Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Infinite Future. I'm Todd Thomas and today we're exploring the innovations shaping tomorrow's world. You're watching Now Media tv.
Welcome to Infinite Future.
Today I want to start with a question every entrepreneur, expert and thought leader should be asking. In a world flooded with content, what still creates real trust?
A book used to be seen as the finish line, the big achievement, the credential, the published proof. But in the future of business, a book can be much more than that. It can become a platform, a positioning tool, a lead engine. It can become the foundation for an entire business model. My guest today is Stephanie Perucci, founder and CEO of Perucci Publishing. She leads a boutique nonfiction business, book publishing and marketing agency. And as a two time Wall Street Journal bestselling writer, an international best selling author, she helps authors turn their books into what she calls a business with four corners.
Stephanie, welcome to Infinite Future.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: As we begin, I want everyone watching to think about the ideas they carry. Are those ideas just living in conversations and scattered content? Or could they become a platform that builds authority, opportunity and impact?
So we're starting today with Stephanie by looking at how the role of a book is changing in modern business.
Stephanie, when you look at business authors today, what do they often misunderstand about what a book can actually become?
[00:01:35] Speaker B: I think what we've lost in publishing is the actual element of storytelling.
One of the ways that an entrepreneur can use a book to help enhance services for their company, get people buying more products, use it as an HR tool. I've had people use books in recruiting as well.
One of our authors recruited literally thousands of insurance agents using his book. But what he did, and it's a great example, is he showed different elements of the office, the client, on sites. He showed dialogue. In fact, 50% of the book was dialogue with characters.
So what business authors fail to do sometimes, I would argue most of the time is they fail to adhere to critical storytelling elements such as dialogue, such as setting a scene, getting to know the author, as opposed to the author giving a washing machine manual of instructions. Maybe get to know the author more intimately.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: That's really interesting.
Storytelling is a lost art. Perhaps, but in today's world with so much digital content, why is a book still such a powerful trust builder?
[00:03:05] Speaker B: So the theory, when I started 20 years ago in using nonfiction books as a trust builder was that, well, this guy Todd wrote the book on it, so he must be the expert.
And then maybe 10 or 12 years later, it was, well, I was an Amazon best selling author, which Then people learned how to hack that system as well.
Now the authority really comes from doing what I think you're doing, which is appearing on podcasts and media and having people host you.
There's an element behind the scenes of being an alleged best selling author where you can put your book, have good SEO, put the right categories and keywords, and be a bestseller in a very obscure category in almost no time.
Currently, Amazon is actively assertively banning people who do that. And so the best seller status is in the next three to five years, I anticipate it's only going to be people who are actually selling ideally thousands of books in their first week.
So the entire industry is changing to help the book feel more credibility.
But in the entire process of publishing, there are ways that a book will clearly say, I'm doing this because I'm a boss, or I'm doing this as a desperate move for my brand.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Now, you and I have talked and I know that you've described yourself almost more than a book publisher, but more of a book marketer. And so when you're looking at this book, this business with four corners, and given what you're telling us now about Amazon bestseller status, what is really the winning approach to marketing? If you have a really good book and you think it's going to do really well, what's the winning strategy to really get that out there in front of people?
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Well, it's not the same for everybody. Naturally, podcasts are, are an incredible way to get your book out there. But even then it's good to get on the right podcasts.
So similar to Hollywood, you have a list actors in the same way there's a list television, radio and podcast shows.
Right now, what's converting even better than podcasts is substack, because the, the readers are invested in the investigation, so to speak. Since Substack is largely nonfiction, it's people's thoughts or philosophies on business, environmentalism, sustainability, something like that.
So Substack is converting really well. What we find is that every 18 months or so we completely change our approach. So whereas a few years ago we focused on, I would say radio was doing really well when I started 20 years ago, in fact, radio, radio, people actually listen to it in their homes and they would go to their computer and buy books while they were listening to radio. And that's just not the case anymore. Radio is mostly people who are on the road. It's hard for them to go and get a book. Although lots of old school PR agencies will still take your Money and put you on radio. Even though it doesn't usually sell a whole lot of books, there are exceptions. We had a radio show this year sell thousands of books, and my author became a guest weekly on Monday nights. It was called Caravan to Midnight, I think, and I believe there were 5 or 6 million listeners. And those people would listen in their living rooms or their kitchens and then go buy the book, we found out.
So there's a lot of trial and error with our authors. One of our authors, he said, you know what? I don't feel like doing tv. We got him on a few local TV shows and he said, I just really want this book in the hands of students.
So we did an entire campaign around reaching out to counselors, mental health support in schools, and getting it disseminated through those schools. And the good thing about the schools is a kid will bring a copy home and. And then the parent will buy it, or some schools, not many actually have the money to invest in a good book for their kids.
Unfortunately, most schools, we learned, are fairly bankrupt and don't have a lot of money to buy books for children. So we started a pay it forward program where people could invest 100, 500. One guy even sent $2,500 to the author so that he could buy those for children. Yeah, so that he could buy those for school children.
So we are very creative, depending on the book, depending on the personality, depending on the brand, with how we market.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: That is really interesting. And as you were talking about that, I've noticed I've been fortunate to do a bunch of different podcasts over the last couple years. And sometimes I'll do a podcast and they'll be no sales that week, and sometimes I'll do a podcast and there's an immediate spike almost during the period of the podcast.
And it's really evident, it's really clear which podcasts have an audience and engaged audience that's going to respond. So that certainly resonated with me, as you said that. And then my last book, Hyperscale, which I'm happy with. A good friend of mine is a high school economics teacher, and for his final project for his seniors this year, he. He made them study the book and write their final paper on it. The only thing I was disappointed with was he copied excerpts and gave it to all the kids. He didn't make them buy the book. So I was a little disappointed with that, but it was still fun.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: That doesn't surprise me. What's really good about your message as an example for all authors is when you're getting on a podcast, Todd, and you're talking about data centers in the energy crisis and woodchuck turning wood into clean energy.
You have this magic formula that every author wants and not all of them, especially if they're just writing a fluff legacy piece, if I do say so myself. But if people are writing these fluffy pieces just to say that they're an author, there's not a lot of urgency on the book. And this is where the book architecture is most important. So we sit down and we storyboard our books, just like you're sitting in a room with TV sitcom writers or with people who are writing a screenplay. And we go back and forth, usually with a group of five people, when we architect these books and we make sure above all you're not just saying the old model in marketing is you have to have a call to action.
No, you don't have to have a call to action. That's actually old school. People aren't buying it. They seen it too many times.
What you really need to convey is urgency. And that's really the magic moment where an intrigued listener becomes a reader when you say, wow, if you read this book, you've got X reward that will come to you or you're going to have this insight.
Now you've got people picking up the book because they need to learn that system or methodology.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: That's fantastic.
We're wrapping up segment one here with Stephanie Perucci. Thanks so much for being here, Stephanie. Please stay with us in our coming segments. Stephanie and I have an exciting update that we will drop, but you're gonna have to stay tuned to find out what it is. We'll be right back.
We'll be right back with more conversations at the edge of technology and transformation. Stay tuned. Every week on Infinite Future, we explore breakthrough innovation across every major frontier. We talk to AI architects, biotech pioneers, space entrepreneurs, clean energy disruptors, and the thinkers redesigning global systems.
We don't just talk trends. We examine scalability, ethics, economic impact and real world implementation.
If you're building, investing in or leading the future, join me on Infinite Future only on NOW Media tv. Because the future isn't predicted, it's engineered. And we're back. I'm Todd Thomas and this is Infinite Future on NOW Media tv. Let's look ahead.
Welcome back down. Stay connected to this show and every Now Media TV favorite live or on demand, anytime you like at NowMedia TV or download the Now Media TV app on your Apple device or on your Roku TV or you can always catch the podcast version on Spotify, Apple, iHeartRadio, YouTube, or the platform of your choice.
So now we're going to continue our conversation with Stephanie Perucci, founder and CEO of Perucci Publishing. And I want to move from the book itself into the business it can create.
Stephanie, once an author has a strong book concept, how do you help them connect that idea to a real business model?
[00:12:44] Speaker B: So I'm very fortunate that most of my authors actually have businesses with products.
However, we do a lot of books for people who are fundraising, raising money for a startup. Maybe they had a little bit of seed money and they want to expand. And so what we analyze with the author is if they have a clear cut product like a widget, things are fairly simple. We're going to bring that widget in as a character in the book without beating them over the head and making them think that we're giving them a brochure when we told them we were going to provide a book or a story.
The other way that we look at the author's ability to convert to a high ticket offer.
Most of the authors I work with, of course, I'm very discerning about the authors I work with at this point in my career, but we usually are working with authors who have a tremendous amount of expertise. Maybe they've been on archaeological sites in various countries, or maybe they were. I worked with a man who was the COO with Steve Jobs for many years. So we have people who are actually titans of industry and forward thinking thought leaders, archaeologists, anthropologists, brain scientists.
And so we'll work with them to say, hey, maybe you're taking a step back from your 9 to 5 position. But let's look at the consulting aspect and what you could do by running either conferences, doing keynotes, or actually mentoring people in a high ticket capacity. We had one author several years ago who was doing a $50,000 weekend for people to just sit and listen to him talk in his living room about business.
So it depends on the author. But we've gotten extremely creative with our author's high ticket offers, even to the point of raising money for legal fees.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: So what makes a high ticket offer work when it's built around a book?
[00:14:56] Speaker B: The beautiful thing is that when you love somebody or something, it's pretty easy to open up your wallet. Most of us, especially with how easy it is to acquire debt honestly, have the ability to open up our wallet and throw money at stuff. And the other thing is, with the cost of living being so high almost everywhere in the country it's not hard to say or to justify. You know what? I'm not going to eat out this week because I really want to donate to Helenka's fund or something like that.
So we make sure that the reader really feels like that author is speaking to them as though they're a big brother or big sister.
And one of the ways we do that has nothing to do with the product we're selling.
Instead, what we're doing, and this is really marketing 101 and storytelling 101. But people forget to do it with, you know, Claude and Chatgpt these days.
So what we do is we develop this avatar.
So maybe it's Nora, and she's living in St. Paul, Minnesota. And the entire book, as we're editing and proofreading and writing these books, will talk to Nora and we'll comfort her and we'll bring her the security, the safety that she needs.
So she has a pain. Maybe her pain is she's worried about the whales and she's upset because there's a killer whale sitting in a tank in south of France. And she. I'm personally very upset about that. But we're going to really engage with her from friend to friend across the kitchen table over coffee. And from there, it's just really natural to say, you know what, since we're friends already, let's do a little business together. It really is incredible how much intimacy you develop with your readers when you write to that avatar. And the messages that we get in our email and the people who call in really feel like they can call and speak to the author.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: That's fantastic.
So how do authors identify the audience? Or how do you help an author identify the audience that is most likely to value their expertise?
[00:17:26] Speaker B: It's one of the hardest questions because authors tend to be type A people. They tend to be bosses, leaders, managers, CEOs, founders.
And it's the same principle in business as it is with book writing. You cannot develop a product for everybody until you first excel in one niche.
So I have a very talented ER doctor.
He's a veteran. He's working in the ER still. I think he's retiring July 1, and he's writing this book. And he says, well, it's. It's people who are this, but it's also people who are this. And we can also touch the medical community. But we really want to talk to veterans.
Wrong. We have to either speak to the veterans, speak to the doctors, or speak to the patients. But one of the biggest problems is people try to make their book relevant to all audiences.
This is going to dumb it down so that it's not exciting, but for any audience,
[00:18:35] Speaker A: really interesting.
What other mistakes do experts make when they're trying to sell a book instead of selling the transformation behind it?
[00:18:45] Speaker B: The amount of money?
I mean, I regularly say that writing a book and marketing a book is an all you can spend buffet. There is just no end to the amount of money you can throw into a book project.
And so one of the biggest mistakes that authors make is they're going to, you know, they're going to diversify the money that they're spending as opposed to going all in on one method to get the book sold. And so maybe they're going to have a transformational message and they're going to run commercials or advertisements on, you know, personal development and spiritual websites or ad platforms. But then they're going to try to get on in Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and they're going to come at this brand as a financial expert and they're going to be in a suit and tie. And so the author tends to not be faithful to his own message sometimes. And what we really need to make sure is that the guy you hear on the radio is, is the guy who wrote the book. The guy you see on TV is the same voice as the guy who wrote the book. And so that's where that connection really helps convert the clients is when they hear your voice in the book and then they see you on TV and they say, wow, Steph is exactly who I thought she would look like.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Fantastic. How does direct response marketing change the way authors think about messaging and conversion?
[00:20:28] Speaker B: It surprises me in the year 2026 that people are not capturing leads and emails from their book sales. And I would say if I were to leave one big request to the audience if they're going to do a book launch, please capture emails for all of your readers because Ingram Barnes Bookbaby might give you emails.
Amazon, these distributors will not share your customer information.
And so in direct response marketing, it's, you know, marketing 101 is capture customer information so that you can remarket to them, so that you can sell products to them, so they'll buy your next book so that they'll purchase your upsell, so that they'll join your community, they'll read your substack and, and this is all brand building and direct response marketing 101. So whether it's a book trailer, a free chapter giveaway, some of our authors do once monthly we have an author doing a live cooking show once monthly where, you know, he just, he did, he did a cheesecake, you know, for a summer light key lime cheesecake. But so he's getting people engaged with the brand. But that author also just received a $50 million investment from this, from this firm to launch his Kombucha line across the country and in some parts of, of Central America. So people forget how valuable it is not only to build that email list to sell your stuff, but also because the people who get on that email list are watching what you do and if you're showing up and providing a tremendous amount of content, they're going to say, you know what, I'll partner with that guy. I'll put my money behind that guy. Because look at the way he shows up on this email list.
And so people forget how valuable it is. And even our marketing assistants, we don't love sending out emails every week, but we do it for our busy authors and in a lot of circumstances.
But the value of these fundamental basic direct response marketing 101 list building activities cannot be overstated.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Excellent. Very good. Now you mentioned substack a couple of times, so that's a good platform. What's another go to platform for non fiction authors today?
[00:23:07] Speaker B: So I have a lot of very big influencers on X.
Problem with X is although it's allegedly a free speech environment, some of our accounts get banned. My account got banned after I published a burn back better and sound the alarm two investigations that we did on the Maui wildfires, the Lahaina fires.
So X is powerful however, because if you are investing several hours a day into engaging with the platform, they reward you.
So basically if you plug into their platform and you have someone engaging continually with comments, etc. They reward you with visibility.
So what I like about X currently is it's a game that we understand they're transparent about the rules, they've told us how we get visibility and it's allegedly a free speech platform. You can say a lot of crazy stuff on there, I'll tell you so still. But, but the, the, the idea that you're not going to get banned, or at least shadow banned is a myth.
And I think if you read through their, their system of, of how they rank accounts, it's fairly clear that there's still some level, I don't know if I should say the word censorship. And then LinkedIn is also outstanding.
People do not value LinkedIn as much as they should and that's because there are so many bots pummeling people in the messages. But when I have authors who get on Sales Navigator, which is only a hundred bucks a month and they send private messages that are custom tailored to key stakeholders, key individuals, key media personalities, the conversion rate on that versus just cold emails or cold x.com or God forbid Instagram messaging is through the roof. So I really love Sales Navigator as a platform for people who are looking to get people engaged in a product or ideally as opposed to one to one, a one to many sale to an institution or a university.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Fantastic. That is great information.
Thanks so much. We will be right back with more conversation with Stephanie.
We'll be right back with more conversations at the edge of technology and transformation.
Stay tuned. Every week on Infinite Future, we explore breakthrough innovation across every major frontier. We talk to AI architects, biotech pioneers, space entrepreneurs, clean energy disruptors, and the thinkers redesigning global systems. We don't just talk trends, we examine scalability, ethics, economic impact and real world implementation.
If you're building, investing in or leading the future, join me on Infinite Future only on NOW Media tv. Because the future isn't predicted, it's engineered. And we're back. I'm Todd Thomas and this is Infinite Future on NOW Media tv. Let's look ahead.
If you are building a business or a platform in today's market, this is the part of the conversation you really want to lean into.
The future will reward people who can communicate clearly, tell a story, build trust and stand out with substance. I'm here with Stephanie Perucci and now I want to talk about authority in the age of AI.
Stephanie, in a world where AI can help anyone create content quickly, how does an author protect and elevate their real authority?
[00:26:52] Speaker B: We might as well have become an AI editing company for a few years. It wasn't our intention, but we had so many absolutely breathtaking authors who submitted manuscripts.
One of them in particular was this incredible 14 chapter.
Each chapter was an individual briefing on this subject related to national security.
And AI of course, helped map out maybe some structure and flow. We ended up getting a real human ghostwriter, but we went through three or four different ghostwriters and we found that even your ghostwriters now are using AI. But the problem is that people who read a lot, they discern the AI. It's not just the EM dashes, but they discern some of the sentence structure and the if this not that logic.
So what you need to understand is that AI is a tool similar to Grammarly assists with proofreading and it is so incredibly fallible that a human must Go through from the first word to the last word, rewrite anything that is conceived through AI in my strong experience, because we do have a ghostwriting arm, we do have many writers who've worked with me, some of them up to 10 years as ghostwriters now. And we prefer that people do not give us anything from AI that we can start fresh from scratch.
[00:28:32] Speaker A: Fantastic.
What separates a strong personal brand from a person who is simply posting a lot of content?
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Well, that's a great question that goes right back into AI because what AI allows us to do? And, you know, I remember in 2019, a man was telling me about AI content creation.
His name was. Was. Was Steve. He has his own podcast now, and he thought it was the coolest thing in the world. You put your hashtags in there, you put your brand colors in there, and it just split. Spits out content creation. So I was way ahead of the curve on content creation for. With AI, and I actually bought the. The. The software for my company.
No one used it because it didn't sound like the authors. What you'll notice for a personal brand is that the.
A personal brand is like putting on a jersey.
And the authenticity of everything you produce has to be like your Knicks jersey or your Bulls jersey or your Colorado Avalanche jersey. Whatever jersey you're wearing, don't take it off. Don't play for the other team. And so that can be difficult for authors who've kind of, you know, put their stake in the ground on a thought or an investigation or a theory. And then science, technology, anthropology, finance, economics requires us to change our position.
But the best thing to do with a personal brand is when someone sees a comment and your name is not attached to the comment, they know it's you saying it.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
Okay, so you talked about this a little bit earlier when you were talking about audience, but I kind of want to double click on it.
How can a book help an entrepreneur become more visible without becoming generic?
[00:30:34] Speaker B: That's a really good question. I would say the first six weeks of our author journey are all answering that question. So when I mentioned to you earlier that we sit down sort of in a virtual boardroom and we storyboard like we're creating a movie, part of that is we're creating that personal brand as well. So we are taking the time to craft a message that is so unique that hasn't been done before.
And you might say that's impossible to do, but it's.
I guarantee you that if you have something worth writing about, you have something unique. If you're just throwing a book out for the purpose of allegedly infusing your personal brand with this bestseller status or if it's not a good book, it's really not going to go far, it's going to fizzle out in a few months.
But if you've got a really great, timeless message, really unique stories, it doesn't matter what you're writing about because no one else in the world has those stories. So for instance, if you're an entrepreneur, you had a startup maybe in the, in the 1980s or 90s, and then you're showing this life of this company, your goal is that whoever reads this book is going to want to maybe purchase the company. And you're, you're looking at an exit now.
And it doesn't matter if your business principles closely resemble Jim Collins or another, you know, kind of generic personal development slash business thought leader.
What makes your book unique is, is the human story, the blood, sweat, tears that you put into your widget on that journey. And so once again, the, the way to make these books unique. It's not only to have that message of urgency the future needs, this book is clear cut and dry. Then the other thing is no one has those stories that you have.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: So that answer was riddled with the word story. You used it throughout the entire answer.
So what role does storytelling, what role does story play in really helping experts connect with the right audience?
[00:33:02] Speaker B: So compassion and empathy are two things you teach your children? Probably.
Well, ideally, you're teaching compassion and empathy from the, the time they're little babies. And that's one of the ways that we understand that children are healthy.
Psycho, psycho, sociological health in terms of thriving, making friends.
Everything about a child's health before they learn reading, writing and arithmetic has to do with compassion and empathy.
And part of the way we connect with audiences and get them on board and develop super fans for your product or service is having compassion and empathy for that audience. Apple could make their MacBooks very complicated.
They could make them extremely all the bells and whistles. They could have widgets everywhere. There could be things flying out at you while you're, while you're typing, it could be talking to you. They've made a calm, serene experience for people who are not technologically savvy. They understand that people are busy. Some people have very high fact finder, some people have very low fact finder like me. And I just want to open this thing up and start typing.
And so there's compassion and empathy even in the design of the MacBook. And so in the same way your story really gets to the, the need, the heart, the pain, the problem of your reader. For nonfiction business books, this is almost always anchored to a better future for your children.
[00:34:53] Speaker A: Infinite future, perfect.
What should authors be doing right now to future proof their authority to future proof their credibility?
[00:35:07] Speaker B: Excellent question.
There's a lot of ways that we screw up our authority without naming names. There is a certain personality, a certain extremely high profile influencer who recently asked my author to be on his TV show and I said that's fine, but this guy's, you know, he's, he's, he's got some very suspicious financial dealings. I think it's all going to come out and I think you're going to lose authority for your brand by associating with this guy.
The high level lesson there is be very judicious about who you're associating with and don't just be, you know, the, the podcast whore and just appear everywhere because you could be associating yourself and be viewed as a friend or a colleague or a peer of someone who eventually that's going to bite you. And so really the long term perspective on your immediate marketing for future proofing the brand in general, there's an element of making a manuscript timeless. If you read Shoe Dog, the Story of Nike, even if you don't do not own a single pair of Nikes in your home, you're taking something away. That's a profound business lesson from that book. And so if the book is too insular in the current moment and doesn't take that big perspective, those big lessons, those timeless lessons into it, then it doesn't have a long run.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Stephanie. What stands out here very clearly is that the future will not belong to the loudest voice or the most prolific voice. It'll belong to the clearest, most trusted voice.
We're going to be right back for our final segment. And yes, we teased it in the first segment and it is coming. Stephanie and I have an update for you. A live. You'll be the first to hear it in our final segment. We'll be right back.
We'll be right back with more conversations at the edge of technology and transformation. Stay tuned. Every week on Infinite Future, we explore breakthrough innovation across every major frontier. We talk to AI architects, biotech pioneers, space entrepreneurs, clean energy disruptors, and the thinkers redesigning global systems. We don't just talk trends. We examine scalability, ethics, economic impact and real world implementation.
If you're building, investing in or leading the future, join me on Infinite Future only on NOW Media tv because the future isn't predicted, it's engineered. And we're back. I'm Todd Thomas and this is Infinite Future on NOW Media tv. Let's look ahead.
Welcome back to our final segment.
Stay connected to this show and every Now Media TV favorite, live or on demand, anytime you like at NowMedia TV. Or you can download the Now Media TV app on your Apple device or Roku TV. Or you can always catch the podcast version on Spotify, Apple, iHeartRadio, YouTube, or the platform of your choice.
Now we're back with Stephanie Perucci. And during the commercial break, we jumped into a really interesting conversation about the additional value and really kind of a secret weapon that Stephanie brings to, to her authors and to her books. And so we're going to trash the script for the fourth segment. We're going to jump right into that and we're going to lead it off with our, our surprise bomb that we're about to drop.
So, Stephanie, I'll let you share the exciting news and then you can use that as an example of your secret weapon.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Wonderful. Our exciting news is that for the first time ever, Todd is not only launching his fifth and most exciting book, but he's going to dive into the story of woodchuck. The team, the clients, the sights, the vehicles, the boots, the mud, the wood, the chips, all of it.
Starving for innovation.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Thanks, Stephanie. I'm really excited about this book.
I think you're right. It is by far the most powerful of the books so far. Stephanie, this book cover for Starving for Innovation is beautiful. I love it. I would pick that up on a shelf in a second.
And now looking at the website, it is so beautifully done together and the website reflects the book and it's really a consistent design.
I love it.
Can you talk a little bit about your approach and disadvantage that you bring to your authors?
[00:40:13] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned earlier, my background is in direct response marketing. I started with financial education, insurance companies probably around 2003 or 4. So I've been doing over 20 years in direct response marketing.
And even though there was this very brief period of time where our community and when I say our, I mean the direct response community and the godfathers and godmothers in that community, a lot of us, I would say, have known each other for, for decades now and we are very, very well connected about what converts, what doesn't. It's a supportive community. People are continually sharing what they learn and fundamentally part of how people earn their living in the direct response Community, which is not just a generic marketing degree. Right. So this direct response community, I would say they're very generous with knowledge because they're all making money from their knowledge.
So it's very easy to buy someone's secrets or systems or methodologies within the community. There was a short period of time when it was believed that an uglier website was better. And I think that's because people made websites very complex. There was also a period of time, maybe 15, 20 years ago when it was common to write a 10,000 word sales letter on a website to convert.
And it did convert for a little, for a few years.
What we have found is that the actual imagery on the website, the colors, the lines, whether things are angular or slightly curved, everything about this website is letting people know that they are about to jump into this adventure with an author they want to hear from. What we conveyed on Starving for Innovation, for instance, was urgency through the red color. But we didn't want it to feel like it was going to stress people out before bed or if they're on an airplane. We wanted to convey, of course, Todd's just unbelievable amount of contributed articles and contributed media, guesting sessions, podcast. So we, we highlighted beautifully a little bit of your brand and your experience.
We showed the other books without distracting from the current one. So I think one thing that non fiction business books absolutely must do is as opposed to just uploading a manuscript to Barnes and Noble, you know, or Amazon or Ingram or whatever the platform is, I think really concentrating on how you are portraying the look and feel of that brand. I want my readers to understand when they hit that website that this author is such a cool dude or such a cool gal that they've got a team of graphic designers sitting there and creating art for them. And when you portray that, that is a silent, subconscious way of elevating the brand tremendously.
[00:43:32] Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, I absolutely love it. I think it's just, it's just beautiful. It's, it's lovely just to look at now, like you mentioned earlier, you have your own brand. You have been doing this for a long time. You've had tremendous success, best selling international author, you've supported so many successful books, so many successful authors that you really get to pick and choose who you work with now and what books you, what books you want to work on.
What is it that put this over the threshold? What really attracted you to this project?
[00:44:07] Speaker B: I didn't tell you this when I met you, but I did, I did divulge something quite personal.
I think maybe A month or two ago, I actually worked with an ocean Restoration company in 2020 was maybe from January until June.
So I gave five or six months of my time to an ocean restoration company and at the time joined that company as their, basically their cmo. I was director of Business Development and I was one of only five equity shareholders in the business.
And I wanted to save the whales. This is no joke. I actually joined an ocean restoration company with all my talents and experience in marketing and publishing because I said, how can we make our oceans cleaner?
And what I learned in six months is that we are not doing it right. In fact, most of ocean restoration is, to my great dismay, is just money laundering. Just money laundering from the U. N. Right down to every NGO I ever worked with. And it isn't always their fault, but they're not using simple technologies that actually impact the water.
My heart was just broken. I've even got an orca painting right behind me. But the I ended up when I looked at Starving for Innovation, the original manuscript that, that Todd sent, I was absolutely blown away when I began learning about some of the solutions that you highlight and some of the success that you've had with extremely simple processes that are anchored to cutting edge technology to actually impact the earth, create more clean energy, divert wood waste. And after seeing so much money and time wasted in conservation and sustainability, I felt like it was healing for me to work with someone who's actually making this world cleaner.
[00:46:28] Speaker A: Well, thanks so much. We're certainly excited about the success that we're having and yeah, it's fun to go to work every day and know that you're actually making a positive impact.
We're still this little startup, but we've diverted tens of thousands of tons of wood, we've diverted tens of thousands of tons of carbon, and we've generated a ton of thousands, tens of thousands of megawatts of renewable electricity. So it's, you know, we, to our, to our small extent, we're making an impact.
I'm so thrilled for this book and really the, the, I guess the expansion of the focus because you're right, the first four books in the series were really all about the energy story and an important story and very timely and we need to have that discussion. But by kind of expanding that focus not just to energy, but really to Woodchuck and the story of Woodchuck as a startup and Woodchuck as a, as a case study or as a template on how other people can enter this market and make an impact, I'm really excited to get that into the market and see how people respond to that.
[00:47:39] Speaker B: All right, so half as excited as I've been.
[00:47:44] Speaker A: Well, I'm certainly excited. It has been an absolute thrill to, to get to work with you. And I'll tell you. Well, you probably remember the first thing you said to me, actually, after you read the manuscript.
So I sent Stephanie the manuscript and I shopped it around to a couple different publishers and had some interesting conversations, but Stephanie certainly stood out.
Stephanie said to me, your writing is dry, it's overly technical, and it's just exhausting to read.
It could be good, but we just have to completely rewrite it.
And I knew instantly, oh, this is my publisher. Because that was, that was really honest, great feedback. You weren't giving me a sales job at all. You were telling me exactly what you wanted to hear. And since that moment, Stephanie and I got to work. And honestly, I think we have jointly put more time into this rewrite than I put into the original manuscript
[00:48:46] Speaker B: for good reason. It's an important story and, and that's, you know, from a larger theoretical or philosophical perspective. That's why you work with people who are not focused on quantity but on quality. And that's really something I have been blessed to do in, in my career.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: And what is that? The, the verse from Proverbs that you quote.
[00:49:12] Speaker B: Oh, words from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies. Kisses.
[00:49:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I love that. I don't think I'd heard that until you shared that with me, but absolutely loved it. That stuck with me and I'm, I'm gonna use that one over and over.
[00:49:30] Speaker B: My ex husband said to my, to my, my husband, my current husband, my son's dad said, just remember, she scares because she cares.
[00:49:43] Speaker A: Well, that's, that's a good version of it as well. That's excellent.
So, Stephanie, if people want to follow your work, if they want to get in touch with you, how do they do that?
[00:49:56] Speaker B: So my website is. @peruchipublishing.com I have a link to a very, very simple jotform where people send me.
It doesn't limit you to 120 characters. People can tell me all about their book, their manuscript. I'll most likely respond within 48 to 72 hours and let you know if I think you need a total rewrite. If I think you've got something going for you. And you know what, if I am not your publisher, I'm probably going to be able to send you to the right person if you've Got a cookbook or a children's book or something like that. But I really do focus on nonfiction business books and other nonfiction books, especially with investigative journalists.
And true crime is our other really, I would say we do as much true crime as we do anything else.
[00:50:50] Speaker A: What are some of your books you're most proud of?
[00:50:56] Speaker B: Well, that's a great question.
I have to be part of the Lahaina books because we did see arrests and we did see legislation changes and we, we did see a lot of political action from those books. So that made a massive impact on the community in Lahaina and really all over Hawaii. And I am also proud of my work with Dr. Vladimir Zelenko. Before he passed, he was, he's, his protocol has been used now by millions of people who maybe didn't want to or couldn't get to medical providers during COVID So he found over the counter solutions to help people get over Covid, which was remarkable. And so he's a real hero. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work. So, so I was really proud of that. And, and then of course all of the brave doctors, you know, in that era, that was really fun to publish them as well. And then Jamie Prickett out of Canada. It was really nice to see the company go from just a, you know, mere $7 million company now to probably being a half a billion dollar company and just working with them on several projects over the years. Seeing a guy with, you know, 20 insurance agents write a book and then get that book into thousands and thousands of people's hands and recruit and actually build one of the biggest insurance and financial advisory agencies in, in North America.
It's just absolutely breathtaking to, to, to see people have that type of success.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: Well now another book that, that you shared with me recently that I, I, I know that you're promoting right now, Red Tsunami. Can you tell me a little bit about that book,
[00:52:58] Speaker B: one of our most successful books. That book is going to be a classic on the shelves of anybody who loves history, who's fascinated in particularly in the subject of warfare or national security. The Tsunami is for all intents and purposes the update from the original Unrestricted War manuscript that we got from two marine colonels in who, who came out of the POC or, or People's Republic of China in the 90s. So this is the most authoritative update since the 1990s version of where we blow the lid off of all of the absolutely brilliant strategic ways that China has used unrestricted war to make themselves to infiltrate every aspect of our lives, from what our children watch on television and social media to Hollywood, national security. Obviously, there's the chip war, there's the communication, telecoms, there's the belt and road.
Some of these things you do mention in your book, which I thought was awesome, because when it comes to energy, they're also.
We were just talking this morning about how they're trying to convince Americans not to build data centers.
It's part of restricted war. They want to dominate in the air space. So that book talks about how a communist regime for the last, you know, technically 100 years, but really especially over the last 70 years, has infiltrated every aspect of Western society.
[00:54:44] Speaker A: I think that's one of the things that people don't understand, but they're, they're leery. You know, how much of this negative press and this division is really being driven by, you know, social media that that's being generated out of China. And probably a lot of it, frankly, is being AI generated.
[00:55:06] Speaker B: Me up that law enforcement in China has been using his products to create blueprints for tracking systems on the Muslim leaders who are the ones who go in the concentration camps, political dissidents and religious people in China actually using rai.
I don't know what's right with the Chinese AI, but they. So that's one of the ways that open AI was able to catch these people trying to create a more difficult existence for these, these riggers who are prisoners in the country. They can't leave.
[00:55:47] Speaker A: Well, that's. That's really interesting. And that the author is Casey Fleming. Correct.
Okay, well, I think we're out of time, but, Stephanie, thanks so much for the conversation and thanks for being on. And please join us next week for another episode of Infinite Future. Thank you. Thank you for watching Infinite Future. I'm Todd Thomas. Join us next week as we continue exploring the ideas and innovators building. What's next only on Now Media tv.
