Leadership Books
What are the leadership books you should be reading? In this episode of Incorporating Superpowers, host Justin Recla welcomes guest Mike Stickler to the show. Mike started his own publishing company in 2013 after a bad experience with his 16th book. His company services non-fiction authors helping them to get their words out to the public. Over time his company has amassed amazing titles and names and continues to grow. Do you want to learn about leadership? Do you want to get published and gain traction? Tune in today to learn more about the leadership books for you!
Justin Recla:
Welcome back to Incorporating Superpowers. Today, folks, we are going to have a lot of fun. I’m super excited to bring him on because he’s doing things completely differently. My guest today is Mike Stickler. He’s the CEO and founder of The Vision Group Ltd. And some of the best titles of business leadership books. If you’re looking for what leadership looks like today, and how to not only do things differently but what it looks like in the book world from Iran’s real perspective, Mike’s here to talk about Mike, I’m so excited about this. Welcome to the show.
Mike Stickler:
Thanks for having me, I’m pretty excited about being here, too.
Justin Recla:
Well, this is good. We are going to talk in-depth before the show and you cracked the whole code back in 2013 were leadership books were born. And you had a whole nightmare of a story of where you had to buy your book rights back from the publisher that you’re working with. And you said that no more and you set out to do your own thing. And now leadership books have got some amazing authors on the site that you work with. Tell me more about your experience in why you did that.
Mike Stickler:
So as you mentioned back in 2013, I’ve written 19 books. In 2013, this would have been the 16th book that I had published. And my traditional publisher, they weren’t promoting the booked day, it was not getting any kind of traction, no sales. And I recognized that the book needed to have a lot more traction if I was going to get the speaking engagements and much of what I planned to do for the following year. And so I had a few conversations with him. He basically just said, You know what, your book isn’t doing all that well because nobody really cares for it. Possibly. And so what I did is I wrestled the book back from him, I literally paid them to get the rights of my book back. So they made more money off of me paying them for my rights than they did selling it.Â
And then I republish the book. And well, first, before I republish the book, I just took a deep dive, I’ve been an entrepreneur, most of my life. And so my writing coach and I just took a deep dive into where is the publishing world at today. Are people still buying books? If they are? Where are they buying books? And how are people deciding what was the decision process and actually buying a book? And what kinds of books are they interested in? And it’s just, they seem like really basic questions, but the book publishing world had changed so much, and is changing so much that it was really those questions were really legitimate, to really check and see if the consumer had made a decision or not. It’s a lot I related to it’s a lot like when Blockbuster Video was going along with all their storefronts and whatnot.
And then Netflix came in. And I’ll never forget, you know, I live in a rural area, and I have to walk out to my mailbox, I will never forget the first time I got free DVDs in the mail from Netflix. And I thought I thought to myself, I am never gonna go back into town and, and rented another movie in my day, you know, in my life. This is really cool. I don’t know how they do it. But this is really cool. Of course, they’ve gone on to streaming and everything since but they disrupted everything in our book publishing industry is disrupted. And there are all kinds of opinions and there are all kinds of ideas, but I just looked at the numbers, where are people buying books? How are they buying books? And why are they buying books that were the important thing? And so from that leadership books, was birthed that first little book, which was a Christian devotional, I sold over 300,000 copies of it and I continue to sell it you know, the other publisher said, Yeah, I’m not going to sell much I just was some unique marketing approach. We actually were very successful at it. And we went on I’ve gone on to sell three more best sellers and just kind of birth leadership books into an approach that not only are people coming to us to publish their work but other publishers and self-published works are coming to us asking us, Hey, how do we get a board here? How do we ride this wave that you guys are doing. And so we do a thing called Book representation as well, where we represent books that are published by other authors, and bring them into our, into our marketing stream.
Justin Recla:
Fantastic. Well, Mike, I want to dive down this because I got a whole slew of questions. I know that people want to hear from you, especially those that are writing books. But before we go on break, where can people go find more information about you?
Mike Stickler:
It’s really easy to find this go to leadershipbooks.com. If you’d like to publish your work in the top right corner, it says authors, just click on that. And it’ll take you through what the first steps are.
Justin Recla:
Fantastic, folks, go take a look at what Mike’s up to over leadership books. Especially if you got a book and stick with us. Because on the backside of this conversation, we’re gonna dive into what this looks like book publishing world, if you’re an author, you want to get your information out there some of the things that you should be taking into consideration before you choose a publisher. Stay with us. We’ll be right back.
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