Episode
He Built a $10M Writing Empire. Here's Why He Says Traditional Publishing Is a 10x Worse Deal
- Podcast
- Behind the Book Cover
- Published
- Jun 23, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2790
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/027abcd6
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Summary
If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life. Nicolas Cole built his first ghostwriting business by answering questions on Quora in 2014, and somehow that has compounded into a $10M+ portfolio of writing companies that he runs with his partner Dickie Bush—anchored by Premium Ghostwriting Academy , the 16-week program that's trained roughly 2,000 ghostwriters to charge premium rates. Cole is a three-time guest on this show, which is a record nobody else holds, and there's a reason for it. We met at a party years ago and immediately started geeking out about books and publishing like two people who'd finally found each other at a conference for a very specific kind of weirdo. He's one of the few people I've watched scale, burn out, blow it up and rebuild without losing the part of him that actually loves writing. The part I really wanted to get into was the 10x argument, which is the cleanest case against traditional publishing I've ever heard anyone make. A traditional publisher pays you roughly 10% in royalties, meaning you keep 10% of the book and they keep 90%. Self-publish and you keep 100%. This means that to make the same money as a self-published author, your traditionally published book has to sell 10 times more copies. We also get into his Medium loophole that paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in…