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KYLE AUSTIN YOUNG IS an award-winning strategy consultant for leaders and teams in a wide range of fields. He has written for the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, the Boston Globe, CNBC, Psychology Today, Forbes, and Business Insider. Among his many roles for many teams, Kyle is the operations manager here at The Memoir Project. And so, it is a singular pleasure and a point of pride for me to welcome him here on the occasion of the publication of his terrific new book, Success is a Numbers Game, Achieve Bigger Goals by Changing the Odds, just out from Hay House Business. Listen in and read along as he and I discuss how to write for major publications, and so much more.

KYLE: Well, thank you so much for having me. I can’t believe that I’m on the podcast.

MARION: We’ve known each other a long time. And this is a dream come true. I have to just horn in on your dream a little bit. For both of us, this is a dream come true. So I’m just thrilled. So you’re deeply accustomed to giving advice to my audience, having been my webinar partner, business strategist, and general go-to person for everything here at The Memoir Project since its inception. So, my audience knows you for your good advice as well as for your candor. And you’ve now had the remarkable experience of getting an inkling for a book, making some notes, sketching that out, writing a proposal, writing for major publications, getting an agent, getting a publisher, and writing and, hello, publishing a book. So, as I said in the intro, you’ve written for and published in all these wonderful publications. But let’s go back to the beginning. Among those terrific publications, where did you start? And what degree of difficulty did you meet as a first-time writer?

KYLE: Sure. You know, I’ve been privileged to teach a class on this topic, and that’s forced me to think back, reflect, and consolidate some of what I’ve learned. And I believe that when you want to write for major publications, you need to create a writing resume sentence. In the same way that you wouldn’t apply to be the CEO of a big organization right out of college, it would also, in many cases, be suboptimal to, you know, try to write for a major publication, like perhaps The New York Times, if you’d never written anywhere else. But when you create a writing resume sentence, which is just a list of your bylines, you have an opportunity to move up the rankings similar to how people might move up the corporate ladder. The key difference being you can do that at the writing level much, much, much faster.

So, I tried writing first for what I call “level one publications.” Those are websites where anyone can submit an article without an editor’s permission. Medium.com is a great example of that. LinkedIn allows you to do that. There are many different services where you can put articles on a really professional website without needing editorial approval. And that gives you some writing samples on the internet. You can then use those to try to get the opportunity to write for publications that are maybe not among the most prestigious in the world, but they do require an editor’s permission. And when you have a few of those under your belt, you have an opportunity to go after the really big ones. And like you said, I’ve been honored to write for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Boston Globe, CNBC. That all started with writing for publications that I don’t talk about as much now, but I’m very thankful for those opportunities.

MARION: Love that answer. And it’s absolutely the way to do it. And now you currently have a mailing list of 120,000 entrepreneurs and leaders who receive your business strategy newsletter. But that was not who you were when you published your first piece, say in The Harvard Business Review. So talk to the writers listening about planning to be something, writing from the beginning of that plan and building pieces one at a time. You’ve covered that a little bit, but I want to know specifically, do you write to who you plan to be, or do you become who you were meant to be as you write? So that’s a chicken and egg, but I’d love you to chicken and egg it for us.

KYLE: Sure, I think it’s a little bit of both. I knew that this was a goal that I’d had since I was a child. It’s a bizarre memory, but as is often the case in memoir, which we talk about so much here at The Memoir Project, I believe I was leaving my great-grandfather’s funeral in the car with my mother, maybe headed to the graveside, when she turned to me and said, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

What a bizarre setup, but I think that’s what happened. And I remember responding and saying, “I want to be a writer. I want to write books.” And she gave the advice that, you know, that might not be enough to sustain a family, but that that was, you know, a goal I could pursue. And I think that that is more or less what happened. But I mean, that was, you know, two and a half decades ago that I said out loud I wanted to write a book. And so, in terms of do you write you know to where you want to be or do you sort of discover it along the way, I think it can be a little bit of both but I do think it’s important when you have a goal, to write it down to make it as clear as possible, and in the book that I’m publishing, I teach people how to create something called “a success diagram.” All that is is you list out everything that has to go right in order for you to succeed at the goal you want to accomplish.

So, in the case of trying to publish a book, I knew that I was going to need to have credentials. I knew that I was going to need to have an audience. I knew that I was going to need to have a literary agent. I knew that I was going to need to have a really clear message to share, and an origin story for where that message came from. And because I had all of that in front of me, it made the process of pursuing this goal almost passive, in the sense that I could just live my life, work my job, love my family, and it wasn’t uncommon for the advantages I was looking for to just present themselves to me. And because I knew what I wanted, I was able to spot those.

So when I had the opportunity to connect with someone who I knew could help me write for the Harvard Business Review, that stood out just like firetruck lights. It was such an obvious opportunity. And I ended up doing some free work for someone to help learn more from them about how I could ultimately write for HBR. That was a big source of credibility for me. When it came that I had the opportunity to be connected to a literary agent for a consulting project, I jumped at that, even though it wasn’t necessarily one of the highest paying contracts I would ever have, it was a chance to meet someone in the space, and then I would end up meeting more people in the space because of that, and I was able to leverage that to find an agent. So I think it is important to have a sense of where you want to go now. Certainly there’s a process of discovery along the way, but if you have a general idea of the destination in mind, again, it allows you to sort of collect advantages in the same way that a child might collect Easter eggs on an Easter egg hunt. You live your life and you find these things as you go.

MARION: You absolutely do. And the title of the book is Success is a Numbers Game: Achieve Bigger Goals by Changing the Odds. And I want everyone to buy this book and work its magic. So I refuse to give away most of the content. But I must say that one of the many things I took away from this book, and have taken away from working with you over the years, is the simple test you teach us for knowing which of our biggest goals to prioritize and which to quit immediately. So let’s just use that a little bit to tempt people into your way of thinking. Talk a little bit about that test, please.

KYLE: Sure. I think that when many of us are trying to choose which goals to prioritize, and I work with a lot of smart, very ambitious people who have a long list of things they’d love to accomplish, typically we turn to the same old, I guess, filters or litmus tests. We ask, “Which goal is most aligned with my values?” We ask, which goal might make future goals easier to accomplish? Or which goal sounds the most fun? “Which goal do I feel the most passionate about?” I think all of those questions have value. I ask all of them in my own life. But I also believe that if we aren’t pausing to consider our odds of success, we run the risk of pursuing goals that might look great on paper, but if we don’t have a reasonable chance of actually accomplishing them, we could actually do significant damage to our lives long term, depending on how that goal ultimately plays out. There’s the possibility for big financial loss. There’s the possibility for a loss of time and resources, the possibility for a lot of emotional grief as we maybe experience a failure that we could have avoided if we’d been a little bit more intentional about understanding our odds.

I give an analogy that is intended to be very simple, but let’s say you’re considering the goal of running a marathon. You want to run a marathon. You only have about three months of time to prepare. So you hire a running coach, and she says, “I can get you ready in time. You’re starting a little bit late, but I can get you there. There’s three things you’re going to have to do. I need you to eat, sleep, and train exactly how I tell you to for 90 days.” What most people do when they’re confronted with the reality of the prerequisites to their success is they automatically stop to think, “Do I think I can do all of those things? Do I feel like each of those are things that I can accomplish?” That’s good. It’s good that we’re already doing that. But we often fall for a mistake, and I can illustrate that mistake with some really simple numbers. I’m just going to say that, let’s say that in the process of looking at these three different prerequisites to running a marathon, we decide that we think we have a 70% chance of eating the way we’re supposed to, a 70% chance of sleeping the way we’re supposed to, and a 70% chance of training the way we’re supposed to. Incredibly simple. Most people fall for a trap called averaging. They look at the things that have to go right. They see if they feel good about each of them individually. And if they do, then they feel good about the goal as a whole.

That’s not how the math works. That’s not how the world works.

In reality, you can’t average. You have to multiply. So in this scenario, we would take 0.7 times 0.7 times 0.7, and we would learn that we only have a 34% chance of being ready on race day. Of predicted failure. So in the book, I give people a lot of tips and strategies, actually a five-step framework, for improving their odds of success. But when we consider the fact that over 90% of people fail at their New Year’s resolutions and we ask, why is that happening? Well, in many cases, people are pursuing goals that they feel good about, but because they don’t understand how probability works, they don’t realize that these are predicted failures. And if they don’t take the opportunity to be intentional and change their odds of success, most people are going to wind up with an outcome they aren’t excited about.

MARION: Absolutely. And you’ve done this for me so many times. I have these ideas. My sister refers to them as my “crackpot” ideas. I have these ideas and I come at you and I’m like, “Ah!” And you say, “Okay, so let’s talk about how that’s going to go.” And I appreciate that so much. And I think… it’s still a wonder to me about that initial idea that pops into our heads, that moment. And you’ve talked about how at your great-grandfather’s funeral, your mother asked you what you want to be, and you had this idea to write books. But let’s drill into a little bit about how you decided to write this particular book.

It’s not for me to say what your personal life and commitments are, but you’re a busy person in your personal life. And you may share those commitments here, I just won’t do so for you. But with those commitments we all have and more, talk to us a little bit about not talking yourself out of a good idea. I think this is something writers… Well, I know this is something writers do every day. We have a great idea, we talk ourselves down from that excitement, thinking either, how good could it be if it was mine? Or how could I ever fit this into my commitments? Or, oh, no one else has ever agreed with anything I wanted to do, so why would they start now?

So, how do you hold on to a good idea? Talk to us a little bit about first this idea, it pops into your head, or it comes to you some other way, and then talking yourself into this idea.

KYLE: Yeah, I appreciate that. I think there was certainly a phase where I was asking for feedback. You were one of the people that I came to and presented the idea for the book. You have this great algorithm, which is a way to sort of stress test an idea for a book. It’s about X is illustrated by Y to be told in a Z. And so I came to you, and this will be a little clunky, but I essentially said, you know, Marion, I’m thinking about writing a book that’s about how we can leverage a simple understanding of probability to more reliably accomplish our biggest goals, as illustrated by the last 10 years of my consulting career to be told in a book. What do you think about that? And so there was certainly a period of time where I was going to you and going to other people and saying, do we think that this has a good chance of succeeding?

At that point, I’d already collected advantages like relationships with different literary agents. I had these great bylines. I had, to some extent, an audience at that time. And so I knew that I had a pretty good shot at a book deal. So that was helpful. And then in the case of this goal, once you sign the contract, that is a big part of the motivation to not quit in the middle because there’s tremendous accountability. When you sign a book deal with a traditional publishing house, you’re paid in advance. They write you a check, and it’s an amount of money that is an advance on your royalties. You have an opportunity to earn out and potentially get even more money. But they have put money into your bank account. There’s an investment that’s been made by the publishing house. And so when there are days that you don’t want to write, when there are days when you have writer’s block, when there are days that your children are screaming or your wife has a commitment or your spouse, whatever the case might be, you have a decision to make. And in some ways, because of the commitment that I’d made to the publishing house, to my agent, and my desire to honor that, it was one of the things that got me over the hurdle. And there were nights where I stayed up until three in the morning working on the book because that’s what I’d said I was going to do.

So I think that that’s a difficult part of this. But the accountability that comes from taking steps and moving forward is a big part of it.

I’ll share two steps that don’t come from me at all. I do think there’s a lot of wisdom in choosing goals that we think we can actually stick with. And I think that’s at the heart of what you’re saying.

Jeff Haden is an INC. columnist who I cite in the book. He recommends something called “The Two Week Test.” He says, if you’re thinking about pursuing a goal, try it for two weeks. Don’t make any big financial commitments though. Don’t go buy a $5,000 laptop. Don’t go build a shed in the backyard that’s going to become your writing studio. Try to pursue the goal as affordably as possible for two weeks. And after two weeks, check back in with yourself and see if this is still something you feel motivated to pursue. If you hated it every day for two weeks, it’s going to be a long road to try to ultimately get that to publication. If you had a pretty good time with it, there might be an opportunity to keep going. That’s one strategy I really admire. Another comes from Anders Ericsson in his book Peak. He encourages people when they’re pursuing a goal, don’t quit on a bad day.

KYLE: So when you’re quitting on a…I think that is deserving of a pause and some appreciation because he says when you’re quitting on a bad day, you are potentially letting your emotions drive the bus. He says if you want to quit, that’s fine. If you’re in sort of a lull, a dip, whatever the case may be, get back to where you’re on solid ground again and then decide if you want to quit. If you want to quit then, that’s fine. But don’t quit just because you had a bad day. Don’t let your emotions ultimately make an important choice for you.

MARION: I love that. My husband is a retired newspaper editor and he spent a good portion of his career with people telling him that they could write a column for him that would sell newspapers. And he would say, “First of all, no column sells newspapers, but here’s the deal, write me five and let me have a look.”And 100% of the time people would say, “Five? I’m not going to write you five columns.” And of course, that’s the way to find out if you can be a columnist. Have you just got one good column in you? Well, that’s an op-ed that you should pitch to some major publication. But if you really do have a string of ideas and there’s another string right behind that, you’ve got that kind of commitment. You’ve got the ability to sustain the life of a columnist. And I think that’s just such a great, those are just great tests. Try it for two weeks. I love that. I totally get it. And I get it in terms of writing. Many people have a good essay in them, but it doesn’t have the grit to be, or they don’t have the grit to write a book, or it doesn’t have the grit to be a book. Those are lovely. I love that. I love the two week one.

KYLE: Well, I think your overall teaching methodology lends itself to that same basic approach. You ask people to first craft an argument, to first get out of their own story to some extent and find a universal truth that would make the book more appealing to readers from a variety of backgrounds. If they can pass that test, we know that they have a story. They have something to say, at least. Then the question is, can they create a memoir map? A memoir map is what’s going to help determine if there’s enough here to make it a book. If there’s not enough here for a full memoir map, then this probably should be an essay or an op-ed, which can be incredibly valuable to your writing career. It was to mine, but it’s probably not something that you want to try to stretch into a really thin book. So I think that your framework as well has these same checkpoints that are designed to help people identify what writing to prioritize and also what format a writing might find its best home in.

MARION: Yeah, and I got those ideas working with you. So here’s this mutual admiration society right here on record. So, “Success is a Numbers Game” is a great title. And it makes me want to lean in just saying that. And then the subtitle “Achieve Bigger Goals by Changing the Odds” gives us a sense of empowerment. And in preparation for this interview, I reread an early draft of an outline of yours of what you were considering really long time ago, along with early titles and chapter breakdowns and early subtitles and early pages of yours. And I see a lot of what the book is now, specifically about overcoming limiting beliefs by looking at the many ways the numbers are already in your favor, even if you don’t think they are. So was that your pitch? Was that your pitch to yourself? Was that your pitch to your publisher, to your agent? Talk to me a little bit about how you pitched this, please.

KYLE: The book changed enormously from ideation to book proposal, to ultimately the agented proposal after I did sign with a firm, and then ultimately from signing a publishing deal to release. I’ll tell you just one story that’s kind of an example of that. At one point, after thinking I was done with the manuscript, I thought I’d finished it, they asked me to record a video for the sales team sharing what the book was about. They asked me to record a video that would inspire them to go get distribution in stores like Barnes & Noble. And I was looking into a camera, I’d written a script, I’d memorized it, and about halfway through a video that had been going on for some time, I just forgot my line. I wasn’t sure what came next, and I didn’t want to lose the take because I was pretty far into it. And I looked into the camera and I just completely spontaneously said, “Every goal that you’re pursuing has two hidden numbers attached to it, a probability of success and a probability of failure. If we can make that first number bigger and the second number smaller, we can change your life.”

And when I finished recording that video, I didn’t even take the time to upload it to my computer. The first thing I did was email my editor at the publishing house and say, “Can I have more time?” And I went back and rewrote the entire book with that in mind. It’s so important to start with the most synthesized version of the idea that you can. And I think you’ve done a great job of that, encouraging people to start with their argument and their algorithm. So yes, the idea absolutely changes. Yes, the title changes a lot. Something I think I would want to prepare people for that maybe I was not as prepared for as I could have been, is you’re also gonna get a lot of conflicting advice, even from people who all have great credentials. There were so many different opinions on what my title needed to be. I’m not in love with my title now. I just want people to go into the process with that realization.

Success is a numbers game.

There’s areas where that title is doing me favors, and there’s areas where that title is doing me no favors. There’s certain markets that are really turned off by the idea that I’m telling people that success is a numbers game. One of the things that came out of an article that I’m pitching to HBR right now is the phrase “Think negative.” And there’s a part of me that wishes the book was called “Think Negative,” because I’ve been getting really positive responses to that, arguing that we’re told to think positive, but positive thinking doesn’t make bad outcomes less likely to happen. What does is when we think negative, identify what could go wrong and take creative, intentional steps to minimize those risks. So you’re going to reach a point where you may not love your title when it reaches publication, I guess is what I want to say. You’re going to have to weigh different opinions, weigh different priorities. One title might speak to one group of people better than another. One title may mean a lot to you personally, or might represent sort of an inside joke from your life, but isn’t as marketable. Those are hard choices. And I think I’ve found that books are kind of like songs. Sometimes songs provoke an even greater emotional reaction when we hear them covered, when we hear the piano version, when we hear the violin version. And I’m finding that in the context of my book. My book is a framework. It’s a foundation. It’s a default. But as I go on shows like these, as I give speeches, as I consult, I have the opportunity to riff on what’s in the book. And sometimes that’s where I’m finding the greatest joy.

MARION: It’s a lovely answer and very, very generous because being fixed in a place with anything having to do with creativity is very, very dangerous. I think that being open to not saying, “Oh, I’m going off script here.” Instead, just going off script and then hearing it in your heart and then taking the manuscript back and rewriting it to that even sharper pitch, is an extraordinary lesson for everybody out here. But you mentioned advice and you mentioned specifically conflicting advice. So let’s talk about who you show this to. You and I spend a lot of time in webinars with people who talk to us about their 18 beta readers, or their five best friends who are reading their piece, or their writing group. And I always come down to advising them to deal only with professionals, to not telling their family what they’re writing, if they’re writing about their family, to only work with people who are invested in their success.

So how about you? How did you create a pod of people, some kind of group of people? Who do you advise, the writers listening to this, now that you’ve had this magnificent, you know, for the most part, magnificent experience with publishing, how do you advise people on who to show their writing and your ideas to?

KYLE: I think that’s an important question. I think that I’ve been given a gift, or like many things, I have a heightened attribute that is sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse, and that is, I’m very willing and even excited to ask for advice, receive advice very gratefully, and then not take the advice. That’s just never been a problem of mine. I have no issue getting advice that I ultimately choose not to move forward with, because typically when people give advice, it’s a reflection of their own goals. It’s what they would do if they were you, but they’re not you. They don’t have your same advantages. They don’t have your same disadvantages. They don’t necessarily have your same destinations in mind.

So, in that sense, I’m very comfortable showing writing to people and them coming back and saying, “It’s terrible.” And I say, “No, it’s not.” And then I move on with my life. That’s never been something that derailed me as much. In terms of who to get feedback from, the truth is, and I’m not in any way trying to, I think, kind of contradict the setup of the question, but I found that the professionals disagreed as much as the amateurs did. Even at the professional levels had one editor telling me this is great, one editor telling me this shouldn’t be in the book at all. I was dealing with that when it came to the title, when it came to the introduction, when it came to the use of certain types of analogies. And that was really a common theme.

One thing that I do like to ask, and this is something that I think can allow you to get reasonably good feedback, even out of amateur readers. I think there are at times a place for that. Now, there’s a couple caveats. One is that the person you would want to read it should be someone who represents your target audience to some extent. If you’re writing a book about postpartum depression, it’s unlikely that, you know, maybe a teenage boy would want to read that book. That’s probably not the target audience. So you probably shouldn’t be asking someone in that category for feedback on the book. They’re not going to get it.

But I do think you can, with the right people, get something useful out of them. And the way that I do that is I ask four questions. I ask them, read this and tell me — I guess these are requests, — tell me if you’re ever bored; tell me if you’re ever confused; tell me if you’re ever skeptical. Like, is he telling me the truth? Does he know what he’s talking about? And tell me if you’re ever offended. And that doesn’t mean that I have to respond to the advice that I’m given. People can tell me I was bored the whole time. I may not do anything about that. I might look at it and say, I think you’re wrong. I have other people saying that this is interesting. I think it’s interesting. I’ve worked in the space for 10 years. So I might not take the advice. But I want to know if people are bored. I want to know if they’re confused, because if they’re confused, that could really derail a book. I want to make it as simple and clear as possible. I want to know if they’re skeptical. I want to know if they’re reading it thinking, I’m not convinced he knows what he’s talking about, because there might be a flaw in the way that I’ve explained it. And I want to know if they’re offended. Sometimes writing is intended to offend people. Sometimes the goal of writing is to advocate for change in ways that are offensive.

I follow a writing teacher who quotes that the risk of insult is the price of clarity. Sometimes that’s the line that we’re walking. However, I want to at least be aware of it. So I think we can get feedback from people when we ask the right questions. But I hope everyone would feel empowered to… not take all of the advice they’re given. And yes, to the extent possible, work with professionals. I hired a freelance editor who was formerly an acquisitions editor at a Big Five publisher. And you can get access to those people pretty easily now. Many of them are now employed at private firms that will allow you to hire them for editing services. And they can give your book a read with publication in mind. They aren’t some random person. They’re somebody who knows what your goals are, and can help you accomplish it. I think the biggest thing I’d advise you against is don’t ever ask someone, “Is this good writing?” That’s subjective. And frankly, most people just aren’t even entitled to an opinion on that.

MARION: Yeah, that’s such great advice. I always recommend to people that you tell the person you’re asking to read it what you’re looking for. Otherwise, there’s nothing worse than for an early draft, getting back punctuation changes. It’s like, I know the thing is riddled with punctuation problems. That’s not what I wanted from you. So I always say, “Please don’t change the punctuation. Don’t bother with the grammar. Just read it.” But I love your four questions. And I remember actually you giving those questions to me. And it changed the way I went into the project. And bored. That’s a really good question to ask someone. Because I was trained early on, if you’re just reading the words, but doing your Christmas shopping in your head, the paragraph has to go. And, you know, that means you’re bored. Yeah, that would be bored.

KYLE: And I want to say something, if I could, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think this is really important. I think that when it comes to beta readers, the fear is always, what if they give me unjust, bad feedback? I think that’s what the fear always is. What if they say something critical that isn’t deserved? But I think just as dangerous, maybe even more dangerous, is undeserved good feedback that causes you to not make efforts to improve things that could have been improved.

I had people in this process, even some people in the publishing process, who read my book and came back and said, “Oh, it’s so good. No notes. I loved everything about it. It was perfect.” And I went out and hired a freelance editor who, again, had been a former acquisitions editor at a big five firm because I was looking at just sort of the – just maybe potential conflicts of interest. I felt like there were people flattering me. I felt like there were people who weren’t telling me the truth. And when I went and interviewed different freelancers, I said – “I am trying to hire someone for one purpose. I want you to tell me the truth. That means if it’s good, don’t tell me it’s bad. But if it’s bad, don’t tell me it’s good.” And so I think that’s important. I think that sometimes we miss the danger and assume that only in criticism can we be misled. We can often be misled through flattery, as well, or through someone who didn’t really take the time to read the book. And that’s a very common issue, I think, at every phase of the process is you have somebody who skimmed it, glanced at it, didn’t even look at it, comes back and said, “Loved it, it was great.” Well… You don’t want to base your decisions on such flimsy advice.

MARION: No, and I look at that as someone who’s not doing their job. I don’t want to hear no notes. I want to hear notes. I want to understand the notes. I want to be able to rely on that person heightening my work. What I learned in my professional life at The New York Times is that editing makes a piece better. So I expect the person to whom I hand my manuscript, or essay, or op-ed to bring something to it. So I want them to do their job. And that’s why I’m very critical of people just giving it to a bunch of people who have never published, or who don’t know how to get something published. Yeah, those are good questions. Very, very good questions.

So now the book is out. We’re absolutely positively in the promoting stage. And I just want to say, and in a very congratulatory way, but also in a real recognition of what you put in here, you got a good solid six-figure book advance, and which for a first book is by anybody’s standards magnificent. And with that kind of recognition from a major American publisher comes some expectations. So those expectations have mostly to do around promoting. And so you and I do a lot of webinars. We talk about the business of writing. And people, and we don’t bill ourselves as experts on that, but writers always ask us do i need a website do I need to be on social media. So will you please talk a bit about the advanced planning that went into your book promotion, as well as what you’ve done in the immediate run-up to publishing as well as what you’re doing now that the book is out Sure.

KYLE: I think that a lot of people see a book deal as a goal that is pass-fail. I will either get a book deal or I will not get a book deal. And I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think in terms of your advance, I don’t want to get a book deal personally with a $5,000 advance. That would not have been something that would have justified the years I spent writing this book. The time that I’m now spending promoting the book.  That’s not something that would have been worth it for me. It might be worth it for somebody else. But we need to have a sense of what we want to accomplish and we need to recognize that it’s not just pass-fail.

So, your advance is a formula that is intended to be an advance on your royalties. The publisher is trying to estimate how many copies they think you can sell and they’re writing you a check as a reflection of that. And I’m not an attorney. I don’t give legal advice. But generally, unless you make just enormous misrepresentations, you are not expected to pay that back even if you fall short, because you could always argue that well there’s going to be more sales coming in the future, right? You theoretically have a lifetime to promote the book. But that is an important point to understand that this is a reflection of how many books they think you can sell.

There was a line that circulated in the industry for a long time that if you wanted to get a book deal, you had to have a platform. And I know where that came from, and it came from someone with tremendous experience in the space. I don’t think that’s exactly wrong, but I think that it can be said better.

If you want to get a book deal, you have to demonstrate that you can sell books. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your name is up in lights. That doesn’t necessarily mean any one type of platform, that I have so many followers on Instagram, or I have this blog with millions of readers. But it does mean that through all of the different strategies that you’re considering online, all the different areas where you’re investing, that they think you can sell a reasonable number of books. And so that could involve a number of different things. That could involve speaking gigs. That could involve a business that you own that gives you the opportunity to connect with a lot of people. That could involve having a generous friend named Marion who says, “I’ll have you on my podcast when the book comes out.” There are lots of different opportunities for selling books, and we have an opportunity to make the most of those and to draw attention to them in our book proposals.

So, to answer the question: “Do you need a website?” I will tell you that one of the first things publishers are going to do if you get an agent, they’re going to go out and circulate your proposal and then the publishers are going to want to meet with you. They’re going to want to see if you seem like a reasonable person. They’re going to want to ask some questions. One of the first things they’re going to do in preparation for that meeting is they are going to Google you. They’re going to Google you and see if they can find anything. I was at a little bit of a disadvantage.

My name is Kyle Young. The director of the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, who is not me — I live in Nashville, but it’s not me — he’s named Kyle Young. There was an Ohio State basketball player named Kyle Young, not me. There was somebody who was arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail for storming the Capitol who was named Kyle Young. All three of those people were getting more press coverage than I was as a business strategy consultant, even despite writing for sites like HBR. So, after a meeting with McGraw-Hill where they said, “We Googled you, we couldn’t find you,” I became Kyle Austin Young.

There’s now two people who call me Kyle Austin Young: My grandmother and the imprint of Penguin Random House that’s agreed to publish my book, which has been a bizarre full circle moment for me. But I became Kyle Austin Young because I had the ability to go back to some of my writing bios, to go back to my social media accounts, update the name, and those new pages started indexing, or not new pages, but newly branded pages started indexing. So when subsequent publishers Googled “Kyle Austin Young,” they said, “Oh, there he is.”

They’re trying to see if they’re gonna get a return on their investment. And that comes down to the ability to sell books. Publishers are absolutely relying on authors to participate in, if not do the majority of the selling for these books. So finding ways to demonstrate that you are going to be able to pull that off is a big part of how you get a book deal. And also finding ways to demonstrate that you’re writing to a market that can support a major book launch. If you’re writing about postpartum depression, for example, we’ll try to find statistics on the number of people who are dealing with that. If you’re writing about, in my case, I was writing business strategies, one of the areas that we really highlighted in the proposal, it’s about how to accomplish big goals, is we showed how many people were indicating that they planned to start a side hustle in the next two years. There was a piece of research that came out that showed that this enormous number of people, which I no longer remember off the top of my head, was intending to start a side hustle at a time when that was incredibly popular. And I said, this is a book for them. And in truth, it’s a book for a lot of people. But that’s an important part of what got me that deal.

MARION: I think it’s a book for everybody, Kyle. And I’m so delighted that you were able to come here today and talk about it. Thank you so much.

KYLE: Well, thank you for having me. And when I wrote the acknowledgments for this book, I was given the unenviable task of choosing how to order them and how to arrange them. And at first, I tried to do it based on who’d had the biggest impact in my life, or at least in my publishing journey. And that brought about questions like, you know, where does my wife go versus my literary agent. I decided I didn’t want to…

I decided there was no winning that. So I changed and I wrote it. And I think the line is, I say, here they are in vaguely chronological order. And the result of that was, Marion, you came in number two, just because I had one conversation before you with somebody who gave me the idea for the specific angle of this book. But every time I look at that, I’m bothered by it because truly you taught me how to do this. I’m incredibly grateful for that. You stuck with me through the process. And I am a firm believer that if you follow Marion’s systems, trust the process, figure out your argument, then figure out your algorithm then create your memoir map, ultimately write the book you will put yourself in a position where even a first-time author, I’m a first-time author, but even a first-time author can write something that gets really good feedback and I’m fortunate to say that the book I’ve written is getting really good feedback I credit Marion in large part for the results I’ve seen.

Marion: Well, that’s very kind and generous and we’re going to have a dance party to celebrate. Thanks again Kyle thank you so much for coming along today

Kyle: Thank you

MARION: The author is Kyle Austin Young. See more on him at kyle austin young dot com. The book is Success is a Numbers Game: Achieve Bigger Goals by Changing the Odds.  Achieve bigger goals by changing the odds. Just out from Hay House Business. Get it everywhere books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacquelin Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow Qwerty wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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