199 | Turn WORDS into Wealth with Aurora Winter

[INTERVIEW]

Hilary Hendershott: Aurora Winter, welcome to Profit Boss Radio.

Aurora Winter: Hey, it’s so great to be here with you.

Hilary Hendershott: Thank you. So, let’s just kick this off with an interesting question. Tell me the surprising 27X value of a story.

Aurora Winter: Oh, let’s just jump right in. I think you’ll really love this. This blew me away because so many people, so many entrepreneurs, they spend all of their time working on perfecting their product or their service or raising capital. But they don’t spend enough time, in my view, working on their message. So, I wanted to quantify that. Then there’s this wonderful book called Significant Objects, and they actually did a valid scientific test. So, they took 100 distinct, different objects and they put them on eBay without a story and with a story.

Now, the story added significance. It wasn’t a hypey thing. Some of the stories were even sad. But for example, one of the objects was a pot-holders, there we go. And the story was my grandmother used to bake me chocolate chip cookies. Okay, so guess how much more the thing is sold for with the story and without the story.

Hilary Hendershott: You just told me, though, 27X.

Aurora Winter: True. Well, I can’t talk to most people there, like hey, I think the story might add 50%. No, it’s not even double. It’s not even 10X.

Hilary Hendershott: Add in 2700%.

Aurora Winter: 2700%, so you’re leaving a lot of money on the table if you don’t focus on your story.

Hilary Hendershott: Got it. Okay, so I have lots of questions. You were clearly a high-powered television gal, and it takes something, having done a few morning news spots myself. It takes something, right?

Aurora Winter: Yeah.

Hilary Hendershott: And those women when I was in the dressing room with them are intimidating. They don’t take no nonsense, right? So, it took you something to get there.

Aurora Winter: That’s what all my dates tell me, “You’re intimidating.” That’s not really the best thing to say on a date. But okay, yes.

Hilary Hendershott: No, please don’t tell me that. I haven’t heard that a lot lately. But like now, what you’re doing is more mission oriented and working with individuals that is very different. I want to say set of desires and skill set. Do you think television was just wrong for you in the beginning? Or did you have a big crisis of existence? Or what happened?

Aurora Winter: I think meaning is the new money. This is for your listeners. Meaning is the new money. I’ve always been driven by story. When I was nine years old, I went into the school library and I took down, I remember the moment that I touched the last book in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. And the first book is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And when I touched that last book, which is called The Last Battle, I felt such a strong emotion. It was delight that there was another book to read but also anticipatory grief. And in that moment, I swore I would do everything I could to become a great writer because I couldn’t imagine anything more magical than having little black dots on a white piece of paper, being able to like portal transport somebody to a completely different place. So, I’ve been obsessed with stories since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. And so, there have been various ways that has expressed itself because I am also an entrepreneur, which is also creative, right? I love solving problems.

Hilary Hendershott: Oh, very much so, very much so. I tell the people I work with, “Look, you’re making something out of nothing,” like resources will always be scarce for you because you take what doesn’t exist and you make it exists. You have magic.

Aurora Winter: Yeah, exactly. So, unfortunately, entrepreneurs have a short, or at least I do get bored easily because once we’ve made it, it’s like, oh, done, move on to the next thing. But the theme of my whole life has basically been one person acting alone with a mission can make a difference. And so, that has expressed itself in movies and books and businesses and coaching and mentoring. Now, my mission is to launch thought leaders because I’m doing the karma math, or my math goes like this, if I help one person, and they’re helping 10 people, that’s good. If I help one person, though, and they might touch thousands or millions, that’s better karma math.

Hilary Hendershott: Yes. Well, it’s good for you.

Aurora Winter: That’s why I love launching thought leaders, yeah.

Hilary Hendershott: Well, I’m hoping this podcast interview gets you much closer to heaven, so.

Aurora Winter: Hopefully, I don’t drop dead in it, yeah.

Hilary Hendershott: Not that much closer. So, listen, my view of people who write books is either they win the authorship lottery and sometimes they publish independent, but they get picked up by a bigger label because of the success or size of their platform or the book. And sometimes they publish traditionally and they’re just like a media darling and they figure it out, but that’s like 2% to 5% of authors. And the rest of them do exactly what I’m tired of doing, which is work their butts off to sell, like I think the average is 2,200 copies or less than that or something, right? Like some pathetic number that they poured their heart and soul into a book, and then it just went nowhere. And even though I think I really have something that people want and need, which is a mechanism to money, I’m afraid that I’m just not a media darling and I don’t want to risk it, so.

Aurora Winter: You are a media darling. But this is exactly why I wrote my most recent book, Turn Words Into Wealth: Blueprint for Your Business, Brand, and Book.

Hilary Hendershott: So, yeah, tell me what your view is.

Aurora Winter: I got so heartbroken, 80% of people want to write a book, and like you say at the beginning of your podcast, you’ve made every money mistake. I think I’ve made every authorship mistake. And it doesn’t matter how hard you work on a book if it has the wrong title, if it doesn’t have a call to action, if it doesn’t further a business, if you don’t have a business back-end, if you haven’t thought through all of these things. Like a book can be a very powerful mechanism to launch a business or launch it to the next level or be a lead magnet. Amazon is the number three search engine. So, coaches, consultants, experts, leaders should have a book in Amazon because otherwise, they’re competing on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Google Ads. Those are very expensive.

So, when people are on Amazon, they are buying. They usually have their credit card already pre-installed. They just have to click the button where you’re interrupting people if you’re talking to them on Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram, that’s not really the place where they’re going to be immediately buying something. But a book is such a low decision point, but still, it has to be the right book and it has to have the right back-end. So, I’ve been helping people with their books, well, if people who hang around me always end up writing books.

Hilary Hendershott: I’m shocked.

Aurora Winter: You have a story in you, and other people could benefit. But it just made me heartbroken that they would put all this energy into the inside of the book, and then they would forget to test the title, to test the subtitle, to make sure they were speaking to a specific audience, to make sure it mentioned hello, how to get a hold of them after that. So, as entrepreneurs, we solve problems at a profit. What is the problem that a person will still have after they’ve read your book without withholding anything? The book can be the beginning of a relationship or the beginning of a marketing funnel, but there’s still problems. And if you want to solve those problems, identify what those problems are, and mentioned in the book, by the way, if you’d like more help.

Also, the content of books is, I could go on about that. Anyway, the book needs to be structured correctly so that it answers the top of mind questions for your target reader, and then it needs to provide an invitation to a relationship. So, Turn Words Into Wealth, which you’ve read, it does give you seven different examples with seven different ways of monetizing a book. And you know what? Selling books is not one of those seven.

Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, I noticed.

Aurora Winter: That’s number eight, right?

Hilary Hendershott: I noticed.

Aurora Winter: So, people are not thinking it through properly if they don’t take a moment to understand the whole business of publishing.

Hilary Hendershott: You do know The Chronicles of Narnia is very different than Turn Words Into Wealth book, which I just read. Do you have as much fun writing nonfiction as fiction?

Aurora Winter: I do, and I am also writing fantasy, and I’ve also written screenplays for adventure stories for kids. So, I have the whole spectrum. In fact, one of my clients is actually a lawyer, and he came to me with a– sounded like it was going to be a fairly straightforward nonfiction book, but he’s very smart. So, I said, “Hey, why don’t we structure this like a movie?” So, we ended up structuring a nonfiction book like a movie, so that’ll be fun. It’s called Confessions of an Accidental Lawyer.

Hilary Hendershott: I like it, I like it. I once went to a book publishing event, taught and led by a media darling that I know who I won’t name right now. And I said I wanted to do a money book as a parable. She said, parables don’t work. Parables, they don’t sell. Do you think they do?

Aurora Winter: I think that powerful stories always sell. And I think that’s wrong to say categorically, X doesn’t sell. Well, Chicken Soup for the Soul when Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen were trying to find a publisher for Chicken Soup for the Soul, they were told short stories or anthologies, collections of short stories don’t sell. Well, that was wrong.

Hilary Hendershott: It turns out.

Aurora Winter: I’d love to help you with your money parable book. Look at The Alchemist, that’s a parable. Oh, you know a great book that’s a parable and that’s financial is The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino. That’s a great book. It’s sold millions of copies and that’s an example of a book that has a financial parable in it, The Greatest Salesman in the World.

Hilary Hendershott: Great. So, in your book, you actually invited people to direct message you on LinkedIn.

Aurora Winter: Yes.

Hilary Hendershott: Do you regret doing that?

Aurora Winter: No. Please, go ahead, direct message me on LinkedIn. My name’s Aurora Winter. After the pandemic, I have an MBA like you. I don’t have a CFA, but I took a big breath and went, okay, what do I really love to do? What do I love to do? And what doesn’t involve seeing people in person or having events? Because when the pandemic hit, I was hosting an event or just after.

Hilary Hendershott: A live event.

Aurora Winter: A live event, yeah, I used to have three live events per year. And I was in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which is a beautiful place. Check it out. It’s a Unesco heritage site, really beautiful.

Hilary Hendershott: I’ve been there.

Aurora Winter: Cobblestones and everything. You’ve been there?

Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, it’s great.

Aurora Winter: And so, I applied the 80/20 rule, which most people are familiar with, 20% of your clients bring 80% of your revenue. And I thought, well, I’ll just double down on that and I’ll do it twice. So, 4% of your clients probably bring you the bulk of your revenue. So, that’s what I decided to do. So, I’m only really just helping high-end people now with their message, with their book, with pitching to raise capital, and they’re on LinkedIn. So, yes, please, go ahead, message me on LinkedIn.

Hilary Hendershott: Got it. Okay, so you have some sort of sorting or qualifying mechanism?

Aurora Winter: Yeah.

Hilary Hendershott: Okay, good. Alright, so let’s talk about the kinds of, let’s say, thought leaders. Everyone who’s a business owner, does it relate to herself like a thought leader? So, how do you define thought leader?

Aurora Winter: Well, it’s the opposite of follower.

Hilary Hendershott: I also think thought leader is sort of this, I mean, any time I see a title, like How to Be a Thought Leader or How to Become a Thought Leader, I click away because it seems like such a vanity thing. Like people who have thought leader in their LinkedIn personal description, I don’t know, it just seems like, does a thought leader really call herself a thought leader?

Aurora Winter: Well, that’s the tricky thing, right? If you call yourself that, are you really? I mean, my short form for what I do is that I launch thought leaders because it was just too long to say. I help people write bestselling award-winning books and become polished public speakers and raise capital. That just was too long. Sorry, I forgot what the question was.

Hilary Hendershott: What’s your definition of thought leader?

Aurora Winter: So, a thought leader is somebody who has something to add to the conversation that is meaningful, and I believe that that kind of person is driven by purpose and meaning and vision. So, they probably have what I call a massively transformative purpose. So, they might have done the karma math, which I said as a joke, but which is actually sincere for me because I used to…

Hilary Hendershott: I know.

Aurora Winter: I used to help people through grief, and it was very good helping people one at a time.

Hilary Hendershott: Oh, wow.

Aurora Winter: Get out of the well of despair and put them back in the sunlight so they could go on with their lives. But that’s helping one person at a time, and the multiplier effect was quite small, maybe seven.

Hilary Hendershott: Right.

Aurora Winter: So, I think our society in North America has got way too crazy about, oh, you’re making seven figures or you’re making eight-figures. And as you’ve said on a number of occasions, what about the net? Never mind the gross. So, I would love, especially to invite women to share what they know in their hearts and minds and to be deliberate about sharing that, not in a sort of, oh, yeah, I agree with that person, but what do we really think and tend to share it? Like the pandemic made me really double down on meaning, and it had me feel like really good about, you know what? I don’t want to build an eight-figure company. I don’t want to have a bunch of staff working for me. I want to have the freedom to write my fantasy book just for fun. And I love helping people who are up to something. So, especially as women, I think we are the prevention of World War III.

Hilary Hendershott: Yes, well, I got deep. And we are. Guess what? Women don’t go to war.

Aurora Winter: Women don’t go to war. And I’m forgetting who said it, but he basically said, the only people who should be able to vote in the U.N. are pregnant women. And I’m like, oh, because this was a man who had actually been in– he had the misfortune of being in Hiroshima, and then he moved and then he got it also, the second nuclear bomb. And I forget the fellow’s name, but he said, we wouldn’t have war if women were deciding.

Hilary Hendershott: Yep, I totally agree. Okay, so if I could explain it colloquially, if you’re bursting with a message that you want to share with people in general, then even if you don’t necessarily feel like you have perfected your craft or your way around a microphone or, for example, I’m not a great writer, I’m an okay writer. I have something to say, but it’s not my forte, right? This microphone, this is my baby. And I sometimes feel limited in expressing myself. And so, I’m trying to figure out who’s listening that should be included, thinking of themselves as a thought leader who may have had the same thought about this title thought leader as I have, is it if you think you have a book in you?

Aurora Winter: So many things I could say about that.

Hilary Hendershott: You don’t like me trying to pin you down, yeah.

Aurora Winter: Well, firstly, the person, I don’t think it matters what you call yourself. Are you trying to make a contribution to the world? If you don’t want to be called an author or an influencer or a thought leader, what does that matter? What matters is what are you up to. If you’re just up to trying to rip people off, you’re not a thought leader. If you’re up to trying to change how people think or feel or make some kind of contribution, then maybe you should just get over yourself and speak up as loudly as you can. So, that’s one thing.

I think that when we are leading with our ego, then it’s very easy to get caught up in things like, well, am I a thought leader? Am I not a thought leader? And it’s also easy to get caught up in what I call like competition with the boys. Like, am I making as much money as Tony Robbins? If I’m not, then maybe I’m not okay, and I can’t, right? Let’s just get over all of that and think if I was going to die tomorrow or in six months, what contribution would I want to leave the world? What would I like to leave for my children or my colleagues or my family? Or how would I like my voice to be heard? Because the only thing we have to give other people is our stories. It’s not just about 27X, we started with some fun. Really, that is the only gift we have to give others. The suffering that you’ve overcome, the triumphs that you’ve managed, how have you avoided or overcome difficulties? And how have you catapulted into fame or fortune or love or health or vitality? These are the things that we have to share with others. Otherwise, we’re just parroting other people’s messages. And when you’re sharing your own story, then you are, in my view, a thought leader.

But the second point that you made was about that you’re very happy with the microphone and you have something to share. And I think you are a media darling, darling. And so, what I do with people is most people, the first book, I take three and a half years to write it because they freeze. Nobody wants to look at a blank page and have all of that imposter syndrome stuff come up, and then you’ve got like all of the mindset issues to do. So, what I do is the spoken author method. So, after understanding the person’s business and understanding their goal and their mission, then we reverse engineer it, and then I design questions and I just ask them questions, and we record it. So, then we get audio, we get video, we get a transcript, and then my team and I take that and we turn it into a book.

So, there are so many mistakes first–time authors make with books. One of them is not being their authentic voice because they get triggered into, oh, this is a university essay, but that naturally goes away with a conversation. But the other mistake people make, well, the biggest mistake they make is not monetizing it or working it, thinking it through strategically, to maximize the value of their book. But the next thing that they make is they don’t think about marketing the book. So, they get their book published by a publisher or most likely they self-published on Amazon and then they press publish, and then nothing happens. Crickets.

So, by interviewing people, which is always how it had been done. I mean, you don’t think Hillary Clinton’s typed in front of a page, or Sir Winston Churchill, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he had secretaries and researchers and ghostwriters. So, this is always how it has been done. It’s just only now been accessible for people who are relatively successful but not Sir Winston Churchill. But by having the audios and the videos, and we have hundreds of pieces of social media content to use to promote the book when it comes out or just before it comes out, and also to prove that this person has a story, has something to say, and can get on podcasts or radio or TV or speak on the TED stage or what have you. So, by doing it that way, you solve so many problems.

Hilary Hendershott: So, I’ll tell you the thing that someone said that flipped my mind about books because I paid for this, How to Publish a Book Training, and I went to the training and my conclusion was, I’m not going to publish a book. I’m just going to avoid all that work because it’s the marketing that’s just like, I have enough commitments. I don’t, I can’t do a global book tour, I can’t do it. Anyway, that was my conclusion. And then da, da, da, fast forward, and then someone said, “You need to publish a book, you need to publish a book. You know why? Because you have lead magnets and you have podcast episodes, but nobody ever gives their best girlfriend a podcast episode for her birthday. It’s going to be a book or nothing.” And I thought, you know, that is so right. That is so right. And even you sent me a PDF of your book along with a– I mean, I have the whole thing, and I still wanted to buy it because I want to hold it in my hand. You know what I mean? So, there’s something about a book.

Aurora Winter: There is something about a book, and I think most digital marketers make a huge mistake when they don’t have digital plus physical. So, there’s something about holding a book, right? No matter how great the podcast, no matter how wonderful the video that’s online…

Hilary Hendershott: That’s a great promo you’re doing right now.

Aurora Winter: Yeah. You’d think I’ve done this a few times. And that’s even the copy that doesn’t have the nine award seals on the back, which is on that most recent…

Hilary Hendershott: You need to put that other one by your desk.

Aurora Winter: I know. I just put it by the door to give to somebody later today. You always get me off on a tangent. Yes, you need a book. I’d be glad to help you with that, which you’d set up a call to talk about it and make it happen. Not just you, I think your message is really important and very valuable and that you’re not serving some people who could really benefit from having your book by their bedside table.

Hilary Hendershott: And that’s what I got and that’s what I wanted to make sure to get into this conversation is it’s like, yes, I’ve been trying to serve the podcast listeners of the world, but there are a whole lot more book readers than there are loyal podcasters who have time on a morning commute to listen to two or three episodes of some podcasts, right?

Aurora Winter: It’s not either/or, it’s both ends. Your book will feed your podcast, your podcast will feed your book, and all of them need to have a back-end, which you have got sorted because you are the wealth queen. So, you tell me about the business part of that. And I just want to add really quickly here. My first book, From Heartbreak to Happiness, which is an Intimate Diary of Healing, I made all of the mistakes that I am telling people, that I’m helping people avoid. I made all of the rookie mistakes. But that book did launch a business for me and did in the end generate seven figures, not from selling books, but from people being attracted to that business, from that book and from getting on radio and TV, there weren’t podcasts at that time so much, as a result. So, even with a bunch of rookie mistakes, a book can still be a great asset.

Hilary Hendershott: So, let’s talk about some of your seven methods for monetizing a book, your favorites. What are your favorites?

Aurora Winter: Well, my favorite ways to use a book as a lead magnet, so after I took my MBA, I graduated in 2015 with a nice, shiny MBA and I had no business, no job, no income, and I wasn’t even sure where I was going to live, I could do anything.

Hilary Hendershott: Ultimate freedom.

Aurora Winter: Ultimate freedom. So, then I spent a while googling, too many options. It’s actually very hard on the psyche. So, what I did is I had a friend of mine who at the time was director of coaching for Tony Robbins. He had interviewed me before about the coaching that I did. I said, “Hey, let’s do an interview about marketing.” And he’s like, “Sure, that sounds great.” So, key point, I gave him the questions. I choreographed the interview, and we had an interview about marketing. And I turned that basically one hour, maybe 90-minute interview into a little PDF, a little book. I use that PDF to get on television a couple of times. I use the TV clips to fill my event. And then when that book was still just a PDF, it already was generating revenue. But when I came back from my MBA, the book had finally been turned into an actual print book. And I had just a small email list at the time, but I offered the book to people for free. They had to pay shipping and handling, so it was more or less a breakeven. I spent, if memory serves me, about $12,000 in advertising. And within 90 days, that little book had generated $250,000. So, $250,000 of new business in 90 days from using a very short book based on a 90-minute interview and using it as a lead magnet.

Hilary Hendershott: This was about? This was the same topic you make money on now, so I’m asking. The words aren’t coming out right, but the question is confirm it’s $250,000 in revenue of you training thought leaders how to publish.

Aurora Winter: It’s more or less the same thing that I do now. It was helping people with their marketing and their messaging. I hadn’t doubled down quite so much on the super high end right now, like I specialize in bestselling award-winning books. And my typical client is already making mid-six figures, or they have a seven or eight-figure business. But yes, more or less the same thing. Before that, I had been doing a different kind of business. So, the little book Marketing Fastrack, which people can get on Amazon for free, actually, I thought it would show people. I just updated it. So, it has got an explanation of what happened after it was published the first time. So, that is an example of how you can use a book as a lead magnet.

So, if you have an email list or you have a way of contacting people and you offer them a free book, but they pay for shipping and handling, then you send them. In this case, I sent them five little short videos to add more value and build like and trust, then I offered them a free business breakthrough call. And then as a result of those conversations, within 90 days, I had a quarter-million dollars new business. And then to be honest, I freaked out because I’m like, “Holy shit, that’s a million dollars a year. Wait a minute. Time out.” I didn’t have any full-time staff or anything. And I did this silly thing and I went, “Ah,” we were so funny as women. Actually, there is another story about that.

Hilary Hendershott: It’s not just women who sabotage themselves financially. But yes, women do some unique things, it’s not just us.

Aurora Winter: Yeah. My husband died when he was 33, and I was 31, and the amount of money that I received as the life insurance was more than $250,000 but not a whole lot. And so, I realized later that was the ceiling, like I had an idea that, oh, if I all of a sudden get a windfall of money that’s several hundred thousand dollars, something terrible is going to happen.

Hilary Hendershott: Isn’t that funny?

Aurora Winter: Not so funny at the time but good to realize what had happened.

Hilary Hendershott: Yeah. Life insurance settlements are a funny thing, are very emotional things. Let me not use the word funny, they’re emotional. Okay, so I think that that’s a model people are…

Aurora Winter: That’s one example.

Hilary Hendershott: Yeah, I think that’s not shocking to people. What’s the most interesting one?

Aurora Winter: Let’s see. What’s the most interesting one? I think the most interesting one or the one that you may have heard the least is around raising capital. So, my experience with my clients who’ve come to me, they’ve got like, really super– I used to live in Silicon Valley until just recently, super smart, really ambitious brainiacs, but boy, can they not communicate? So, on average, they would come to me with a really great idea and zero capital having being raised, and after they’d gone through the training with me and learned how to communicate their message and get their million-dollar message nailed, on average, they raised eight figures.

Hilary Hendershott: That’s impressive.

Aurora Winter: Pretty good.

Hilary Hendershott: And I’m watching the Elizabeth Holmes trial right now and I’m thinking, that woman, she is a storyteller, right?

Aurora Winter: She’s a storyteller.

Hilary Hendershott: And she raised massive capital. Okay, so that is super interesting. And it could apply to people looking for business investment, not just from VCs, but from angel investors, from private investors. Like if you’re creating a partnership, I even know people, for example, who do real estate investments, so they pool investor money, and so, it could be the same thing, there’s no uniqueness to the VC model.

Aurora Winter: Exactly.

Hilary Hendershott: Other people’s money.

Aurora Winter: Jason Calacanis has got two podcasts, one is called Angel and the other one is called This Week in Startups. And he has a book called Angel, and he uses his book Angel to attract the best opportunities for investment. And then he runs an investment syndicate. So, you should be aware with this, you need to have X dollars or else you can’t invest in certain things.

Hilary Hendershott: You’re talking about being an accredited investor, yeah.

Aurora Winter: Thank you for the right words. And he runs an investment syndicate so that you can invest a thousand dollars or a small amount of money, $10,000, and whatever he’s up to because he leads that syndicate. So, the leader of a syndicate has two problems. One of the problems is how do you get the best deals?

Hilary Hendershott: Deal flow.

Aurora Winter: Deal flow. How do you get the Facebook and the Uber and the LinkedIn and the box before others? Well, how he does that is his podcast and his book. And then the other problem is, how do you get the people– so, anyway, he’s got the deal flow, and then he’s used his podcast and his book to position himself in the right spot to get the best deals early and to get the investors.

Hilary Hendershott: I love it.

Aurora Winter: That’s more up your alley, I would think. And then one more example if you’d like.

Hilary Hendershott: I want it.

Aurora Winter: I think this one is also so surprising. Your house looks beautiful, so you’ve probably read Marie Kondo’s books, The Joy of Tidying Up.

Hilary Hendershott: My biggest regret in life is that I didn’t write that book. I’ve been telling people, if it doesn’t give you joy, throw it away for the long time.

Aurora Winter: Oh, that could have been your book.

Hilary Hendershott: She makes herself like a billionaire. Oh, my goodness. Okay, yes, I’ve read Marie Kondo with much envy.

Aurora Winter: So, that could still be a book in your– it could be a chapter in your book. Why not, though? It’s part of wealth, not being surrounded by things that you don’t love.

Hilary Hendershott: I think so.

Aurora Winter: Okay, so she doesn’t even speak English. She has a translator. She speaks Japanese, and she has a Netflix series. Why? Because she has a book, and she also has a training program, people Invest. I think it’s a couple of thousand dollars to become a Kondo-certified trainer. But here’s the smart thing about that business model. Besides the couple of thousand dollars they spend to take the training, then the trainers, I think they have to spend $500 a year keeping that certification current.

Hilary Hendershott: So, it’s a recurring revenue.

Aurora Winter: Bing kaboom, yeah. So, there’s a couple of models that are detailed and turn words into wealth.

Hilary Hendershott: I like it. Okay, well, just for the sake of link, let’s have people buy the book and teach themselves the other four models. But the point is that if you’re a business owner and you’re a thought leader and you have a meaningful thing to say to contribute to society, you need to put it in a book because there are people who can and will read the book and access the book that aren’t going to access it elsewhere. It’s just not going to happen.

Aurora Winter: Exactly. And the myth is that you have to be the person to write that book. So, it’s a different skill set to be a word wrangler than it is to be the person with the heart and the passion and the life experience or the business expertise. So, if you bring any of those things, heart, passion, business, expertise, or life experience, that is your book, even if somebody else is the ghostwriter or editor or publisher or helps you with it. One last really quick story. So, I love this story. David Goggins was asked what was the worst advice that he ever got? And he said the worst advice he ever got was from an agent in New York who told him if he self-published, he would at most sell 5,000 copies of his book Can’t Hurt Me.

He decided to independently publish not so much because of the money, but because he didn’t want to lose control of his story. But then he had a marketing plan and he went on a lot of podcasts and he sold about a million copies of his book and 600,000 copies of his audiobook. If he had gone with the traditional publisher, that choice would have cost him about $20 million. So, there, independent publishing is here to stay. I think the antique method, the dinosaur method is very rarely going to be your best choice unless you’re J.K. Rowling.

Hilary Hendershott: That’s true. She’s another independent published author.

Aurora Winter: She kept the electronic rights to the Harry Potter series, so she makes about, I think, it’s $40 million. I can’t remember, it’s $40 million or pounds a year.

Hilary Hendershott: Every time she wakes up.

Aurora Winter: No, as an independent publisher because she kept the rights to the e-book and audiobook component, which is very smart, so.

Hilary Hendershott: Well, as a capper, and this is completely non sequitur, but Aurora happens to be one of my favorite names of all time. It is Sleeping Beauty, right?

Aurora Winter: It is, I think so. Yeah, nice.

Hilary Hendershott: Yep, I love it. So, tell people where to find you. Besides buy your book, Turn Words into Wealth, which we will have a link to in the show notes for today’s episode, you want them to private message you on LinkedIn. Is that right?

Aurora Winter: Yeah, they can private message me on LinkedIn and they can certainly go to my website, which is AuroraWinter.com, A-U-R-O-R-A, Winter like the season.

Hilary Hendershott: Perfect. Alright, thanks for being here.

Aurora Winter: That’s my pleasure, thanks.

[END]