David Burkus joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams — his fifth book, and the first he published professionally after four traditional deals.

David lays out the math he gives every author weighing the two paths: still write the proposal, and if the traditional offer comes in between $75,000 and $100,000, take the money — but if it’s “20, 25 grand,” that’s not enough to deal with the hassles of signing away your IP.

He explains why a traditional proposal is written “for an audience of one,” how his publisher’s push to make his networking book a career book earned him exactly two speaking gigs in the book’s entire history, and why the timeline sealed it: guided author in June 2022, on Amazon everywhere by May 2023.

Then he opens up the speaking machine itself — lanes and problems, the caveman test that named Best Team Ever, micro videos that get found, the bureau secret of bringing agents in on deals you already have — and the production system behind five books: six months of research in piles on the floor, 500 to 750 words a day, and “when you write nonfiction, there’s no such thing as writer’s block. There’s just you haven’t researched it enough.”

Plus the LinkedIn message from a Lithuanian event planner that turned a book into a homecoming.

For more information on David Burkus, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/david-burkus

For more information on Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/best-team-ever

Matt Moyers joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about The Venture Capital Alternative: A Blueprint for a Better Patent System — a book idea he sat on for the better part of a decade before deciding, in 2023, that "now is the time."

Matt explains how a career spent valuing intellectual property — including the Nortel bankruptcy, where a patent portfolio first bid in the hundreds of millions sold for $4.5 billion — showed him the same story on repeat: an inventor commercializes an idea, big tech enters with a competing product built on that invention, and the inventor gets crushed.

He walks through the Sonos case, why the IP system in America is "a mess," and his blueprint for IP debt and IP equity as an alternative to venture capital.

Then the conversation turns to craft: the Instagram course that got his first draft done in 60 days, the 18 months of editing that followed, the Kaizen 30-minute writing sessions, a dog that got "walked like crazy," and why he shopped a finished draft to publishers everywhere before deciding Scribe's hybrid model — and Scribe's editor — were what he wanted. He's already realized he has three or four more books inside of him.

For more information on Matt Moyers, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/matt-moyers

For more information on The Venture Capital Alternative: A Blueprint for a Better Patent System, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/the-venture-capital-alternative

Nick Capman joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about The Passionate Workforce: How to Create and Maintain Maximum Employee Engagement, the book he wrote from a four-page Word doc called "book notes" that he'd been keeping in Calibri 11.

Nick explains the theory behind the book: we all sit on a spectrum from resentment to passion, the same person behaves completely differently at each end, and if you hire the right person, "it's not the employee's responsibility to bring passion. It's the employer's. It's not 50 50." He shares the 15 pillars, the NPS-style assessment his company runs every year — and the news that this past year The FDA Group scored above 9 on every pillar for the first time.

Then he gets practical about what a book actually does for a business: the credibility "spoke in the wheel" that turns sales conversations from "I need to see if you're the real deal" into "how can you help me," the copy every employee receives at their 90-day mark, the confetti-filled client box with an engraved bottle of wine and the book ("I wanted to send out my book, but I didn't want to be pretentious"), and the Barnes & Noble signing that drew 60 people because "I said I have a book" — it was as simple as that.

Plus: the LinkedIn ad that said everything he'd been thinking, why the finished book had "no fluff," and his marathon advice for anyone still sitting on a book-notes doc of their own.

To listen alongside an in depth episode summary, highlights, and full transcript, visit [link for Author Hour episode on Scribe website]

For more information on Nick Capman, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/nicholas-capman

For more information on The Passionate Workforce: How to Create and Maintain Maximum Employee Engagement, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/the-passionate-workforce