Book Writing and its Marketing Advantages with David Meerman Scott

Thank you, Shane, for having me on. I really appreciate it.

So, grew up in various places, because my dad was a corporate sales and marketing guy. A little bit of time in Massachusetts and in different places, in New York. But I like to say that I’m from Connecticut, because that’s where I lived when I went to high school, and then I went to college at Kenyon College in the cornfields of Ohio, and then I thought I wanted to be a bond trader.

After I graduated from college, I went to Wall Street, got a job as a bond trader, and actually was on a bond desk. It wasn’t quite the trader—I was sort of an assistant, and I hated it. It was terrible. It was just a whole bunch of young men barking into telephones, which I just didn’t like. What I really loved was the information that the bond traders used—the Dow Jones and Reuters screens, things like that. It was really interesting to me.

So I spent about 15 years in the corporate world. Ten of those years were in Asia. I lived in Tokyo and in Hong Kong, and I was working for real-time information companies, selling and marketing services to bond traders all over the world, living in Asia. And I was really lucky, because that experience of being first on a bond trading desk and then working in the information industry—most of that was pre-web—gave me essentially a head start into what this internet thing was, because I was using real-time information before practically anyone else on the planet was. It was really just a handful of bond traders using this kind of information, so I was really lucky.

Then, about 18 years ago, I went out on my own to share the ideas that I learned in various ways. You know, like all of us, I lucked into things that I hated, lucked into things that I loved, and figured out some things that other people didn’t know.

I have two brothers, both younger. My dad was a corporate guy, and my mom was, you know, an upscale housewife type, making sure we went to the right country clubs—all that sort of thing—which is definitely not the life I carved out for myself. My wife is Japanese. We have one daughter, obviously half-Japanese, and I know we’ll talk about it in a couple minutes. But my daughter, Reiko, she’s 27 years old now and my co-author on my latest book, Fanocracy.

We just got news about her. She’s graduating from medical school and going into emergency medicine. A couple days ago, we learned she’ll be going to Boston Medical Center for her residency. All the medical schools in Massachusetts, including Boston University School of Medicine—where Reiko currently goes—are pushing graduation dates up by a couple of months, and the governor is granting them medical licenses early.

So as we’re recording this, in just a couple of weeks, my daughter will literally be on the front lines of COVID-19 for all of New England, at Boston’s largest emergency facility, and she’ll be an emergency room doctor. It’s thrown me for a bit of a loop because I feel like I’m sending her off to war. She went from my daughter the college student, to my daughter the medical school student, to, oh my God, this is real. She’s going to be an ER doctor at Boston Medical Center dealing with COVID-19 in just a couple of weeks.

I know. It happens so quickly. She’s my co-author on this book, and yeah, she’s my daughter. She’s just about to graduate, and all of a sudden—it’s because she didn’t know where she was going to do her residency. She applied—you apply, but you don’t know until a certain point. All of a sudden it’s, bang—not only are you doing emergency room, bang—you’re graduating early. Bang, you have to be at the hospital in three weeks. It’s like, wow, that’s crazy.

I don’t know what you’re feeling, Shane, but what I’ve been going through here—since we’re not able to meet people in person—is pretty interesting. Normally, I speak at about 40 live events a year, all over the world. I’ve spoken in 40 countries, all seven continents. I love the speaking circuit—I really dig it—but I haven’t been on an airplane in more than a month now. Everything has been canceled or postponed through June.

What’s interesting, and I’m curious about your perspective on this, is just before this whole situation broke, I felt the online world was becoming more and more polarized, more aggressive and salesy. In politics, it was extremely polarized. Social networks themselves were optimized purely for profit.

But what I’ve noticed over the past few weeks—and this seems to be increasing—is a shift toward a kinder, gentler approach to life online. It’s like when we can’t meet in person, we naturally become kinder and gentler digitally. I’m really optimistic that we’ll come out of this with a new way of doing business online—a more personal, kinder, and gentler way than we’ve seen in recent years. Because frankly, people have been abusing these channels lately.

That’s pretty exciting to me. Although it’s a terrible situation that’s upending everyone, I genuinely see positive outcomes emerging from it.

Yeah, and it’s global. That’s what’s really interesting. It’s global. It’s all over the world. And you know, without naming names, people in our political world have been finding enemies over the last three, four, or five years, and now it’s a common enemy—it’s not us versus them, it’s us versus it. Yeah, which is a very different way of thinking about the world.

Right? No, I think that’s right. That’s what I’m saying.

The one I’m best known for is The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which originally came out in 2007. The seventh edition of that book comes out in May of 2020, so around the time this will release, the new edition should be out. It’s been a remarkable run—400,000 copies sold in English, translated into 29 other languages, and I’ve got 10 other books. But the one I think is my best so far is Fanocracy: Turning Fans into Customers and Customers into Fans. It’s really a book for the current times, which I’m pretty excited about as well.

29 different languages, soon to be 30. I know, it’s crazy.

Now’s the time.

I’m going to talk about my process—and I’m going to talk about it in a way I’ve never heard anyone else explain it.

I’m a massive live music fan. I’ve been to 804 live concerts in my life. I keep a spreadsheet of them. I’ve been to 75 Grateful Dead concerts. I started going to shows when I was 15, back in the late ’70s, so it’s been a huge part of my life. I often use music metaphors when I think about writing.

When I’m exploring a topic for a book, I start by analyzing what I’ve tweeted about—what’s getting engagement? Then I look at my LinkedIn posts. What’s resonating and why? If I start to see patterns, I think, “Okay, that’s interesting.” From there, I’ll write longer-form content like blog posts or do some videos. If those start gaining traction, I pay closer attention.

But the real key? I’m always searching for a pattern in the universe that nobody else sees. I want to write a book that’s original—something no one’s done before. Going back to the music metaphor: I want my book to be original music, not a cover band. There are probably 10,000 marketing books published in the last decade, and most of them are cover bands—rehashing ideas, tweaking them slightly, and repackaging them. That’s not what I want to do.

When I wrote The New Rules of Marketing and PR back in 2005–2006, it was a radical idea at the time to say that marketing on the web isn’t about advertising—it’s about publishing content. No one had framed it that way. When it came out in 2007, it was the first book on that subject. You can call it content marketing, inbound marketing, or social media marketing—but it was the first to really dive into that.

Later, I started noticing that marketing was shifting to real time. Google made a huge change—one a lot of people don’t remember—where they started indexing content in real time. Before that, if you posted a blog, it could take months to show up in search. But suddenly, it was instant. And around the same time, Twitter was emerging as a real-time platform. So I wrote Real-Time Marketing & PR—again, identifying a pattern no one else was talking about.

Then I co-wrote Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead with Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot. We realized that the Grateful Dead was basically the original social network before Facebook. The way they treated fans, the way they built community—it was ahead of its time.

For my most recent book, Fanocracy, the pattern I saw was this: any organization can develop a fanbase, just like the Grateful Dead or Harry Potter. My daughter, Reiko—my co-author—is a huge Harry Potter fan. So we combined our passions and showed how any brand, business, or organization can cultivate passionate fans.

So yes, when I think about writing a book, it always starts with identifying a pattern that nobody else is seeing and crafting something completely original. And you know what’s harder than writing? Naming the book. It took me six months to come up with Fanocracy because I wanted to own the term—not just in the Amazon and Google search results—but also in people’s minds. That’s how it was with The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Real-Time Marketing & PR, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, and even Newsjacking—which is now in the Oxford English Dictionary.

That naming process is hard. The actual writing? I don’t think of a book as 75,000 words—I think of it as 150 short blog posts, 500 words each. That makes it manageable.

Right? If you think about the average business book—maybe 75,000 words—and the average blog post is 500 words. If you write one blog post a day for 75 days, you’ve written a book. Then you just have to rearrange it, put it in order, figure out what the chapters are, edit it, and all that sort of stuff.

That’s it. People freak, yeah—that’s what happens. People freak out about writing a book. But no, you just take it in chunks. So think, maybe 15 chapters, and each chapter is 5,000 words. Each chapter is roughly 10 blog posts, and you’re good to go.

There you go. And then make sure, though, that it’s original. It’s not a cover band.

I’m looking forward to that, Shane.

Sure. So Reiko and I, about five years ago, were just talking about how we’re both massive fans of the things we love. I mentioned it earlier—for me, it’s the Grateful Dead and live music. For Reiko, it’s Harry Potter. She’s seen every movie multiple times, read every book multiple times, been to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando—twice—and even went to the UK for the studio tour.

She also wrote an 85,000-word alternate-ending novel to the Harry Potter series, posted it on a fan fiction site, and it’s been downloaded thousands of times and commented on hundreds of times. So yeah, she’s a true Harry Potter geek.

At the time, I had been thinking about writing a book on fandom. My thesis was that any organization can build fans the same way Harry Potter and the Grateful Dead have. So I started asking Reiko questions: “What would a millennial think of this? What would a woman think? A Comic-Con fan?” And after asking all these questions, it hit me—why not have her co-author the book with me?

Why have just a 50-something-year-old white guy who loves the Grateful Dead write the book, when you can also include the voice of a mixed-race woman—Reiko—born in Tokyo, a massive Harry Potter fan, who has a neuroscience degree and is becoming an emergency room doctor? We come from different backgrounds, but we both deeply understand fandom.

So we spent five years researching and writing Fanocracy. And we found incredible examples from all kinds of organizations—B2B companies, enterprise software firms, nonprofits, even government agencies—who’ve built real fandoms.

One of my favorite stories is about Haggerty Insurance, which specializes in insuring classic cars. Now, auto insurance isn’t exactly a business you’d expect to build a fanbase, but they have over a million fans. They show up at classic car shows (pre-COVID), put on seminars, offer advice on how to maintain classic cars, and even have a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers. Their online community has more than 650,000 members who talk about their classic cars.

Now, Haggerty is the largest classic car insurance company on the planet. When I interviewed McKeel Hagerty, the CEO, he told me, “David, there’s no way we could have competed with the big guys, so we decided to go out and build fans.” And it worked.

So the book is full of stories like that—unexpected companies building massive fandoms—and we also offer prescriptions for how any organization can do the same. Writing it with Reiko was super fun, and it gave us a chance to geek out over the things we love—her with Harry Potter, me with the Dead—and explore what it really means to be a fan, and how any brand or business can tap into that same energy.

Well, when we started the project, Reiko was only 21—just about to graduate from Columbia with a degree in neuroscience. So at that time, our relationship was very much hierarchical. I was still paying for her education, and when she wasn’t in her dorm, she was living under my roof. I was the dad, she was the daughter.

But we quickly realized that dynamic wouldn’t work for writing a book. That kind of hierarchy had to go. We needed to shift to a partnership of equals. She had to feel completely comfortable telling me, “Hey, this chapter you wrote doesn’t work,” and I had to be okay admitting, “Yeah, you’re a better writer than I am”—because sometimes, she truly is.

That shift in our relationship actually had a really positive impact. It helped us grow closer, and it set the tone for how we’d collaborate.

Now, that said, we had a false start. We spent nearly a year writing most of the first draft in a unified voice—a blended, neutral tone that tried to reflect both of us. And it just didn’t work. Her voice got watered down, mine got smoothed over, and the result was a really generic manuscript.

Eventually, we realized we had to scrap that version and start again. This time, we split the book—she wrote roughly half the chapters, I wrote the other half. And we labeled them clearly: “Chapter Four by David,” “Chapter Five by Reiko,” and so on. It gave us the freedom to express our ideas authentically, and the reader gets to hear distinct voices—a millennial mixed-race woman versus a middle-aged white guy and Grateful Dead fan. It made the book so much stronger.

We also recorded the audiobook together, each of us reading the chapters we wrote. That worked out beautifully, and it brought the same energy and perspective from the written book into the audio version.

All in all, the process was great because we approached it with mutual respect. We hit a roadblock early, but we pivoted in time and ended up with something we’re both really proud of.

And I’ll say this—I mentioned it before, but Reiko is a better writer than I am. She really is. What’s funny is that at least 40 or 50 people have danced around that fact. No one wants to just come out and say, “David, she’s way better than you.” Instead, they’ll say things like, “Reiko’s writing is really interesting,” or, “It has a lyrical quality to it,” and I just laugh and say, “Yeah, she’s better than me. It’s okay—you can say it.”

Other people have said, “Wow, you two have very different writing styles,” and I always respond, “Yeah, she’s better.” And that’s fine! It’s funny, because people try so hard not to hurt my feelings—but the truth is, I don’t mind. I don’t suck—she’s just better. And I’m proud of that.

January 2020, yeah—absolutely. And Tony Robbins wrote the foreword to the book, which is another exciting part of it. I speak at all of Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery events and have since 2014. He’s become a friend, and we’ve become business partners. I was really excited that he was willing to write the foreword to the book.

Pretty much full-time since 2007. Before that, I did some paid speeches, but it wasn’t the majority of my revenue.

“Let’s sell the rest of the business and only do speaking.” And then—boom—you can’t do that. Awesome. You don’t want to, you really don’t want to do that in 2020.

Yeah, I had dinner with Brian at Social Media Marketing World—must’ve been the first two or three days of March. I forget exactly when, but we were having that conversation. Jay Baer was in the room too, and a couple of others. We were having dinner and thinking, “Wow, we’re right on the edge of this.”

We were just starting to see the cancellations coming in. And you could tell—there were different levels of how seriously people were taking it, what they thought was going to happen.

One person said, “I don’t think I’m going to have any paid speaking gigs in 2020.” And I was like, “Nah, we’re going to be over this quickly.” And now? Who knows.

Who knows what’s going to happen? Yet, fortunately, I’ll be fine—even if I don’t have any paid speaking gigs this year. I just love it so much. I love the energy of being on stage. I love the travel. I love going to interesting places. I love talking to entrepreneurs about their businesses.

So I certainly hope it ends quickly—but if it doesn’t, I’ll figure out ways to survive.

No, I think that’s right. In my case, I’ve always had a lot of paid speaking gigs coming in, so I haven’t had to pay much attention to the expense side of the business.

But things slowly creep in. You look at your American Express bill, and suddenly there are all these recurring charges—online subscriptions, random tools, domains. I’ve got 50 domains! And I’m thinking, “Wait, what’s up with that?” I see GoDaddy hitting my card every single month.

So yeah, maybe now’s the time to think more about the expense side of the equation—especially when there’s not much money coming in on the income side.

Yeah, I’m approaching the need for that—though I’m not quite there yet.

Were you speculating, or did you just find them, think they were cool, and decide to buy them?

Yeah, me too. I’ve never really sold one. Maybe one for like, 100 bucks, just to cover hosting for a month or two. But yeah—I tend to buy them, not sell them.

I always think they’ll be valuable one day. I buy them, and then go, “Oh, that’s cool. Maybe I’ll use it someday.”

Yeah, I’m into surfing. I’m also really into the Apollo lunar program. I have one of the best collections on the planet of artifacts that have flown to the moon on Apollo missions. I even have a home museum.

I wrote a book called Marketing the Moon that came out about six or seven years ago—it did well and was optioned for a movie. It eventually became a PBS documentary series called Chasing the Moon. That was a three-part mini-series on PBS American Experience.

So, you know, that’s the second book I wrote that started as a hobby and turned into a marketing book. My love for the Grateful Dead turned into Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. My love for the Apollo program turned into Marketing the Moon.

I guess there’s a pattern: get really interested in something, geek out on it, and then figure out how the marketing angle fits. Then I write a book about it.

Oh, and you asked where I met my wife. I lived in Tokyo for seven years—my wife’s Japanese. That’s where we met.

She’s into music, I’m not. I’ve taken her to some shows—20 or so. She tolerates me. She likes certain bands and shirts, and I’ll go with her to those. But for the most part, I go with my buddies.

They’re a good band.

So, tell me what’s a California reggae band, for example?

Oh, I know them, yeah, yeah. I’ve seen, I’ve seen them a bunch of times.

Don’t know them.

I like Dirty Heads.

Sublime is pretty awesome.

You might be interested to know that out of the 804 live shows I’ve been to, the most epic was Bob Marley’s last concert on September 23, 1980. I’m the only person known to have taken photographs at that concert.

I borrowed the yearbook photographer’s camera from my school and brought it to the show at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a big, professional camera, so people thought I was a real photographer and let me right up front. I got some amazing shots. Those photos are now historic—they’re the only known visual record of Bob Marley’s final concert.

There’s actually a documentary called Marley that came out four or five years ago. My photos are featured about five minutes in. That concert was crucial to the story because it was the only show Marley performed after learning he had brain cancer and was going to die.

He’d just done a few shows at Madison Square Garden but wasn’t feeling well, so he went to the doctor, and they gave him the diagnosis. He told the band, and they got on a bus, went to Pittsburgh, played that show—and then canceled the rest of the tour. He never performed again.

So yeah, that concert? That’s kind of epic.

Yeah, it’s called Marley. If you go to my blog at davidmeermanscott.com and type in “Bob Marley,” you’ll find the story I wrote about that night, and the photos are up there too.

Yeah, it’s great. I love it too. I think it’s so important. I think being nice to people, being kind—that whole vibe—I really think that’s coming back.

At the same time? So it’s a foursome?

Oh, so it’s dead or alive—that’s interesting.

No, I got it—I got it. So here’s mine: Jerry Garcia, for sure. I guess that’s obvious. Barack Obama, and now I’m going to throw you a curveball: Miley Cyrus. I’m a Miley Cyrus fan. One of the most epic shows I’ve ever seen was a Miley Cyrus concert backed by The Flaming Lips at the House of Blues in Boston—a small venue. She did this tiny, low-key, almost secret tour. The first show popped up on my Ticketmaster alert three days after the tour was announced.

I told my friends, “Miley Cyrus, backed by The Flaming Lips—this is going to be epic.” But none of them wanted to go. I got called around, asked everyone, and they all said no. I ended up going by myself.

So yeah, those would be my three: Jerry Garcia, Barack Obama, and Miley Cyrus. That would be a really interesting dinner. I think there’d be a great conversation among the four of us.

I know, right? It always throws people for a loop when I say Miley Cyrus. But that’s the point—you need to throw people off sometimes. That’s a good thing. I don’t want people to think they’ve got me all figured out.

Interesting question. Honestly, I’m doing just fine financially, so I wouldn’t go out and spend it all overnight. I’d probably stick a little in the bank, just for security, but then I’d want to figure out a way to share it with the world.

Right now, with everything going on around COVID-19—and we’ve talked about this throughout the podcast—I love speaking. I love the speaking circuit. I love being on stage. But the speaking industry is completely shut down right now. And while I’ll personally be fine, I really worry about the freelancers in the speaking business—the people who plan the meetings, set up the stages, run the soundboards, work backstage, manage lighting, provide security—those folks.

It would be really cool to use a big chunk of that money—maybe half of it—to start a foundation to support people in the public speaking and events industry. These are people who’ve lost jobs and income, who live gig to gig, and are suddenly having trouble making rent or even putting food on the table.

These are the professionals who make me look good every week. They’re the ones behind the scenes making everything work, whether they’re running soundboards or managing lights. I’d love to be able to support them in some meaningful way.

I’m a really big believer in the idea that the more you give to the universe, the more the universe gives back. I’m not religious, but if I were to say what my “religion” is, that’s it. The more you give, the more you get back. That’s what I live by.

Awesome. David, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Thanks, Shane. It was really fun to talk with you.