078: Tucker Max – How To Turn Words To Wealth, & Scaling Media Giant to 24 Million

Tucker Max is a 4X New York Times bestselling author, investor and the former co-founder of Scribe Media, a multi-8-figure publishing company that helps aspiring authors tell and sell their stories.

Tucker’s books have sold more than 4.5 million copies, while Scribe Media has helped publish memoirs for people like David Goggins, Tiffany Haddish and Dan Sullivan. After helping Scribe grow to $24M, Tucker exited the company in 2021.

For many entrepreneurs, however, chasing sales and bestseller lists may not be the best way to crack 7 and 8-figures with writing. In today’s episode, you’ll hear Tucker talk about the nontraditional avenues entrepreneurs and aspiring writers can use to monetize their written ideas in a big way.

You’ll also hear Tucker share the key questions nonfiction writers must be able to answer before putting pen to paper, how Scribe adjusted its organizational structure to grow from $2M to $24M, and the role AI will play in book writing in the years to come.

Tucker Max Tweetables

• “If you want people who are worth $30 million to invest with you, you need to speak to them. And they don’t care that you’re a bestseller. They care that you know something that they don’t know that helps them.” – Tucker Max

• “It’s like you hear the saying in construction: ‘Good, cheap, fast — pick two.’ It’s like that in books. You can have fame and status, or you can have money.” – Tucker Max

• “Don’t market the book. Use the book to market you.” – Tucker Max

• “It’s sort of like building your house. If you lay the wrong foundation, nothing you can do after that will fix it. Same thing with the book. If you do not position it correctly for what you want, you cannot market your way out of that.” – Tucker Max

• “AI is going to make people who are good at media even better.” – Tucker Max

✔️ The internal changes with roles and responsibilities that helped Scribe Media grow from $2M to $24M.

✔️ Should your book deliver content that your readers want to hear or content that your readers need to hear?

✔️ What are the steps to writing a nonfiction book – and why writing for niche audiences can be so lucrative.

✔️ The idea of “dirty authenticity” as the future of effective marketing.

✔️ How will AI impact authoring books?

✔️ Why some books can be marketed successfully for cheap and others fail to gain traction regardless of marketing spend.

✔️ What are the character traits that make a great CEO?

✔️ The nuances behind the decision-making processes for what lands on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.

✔️ Why are high-end service businesses so difficult to scale?

✔️ The employee growth number Scribe hit when things started to break.

✔️ How avoiding the traditional route to professional writing helped Tucker monetize his work early in his career.

✔️ How Tucker went from writing blogs to landing on the New York Times bestseller list with his first book.