for 20 years.

Ryan Hanley: I would 100 percent believe that. I think this is especially true when you create as much as you or I do. You get into the flow, and sometimes you inject little bits into the narrative that make it sound more exciting for the audience. You're not lying or trying to be dishonest, but you're in that moment. You come out and hope 80% of that was what actually happened. If the point of the story is to help move someone or entertain them, if a few little pieces are off, should we hold people accountable? I would be hypocritical to hold anyone accountable because I know aspects of things I've said have morphed, and today I couldn't tell you what the truth was.

Joe Pulizzi: That's the issue. I always tell the story of when we pivoted Content Marketing Institute in September of 2009. I got a rejection call for a service we were trying to sell. That was it. It told me the current model wasn't working. When I tell that story in my head, it all happens very quickly. I get the no, I go into the backyard feeling sorry for myself. Very quickly after that, I write down on a cocktail napkin—I don't know where I got it, but in my mind it's a cocktail napkin. I think I was drinking, but I was at home. I wrote down the model for what became Content Marketing Institute. That's the story. I don't really know how that whole thing happened. I know that it happened. I can't even get into that detail anymore, and that was almost 11 years ago.

Ryan Hanley: I like that visual. You come down, very sober, make yourself this really professional drink with the cocktail napkin in the backyard. You're contemplating life. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping. You're in your Zen moment. The muse plops onto your shoulder and gives you this idea. When I'm on stage, I lean into it. I'm in the backyard with a wife and two small kids, I don't know how I'm going to take care of them anymore. I'm feeling so emotional. I've made a horrible mistake by starting this business. Then I get the revelation: there's a better way. Content Marketing Institute.

Joe Pulizzi: Okay, we've got just a couple minutes here. I have a couple more questions about the book. Tell me a little bit about launching a fiction novel versus launching a nonfiction book. What are some of the differences in putting them out into the marketplace? You talked about building a new email list tailored to a community of people interested in that. What other things are you doing that you wouldn't have done with your previous work?

Ryan Hanley: The launching process for fiction and nonfiction is very similar. If you're working with an agent and a publisher, the process is long. You're at least 12 to 18 months out from accepting the proposal until you see the book. I launched the audiobook, the ebook, and the print book all at the same time. That's what I did with my last three nonfiction books published with McGraw Hill. When I researched how people launch novels, it's pretty much the same. If you go with a traditional publisher like Simon & Schuster, it takes that long time. They launch everything at the same time with a big three-month marketing lead-up. If you're a self-published author, you focus on the Amazon ebook and then maybe launch a companion Audible version. Everything is on Amazon.

Joe Pulizzi: Now, a couple things. I had a pretty good audience of marketers that follow me, especially on social media. But nobody follows me for this. Nobody even knows I'm writing fiction. This is a whole new thing. I'm figuring out how to build an audience with this. I have no audience. I just have people that like my marketing stuff. That doesn't mean anything when I'm launching a fiction novel. As I did research on how to launch a fiction novel, I got frustrated because everyone does it exactly the same. Most of the time, you're just beholden to Amazon. You have to focus on Amazon this, Amazon that, because if you don't bow before Amazon, nothing's going to work. I thought, "There's got to be another way." I was desperate to look for case studies of authors trying different things. Not much out there. Everybody's doing it the same. So I said, "Okay." If anybody knows, when I talk about content marketing, I talk about brands launching whatever they're going to launch on one platform and focusing on that one. If you're going to launch a podcast, you're all in on that podcast. You create one great thing and market using other things, but you have one thing that draws them in instead of everything at the same time. But that's what everyone's doing in book publishing. They launch it on audio, print, and ebook all at the same time. I think there might be a better way. I have no audience. I think if you focus on one channel only and focus all your energy on that, the results might be better than if you did it on every channel at the same time. So that's what I decided. My wife and I decided to launch on just audio and see how that goes. The second thing is I need people to try this thing, so let's give it away for free. The book launched on December 4th. For four months, I'm going to give it away completely for free on any podcast channel—Apple, Google, Stitcher, Overcast, Spotify. I thought the best way to build an audience is just to give it away and focus on audio. Some people have told me, "Joe, I only read books in print." I say, "That's fine. This is not for you." I'm focusing on a very specific audience: marketers that already know me who listen to podcasts and like thrillers. This is a very niche play from a marketing standpoint. Instead of going after all thriller lovers, I'm going after this group of people. If I focus on that as my true fans, I can make this thing successful and see it grow. That's the crazy way we're launching it. I don't have the results yet, but we'll see.

Ryan Hanley: I love it. I read *Content Warfare*, my book from 2014, as podcast episodes chapter by chapter. 23 chapters. I launched it for free on the *Content Warfare* podcast feed. I think you're onto something. You'll know when it launches. My gut tells me you're really onto something because I'm assuming this won't be the only book you write in the series. To show that amount of value up front is what you've preached for a decade plus. It fits your methodology. The idea of a novelist giving their work away for free is so foreign outside of the ebook 99-cent sale for three hours. That's been done for so long that it feels valueless. You're just pumping your numbers up, but no one's actually reading that book or falling in love with the characters and the world you created. I'm incredibly envious to a certain extent, even though I know the torture you went through. I really would love to write fiction. I've read science fiction for 38 years. I've always wanted to create this world. On long drives, I create the world and talk it into my phone. I capture ideas and scenes. My son listens to my talk-to-text because he likes to play with it. The other day, he started playing one, and it's me talking about where the characters are and how they're interacting. He said, "What's this?" I said, "Turn that off. I don't want anyone to know that exists." What I've always wanted to do is have a newsletter with conversations that only exist in that newsletter. You mentioned Brenda and Jimmy Miller. If there's a conversation they could have about something pertinent to the book that's not in the book and won't be in the next book, but pulls them in or explains something that happened. It's the only way you see that conversation—maybe three sentences, cryptic with a cliffhanger. That type of original, vanishing content. I've always thought authors could fill in around their work like what Star Wars is doing with their movies.

Joe Pulizzi: You're not far off. If you're on Apple Podcasts, you subscribe to *The Will to Die* and get the trailer, all 42 chapters, the instructions, and the bonus chapter. I just put that in because people were starting with the epilogue. I'm working on book two right now with Will Pollett, the main character. If I continue to do this, every couple weeks or a month, I'll throw in a little episode or chapter leading into it. You don't have to wait. It's coming here. I can keep them hooked. Hopefully, this time next year, book two comes out and they're already subscribed. I don't know yet. This is all a big experiment.

Ryan Hanley: I love that idea. The reason people are so Star Wars crazy and Avengers crazy is that they give these little glimpses into what their life is really like. Those scenes at the end of Avengers movies where you have to wait till the credits end—people make fun of them, but I love them. After an epic battle with an army of aliens, you'd probably want to mow a Big Mac and a Coke and just chill out with your leg on a table. That's probably what you would do. Those things are so interesting. Dude, I want to be respectful of your time. We've chatted about a whole bunch of things. I'm so incredibly happy for you. The professionalism in which you've handled yourself forever is very admirable. It's exciting to watch you transition into this next phase. The fact that you are tapping into a whole new vein of creativity is something many people would be envious of and would celebrate. You've actually gone through the work. Everyone daydreams but doesn't actually do it. You've done it. That's amazing. For *The Will to Die*, this will come out on the day everything is launching. By the time anyone watches this, go to thewilltodie.com. You can download it for free until March 3rd or March 4th. You can get it on whatever player you want.

Joe Pulizzi: Go to thewilltodie.com. If you can't remember that, go to my site and I'll have it linked up.

Ryan Hanley: As always, it is such a pleasure to spend time with you.

Joe Pulizzi: Absolutely. It's been fun. Thank you so much. Looking forward to your next thing.

Ryan Hanley: This is going to be great. Thanks, brother.

Joe Pulizzi: Thank you.

[End of interview. Promotional content follows.]

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