Ryan Holiday Reveals How Much Best Selling Authors Make, Crazy Peter Thiel Stories & More

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. Talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales. You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.
And then I Googled like Mark Manson House because that's always like the tell. I'm like, is someone like crushing it? Because you can't really like, it's hard to get a mortgage for a $15 million house unless you're actually raking it in.
And it said like, you know, Mark Manson sells Tribeca condo for $14 million. And I'm like, damn, like I thought book, the book business was a bad business. He must've crushed it. He must be making millions.
My man, Ryan Holiday. How are you? Nice to talk to you.

**Ryan Holiday** (1:35)
It's good to talk to you too.

**Sam Parr** (1:37)
So you asked to come here, and I'll just, cause I just want to get it out of the way, I want to give you the love. You asked to come on here because A, we're homies and I love you, and also because B, you have a book coming out.
What's it called?

**Ryan Holiday** (1:49)
Discipline is Destiny. This is the new one for the series. Yeah, it came out yesterday.

**Sam Parr** (1:56)
Oh, and how's it going so far?

**Ryan Holiday** (1:58)
Really good, really good. It should be significantly higher. It's already significantly higher than the last one.
And then you're... So I know where the numbers are, but I'm waiting... The one thing you don't know until the end of the second week is audio book numbers and where it may or may not land on the bestseller list.

**Sam Parr** (2:22)
What do you think the outcome of this one's gonna be?

**Ryan Holiday** (2:26)
We'll probably come in a bit above 40,000 copies the first week. I would venture to guess. It could be higher if they keep trending this way. So because I have my own bookstore and I did the sales through my own bookstore, I probably won't hit the Wall Street Journalist.
They skunked me last time. And then the New York Times list is, let's say 50-50, all of which my publisher is very concerned about and I've decided that I don't care about at all anymore.

**Sam Parr** (2:57)
Because if you own your own bookstore, that means that, and you sell 20,000 copies, do they not count all 20,000s in the rankings?

**Ryan Holiday** (3:05)
Yeah, so I mean, just generally, if you sold 20,000 copies of a book through one bookstore, they would find that to be suspicious or unrepresentative and there's a chance it could get tossed. If you ever look at the bestseller list and you see like a little, they call it a dagger, it's like a little cross next to certain books, that means that there was a lot of bulk purchases or like suspicious activity. So there could be that, but the Wall Street Journal or BookScan, which is owned by Nielsen, just flat out told me they just don't include sales from stores owned by the author anymore, which doesn't strike me as that being a big enough category to have a rule about. But I guess there's the potential for fraud. Like I guess theoretically I could have just, you know, inflated the numbers or something. So there's a chance it could get tossed, but as I have gone on as an author, I've cared, once you get it once, I feel like you have it and then you also realize like kind of how meaningless things are.