Janine: Hi, welcome so much. It is great to have you with us. I wanted to let you know about the amazing, thriving entrepreneur that I have on the call today with us. His name is Mike Capuzzi. And what I love about it is the very first time I met him, he’s like, you know, like jacuzzi. I will never forget this man’s name, ever. It was wonderful. Not only is he a publisher and an author, he’s also a business coach. He is been in marketing for 25 years. He is coached for over 21 years as a consultant. He is consistently surpassing expectations and the outcomes of traditional marketing. I know, I was one of his clients. To see I’m a raging fan is an understatement. So, let me tell you what I am most excited to tell you about. Mike, in 2019, launched a thing called Bite Sized Books. It was a new publishing concept and he wanted to help people get short, little, helpful books to promote what they knew to help their customers, help their clients understand, look, I have stuff in my head that you’ are not even aware of. I can help you with if you were just read my little, and he calls them Shooks which stand for short helpful books. It’s wonderful. I loved it. Anyway, he originally set these up to help local Main Street business owners, people that were literally on the main streets of the towns he worked in. To help them kind of connect with his people online because it was when websites were just becoming a thing, that business owners whether you were brick and mortar or whatever, you needed a website. So this was how he was trying to help people. So Mike is also the host of The Main Street author podcast where you can like the Thriving Solopreneur. You can get on to that podcast by going to his website mikecapuzzi.com/geust. He would love for you to introduce yourself, especially if you have a printed book. If you have a printed book, he would love to have you on. So, Mike, thank you so much for being with us today.
Mike: Hey, Janine, it is always good to talk with you and I appreciate this opportunity.
Janine: So, what I would love to, for people to talk about, so many times you are sitting here as a ragingly successful Amazon Seller. Now, you have got your Shook which originally was never meant to go on Amazon. You were one of these fervent entrepreneurs that you had a vision and that vision was what? What was it about Shooks that was your vision? And then we are going to talk about how it morphed a little bit.
Mike: Yes. So, first of all, I, by degree, by college degree, I’m an engineer. So by degree, I’m a very analytical. I did that for years the beginning, decades ago. So, that analytical part is key that need to make things better or smarter. And, I have also been an avid reader since I was a kid. My grandmother instilled a love of reading. I love reading. And in 2007, I published my first book and I always had the vision of writing books to be helpful to other folks. But, as I have gotten older, and you know kids and family and business, your time is precious. And I found myself, I found a very interesting thing happening to me and I don’t know if it happened to you. But my Amazon bill every month is crazy because I am always buying books. But I would buy these books and, more often than not, I never finished them. They tended to be really bloated. They tended to kind of just drag on and on and on. I get annoyed with that, right? And, I started thinking why does it have to be a two or three hundred page book? Why is it have to take literally days or weeks to read a book on something that I want to help with? Why can’t it be an hour or two? And interestingly enough, I was reading a short book by a gentleman named Seth Godin called Purple Cow, which is a great little book. And he was talking about, you need to have a purple cow, Purple Cow is something different. And I am sitting there thinking cheese. Meanwhile, I had been helping clients with book publishing but this concept of let me come up with my own Purple Cow, a lava shook, the short helpful book. And that was really the Genesis. Even though I have been helping clients for years, I never formalized it, Janine, until 2018. And then last year in 2019, I actually formed a publishing entity called Bite Sized Books as you mentioned. So, these are short helpful non-fiction books. We still serve Main Street authors. So it’s either a Main Street author, someone who has a bricks and mortar, or service business in their town like I am working with a dentist in Beverly Hills as of right now. So, that kind of person. Another client has just signed up recently, he is in Switzerland. I just had my first Swiss call this morning as a matter of fact. He is the CEO of a pretty big company and he serves Main Street business owners if you will. So, those are the types of people we help with the authoring and publishing of Shooks.
Janine: And that is all the rage now. People are saying, “Okay, if you are a business owner, you need to have a book to build your platform of authority and blah blah blah.” And I am not knocking them, they are right. I mean, one of the reasons I am a sought-after speaker is because of my book, money. It is not just for rich people and my purple cow was the 60/40 principle. However, one of the things that is unique about the Shook is it demands engagement. The reader cannot help themselves but engage because of the templates in the format you use. Would you like to talk a little bit about that?
Mike: Yes. Thank you for bringing that up because it goes back to the engineer brain, right? So, engineer brain plus a long time marketing guy, you know, I have been around and really studied marketing and old school marketing and new school. So, as shook, Janine, as you know, because you have one, first and foremost, it is a sales tool for you. Right? So, we are not publishing life histories and biographies, that kind of stuff or even a novels or anything like that. We are publishing and helping business owners publish a a
sales tool that looks like a book. Now , having said that it is still a helpful book. As your book shows its helpful content, but it is designed in such a way both physically and the way it flows, the content, blueprint to be a sales tool. So. there is a very specific recipe, Janine, and again, you know this because you went through it, of a flow of calls to action and even the way it looks. So it is very readable which is a key thing to make something easily readable. These are all components of what really makes a shook unique.
Janine: So, I want to definitely give you a shout out because I have been a published author. I had, at the time, eight books under my belt. I have been in traditional publishing. I had self-published. I have been through quite a bit in the 15 years of that. And one of the things that was very helpful and it gives people some numbers here, when I first published the Thriving Solopreneur, I received 78 new people within 24 hours of that book going live. And then I received 114 beta readers. That was before the shook was even published. I sent out a call to my readers and I said, “I am coming up with a book that you can read in an hour. It will have four different techniques for you to grow your business. Are you interested?” That is all I said. I, now have sold, within the first 30 days of that but going live, more than I sold in the first year of Money… It’s
Not Just for Rich People! Now, I don’t give the exact numbers because Amazon was not built the way it is now back in 2005, the dark ages when I first started publishing. But those are just some numbers. Now, for some of you, you may say, “Well, okay. Well, that is under a hundred people.” Let me explain something. You are considered a best-selling author in this day and age if you sell more than a hundred copies of something. Why? Because that means you’ve reached beyond family and friends as far as traditional Publishers are considered. So, those are some statistics for you if you are not familiar. So, Mike, back to you. I want to talk about 2019. You come up with this purple cow, the shook, a short helpful book. Yes, it is a sales tool for the business owner. But for the reader, they get knowledge for free from that business owner and I cannot express that enough. Yes, it is a sales tool but it has got meat on the bones. All right. Why then did you decide to go against the grain and you actually decided to do a hundred page book on Amazon? I mean, this was kind of a different way to go for you.
Mike: Yes. Well, slightly in that, I mean, like yourself Janine, I have always been a self-published author had done it different ways. But I resue with the growth of Amazon, it is sort of a no-brainer. If you have a global audience like you have or I have, meaning outside our hometown, being on Amazon’s very smart.
Now, typically, what I have done in the past was I write a book, we designed it and I would throw it up on Amazon. And some of the couple emails to my list and say, “Hey, go get it and if you would, please leave a review.” And, good things happen but nothing, I mean, we have got clients and all that but nothing like really major because I was not leveraging Amazon the way it can be leveraged, if you go about smartly. So, with the hundred-page book, Janine, it was actually a gentleman was a podcast guest who challenged me to think about Amazon a little bit differently. So, this was in the spring of this year. And, what I did from a blank screen was I literally wrote and engineered the hundred-page book with my latest shook to be what I would call Optimized on Amazon. So, there is a lot of techniques there, everything from every word that is on the front cover and on the back cover. And every word that is on your book page and the category, there is just like a whole science. I literally got a PhD.
Janine: No. We talked about that.
Mike: Yes, and I gig down on that. The other thing I did was, I called OPC, Other People’s Customers. I leverage and you were kind enough to do it too. I leveraged a network of friends and colleagues to help me promote the book when it went live on Amazon. So, went live in the middle of July, 2020 and it quickly became a recognized number one bestseller. A lot of people say their books a best-seller but until you get the little number one bestseller tag on Amazon, it’s really not. And, Janine, we are at like 18 weeks since we published it. It is still a number one bestseller in a couple of categories. We have literally sold over 2,500 copies as of last week. We have generated a ton of new business. And, real-quick story and I’ll be quiet, I will share before we hit the record button, this is the God’s honest truth to show you how effective a book Centric or a shook Centric strategy can be for anybody. So, my call to action to my shook, one of my calls to actions is to schedule a call with me to discuss your shook ideas. I literally just had a call before you and I jumped on for this recording and the first question I ask the gentleman was, “Hey, how did you hear about me?” He said, “Well, get this, Mike.” He said, “I turned my Kindle on this morning and your hundred-page book ad popped up.” And he said, “It really intrigued me.” Visited this guy, I did some research on him. He is pretty successful, has a fairly successful software company. And he said, “I read it this morning.” Okay, just a couple hours ago, Janine. He already booked a strategy call. I already sent him an agreement for two shooks. He wants to do two to start. So, in a matter of about five hours, Janine, he went from not knowing Mike Capuzzi to at least having an agreement in front of him. Hopefully he’ll take that final step. But that is the power of being an author, helping people because he could not rave enough about the hundred-page book and then this case being findable on Amazon.
Janine: Right? And, so I just wanted to let people know, I am often asked tips. How do you grow your business? How do you make your business better? A lot of entrepreneurs are always seeking that next demographic and I have used books to do that. But, what I wanted to share with you today is that Mike Capuzzi has a system that you can count on. There are a lot of people out there promoting, publishing interest itty-bitty books and stuff like that and they are very good at their job. Just make sure, whoever you hire, whatever publisher it is, is in alignment with where you want to go. Because I have seen, for their people, that are promoting small book sort of venues but, I will stand by and my business is already profitable enough to do this. I will stand by what Mike Capuzzi has as far as his shook because, as a business owner, as somebody who runs my business from home, single person that this shook has done more outreach than anything I could have done, having a whole league of marketing companies do that for me. And I have the numbers to prove it. Just give me a call, be glad to do that. If you want to definitely chat with Mike, please go to mikecapuzzi.com. It is spelled M as in Mike, M-I-K-E,
and then Capuzzi is C-A-P-U-Z-Z-I .com, and he will be glad to help you out. Any other ways you want people to connect with you?
Mike: All my shooks are up on Amazon, Kindle audio, Paperback, and if they were to check out bitesizedbooks.com. They can check that out and read more about them.
Janine: Yes. I totally stand by. I’m saying so much. I know you are busy. We are going to let you go. But, I just wanted to make sure that since you were doing so well with thunder[?] paid book that we got more entrepreneurs to understand what you are doing and how you are helping a bunch of communities. So, thank you so much for your work, Mike.
Mike: Thanks, Janine. I appreciate you.
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