Nicholas Russo, Author of Fifty Pieces of Gold: An Engineer's Musings on Business and Life

Len: Hi I’m Len Epp from Leanpub, and in this episode of the Frontmatter podcast I'll be interviewing Nicholas Russo.

Based in Aberdeen, Maryland, Nick is a Cisco Technical Leader, author, teacher, and programmer, with a particular expertise and interest in DevOps.

You can follow him on Twitter @nickrusso42518 and check out his website at http://njrusmc.net/.

I'm pleased to say Nick is today joining the small group of authors who have become repeat guests on the podcast. I first interviewed him back in 2016, where we discussed his Cisco Certification book *CCIE Service Provider Version 4 Written and Lab Exam Comprehensive Guide. And if that sounds like an obscure book to you, it is one of our best-selling books of all time. If you've ever passed a really hard test, please write a book about it and publish it on Leanpub, you might do very well.

Nick is appearing on the podcast today to talk about his new book, Fifty Pieces of Gold: An Engineer's Musings on Business and Life. In the book, Nick talks about the 90% of things he writes about, that is, topics besides technology, including business, time management, investing, and many other topics.

I should note that Nick has also recorded an audiobook for Fifty Pieces of Gold, which you can also get from Leanpub if you choose the audio package when you buy the book.

In this interview, we’re going to talk about what Nick's been up to in the last three years, his blog and his book, and at the end we'll talk about his more recent experiences as a writer.

So, thank you Nick for being on the Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast again.

Nick: Thanks Len. I appreciate the intro, and it's always good to be back.

Len: I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin story, but we already did that when you first appeared on the podcast. So - what have you been up to for the last few years?

Nick: It's been a busy three years for sure. Last we spoke, I think it was July of 2016? And I had a daughter on July 5th of that month, so it was probably just like a week after that.

So, I was a brand new father at the time. When we spoke, I probably didn't know much about fatherhood. Three and a half years later, I've learned quite a bit there. I've got another baby on the way in February. The family is growing, so there's obviously a whole lot of busyness there - we could go on forever about that.

But the past three years, from a professional and technical standpoint - I've done a lot of writing. As you know, the book I've sold on Leanpub was initially a huge success, but it was also my first book ever. My first ever kind of public thing, if you will.

Since then, I've done quite a bit more, between blogs and live and recorded training courses for a variety of different providers. I've written a few other just tinkering-around books. And then the newest, my third book, is Fifty Pieces of Gold, the one we can talk about today. So yeah, it's been pretty busy.

Last summer, it was about - I don't know? Around August in 2018, I started a one-man business, to do some of this training stuff. I figured I have a lot of technical knowledge and expertise that I think I can share. And have this be - being quite frank, just another source of income for me, and possibly something that can help me on my path to financial independence in the future.

Len: I've got a few questions about that. I guess the first one might be a little bit cheesy, but what's the number one thing you learned about parenting with your first child?

Nick: I would say, a big mistake that I think I made was - as I said - I was doing podcasts with Leanpub, I was actually studying for a few different exams, I was doing a lot of other things, other than being a father in the earliest days. And I didn't really think it was that big of a deal, because the baby was very attached to my wife at the time. I was like, "Okay, whatever. I'll just do everything else that doesn't involve the baby."

That was a foolish move, because it took a long time for the baby to really warm up to me as a father. So it was hard for me to spend time with the baby and connect, and that didn't happen until she was almost two years old. And in addition to the emotional burden, as a father, that you feel when your daughter doesn't want to be around you - it's also very hard on my wife. Because it was hard for her to go and do anything. It was hard for her to go downstairs and go to the gym for an hour, because the baby just didn't trust me.

So I would just tell all the fathers out there, it's hard in the beginning, not just because of the lack of sleep and all that - but you need to really make the effort to spend time with your kids as soon as they're born, so they learn to trust you. I will definitely not be making that mistake the second time around.

Len: And was there a particular kind of time that you spent with your daughter, when you realized that you needed to spend more time with her? I mean, was there particular activities that you did, or -?

Nick: It was mostly playing. I mean, a lot of the time that I was spending with her early was more chore-based, for lack of a better term. Diapers and putting her to bed and changing and bathing and making food for her - things that aren't really fun. So I try to make more time. It's like playing with blocks, or making up games. We made up this one game where we take a big object like a toy or a ball, and we shove it in our shirts and we just bump each other. We chest bump with these things in our shirts. It's kind of a stupid thing, but it was it was really fun. That was our thing for a long time, and was kind of a big icebreaker for us.

But again, you can't do that with a three-month-old; the kid has to be a little bit bigger to play a game like that. But in the early days - I'm probably going to spend more time just playing with the baby, playing with her legs or rolling a ball to her, or just reading to her. Things where you don't really get a lot of feedback. Because they're such a young infant, they can't really interact with you on a very explicit level. But I'm going to try to be a little more involved early on, so that hopefully my wife gets a little bit of a break - rather than me being the workhorse in the background, and her being the nurturer. I blending those roles a little bit would be healthy for everyone.

Len: Congratulations on that, it's just really wonderful to hear about your growing family.

Speaking of big news - you mentioned that you have gotten into training, particularly you've done video training - including live training. And you've done this for both O'Reilly and for Pluralsight. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that got started? Did you approach somebody, or did somebody approach you?

Nick: That's interesting. So in the O'Reilly case - and for those who don't know, Safari - is now known as the O'Reilly live training platform. Back when it was kind of Safari - yes, I had some contacts who had done work with Cisco Press. So, Pearson - the thing that's a little confusing is there's a lot of companies involved, but Pearson and Cisco have kind of combined to create a joint venture known as Cisco Press. And Pearson once had a stake in O'Reilly. They sold that stake, but they still have kind of an operating role. I'm not exactly sure how it works.

But I have contacts at Pearson. I reached out to them, and they said, "Hey, we think you'd be a good candidate to do some training." I submitted a few proposals on topics that I know well. All those were accepted. We did a couple courses. They were well-attended, high-rated - and now they're like, "Okay, we want you to come back every month."

So, once a month I usually take a day off work in the middle of the week. I'll do a four-hour live class. It's one of those things that's exhausting but satisfying, standing up and talking at this rate, at this volume, for four hours straight - and doing technical demos at the same time. I think that's exhausting for just about anyone, but I enjoy doing that. So I reached out to them to inquire if they were interested. They said "yes," and then we just kind of had a informal conversation.

With Pluralsight, it was a bit more formal. It was - you go to the website, you fill out a form, like, "Hey, I want to teach. Here's my skills, here's where I think I can be helpful." And then a couple weeks later, one of their acquisition people will reach out to you, generally ask you what you're about - to do kind of a phone screening, to make sure you're a good kind of cultural fit. Then you'll do an audition, basically.

I think this is actually really smart - they ask you to do, I think it was a six to eight minute video. Teach them something new. To teach a technical topic in that short amount of time, it's typically something very technically focused. And say, "Hey, today I'm going to teach you how to configure feature X on platform Y. Let's dive in."

And then you do maybe a couple PowerPoint slides with some animations, then you dive into your live demo. You have to produce it, you have to do the audio, you have to do the video. Pluralsight wants to get an idea about whether you're, frankly, technically competent and also understand how to develop good quality audio and visual content.

So I went through the no-shortcuts path with Pluralsight. Once the audition gets approved, you get assigned to one of their internal people managers - for lack of a better term. And then as you want to take on individual projects, you submit a proposal. "Hey, I think this topic would be really great. Here's why I think it's great. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's how long it is. Here's the difficulty level. Here's when I can deliver it." And assuming they accept that proposal and like what you're trying to sell, then they'll sign a deal with you. You'll get paid on completion. And then - just like Leanpub, you'll get a fraction of the royalties based on viewership.

Len: It's really interesting - just to spell it out a little bit for people listening who might be a little bit confused about what we're talking about.

This kind of training is where you typically are probably at home in a home office, or something like that. You're in front of your computer, either sitting or standing, and you're recording what's going on the screen - and potentially even recording yourself at the same time, with your computer's camera. You're demonstrating things on the computer to other people who are either watching a recording of it, or who are watching it live. You take them through things step by step. And this is a very hard thing to do - well, let's put it this way, it's a very hard thing to get right.

So when you started doing this kind of thing, Nick, had you had experience like that - had you done it before?

Nick: No. So, the specific act of doing recorded video training in a high quality environment, to include the production, the editing and the delivery - no, that was completely new. And frankly it was kind of terrifying, because, not only do you need to have the technical expertise and be really - I wouldn't say "on script," but you need to be on point with what you're saying. You need to be clear and concise.

But you also need to be able to work the software. So using ScreenFlow or Camtasia, or whatever you end up using - aside from the few hundred dollars investment required - you need to learn how to use the tool effectively, to be able to produce all your stuff. And sometimes as technical people - at least for me, I tended to shy away from learning those tools. I had all this knowledge, but I wasn't able to share it. So I decided, one day, "I'm just going to spend a few hours, I'm going to go through the videos on it, I'm going to get some practice."

And I can tell you that when I did that audition for Pluralsight, it was actually kind of terrifying. Because I realized, "This is a make or break moment - if I do this well, then I'm in, and the sky is the limit. But if I do this poorly and they see the audition and they're not happy with it, it's - I don't, there's not like an appeals process. That's it, I can't do business here anymore." So I took that very seriously, and I would say that it took - to produce that six to eight minutes, probably took me about four hours total, because I was being extremely diligent about it.

Now after having done like 11 courses, and tens of hours of produced video - I've become very proficient, the shortcuts and all that.

But you're absolutely right, it is difficult to do right. It takes a lot of time, not just to do the technical content creation, but also the recording, the production and the delivery - certainly takes a lot of effort. It's definitely taught me a lot about everything from time management, to running your own business.

Because as an employee of a company, and I'm sure a lot of you - at some point in your careers - even for those who are independent now, have worked for companies at some point. And as an employee - you'll get assigned a task, you'll do the task, your manager will have you move on something else - it's a relatively straightforward thing. But when you're the one setting the deadlines, collecting payments - in the United States, you have to make estimated tax payments. There's a lot of other things that play into that whole, I guess, psyche of being an independent contractor, and doing that kind of work. So the complexity is kind of multifaceted there, and it's been a huge learning experience for me over the past year and a half.

Len: I'd like to talk to you a little bit about creating that business in just a moment. But just so people who haven't done it before, might get a bit of a flavor of why it could take four hours to record a six minute video - when you're recording stuff that you're doing on your computer, you suddenly realize how much fussing about you do all the time. So, an errant mouse movement, a page taking too long to load - things like that, become really obvious when you're trying to record a good video, showing people how to do things. And having done this a little bit myself, it really does come down to like fractions-of-a-second edits that make or break a video.

Nick: Yeah, that's absolutely true, and just to - when you say "pages load too slow," or maybe you're scrolling through a document trying to find something - Pluralsight, just to give an example - they frown upon any pauses in your video that are greater than one second. So if you're waiting for a page to load and it takes three seconds, you're expected to do the appropriate - either cutting out of that wait time, or applying a fast-forward over that section. So you have to go and do all those manual edits, unless you outsource it. So like you said, Len - it can be very time consuming.

And just for those listening, I would say my rule of thumb is about to produce one hour, takes about 30 hours. And that's everything from proposing it, to selling it, to writing the code, developing the slides, recording production editing - that whole thing is about 30 to 1. So if you sign up for a two hour course, you should plan on spending about 60 hours developing it. And that's been a pretty good rule of thumb for me over the past year and a half of doing these courses. You just need to make sure you plan ahead and figure out if that sounds like a good ratio to you.

Len: And the good news is that the tools available these days are amazing. You mentioned Camtasia, that's the one that we've been using lately. It takes - there's some onboarding, and it takes some time getting used to it. But the fine control over audio and video, and the effects that you can add and things like that, are just amazing. The fact that it's doable at all is quite something.

And so, you decided to create your own business in it - you were doing all these activities, and then you created a business on top of that. I'd just like to ask you - since this is one of the things that you write about, why did you decide to do that?

Nick: The reason I did that - when I wrote my first book with Leanpub - and this is probably a little bit country-specific, but when I wrote my first book with Leanpub, the book was owned by me, as a person. I wrote the book, I got royalties from it. I claimed those as income on my personal tax return, and that was fine.

But I realized that at some point, if I want to continue to be a writer and a blogger and a content producer and a podcaster, and whatever other things I want to do - it might make sense to create a business to be the front of all those activities, for a few reasons.

First of all, I'm a one-man shop, a simple a sole proprietorship. So I'm not an LLC, I'm not a corporation. I'm just still one guy. My taxes haven't changed a whole lot, but the difference is now I can put a name that isn't my name in front of the business. I called it Loop Free Consulting to start out. That gives me a springboard to do consulting work in the future, and have checks addressed to that - to potentially have employees, and I can always restructure later.

In the state of Maryland, for example, that whole process cost me, I think, $115? It was very inexpensive, I did it all online. I felt like this was a good way to get started.

And the other advantage is that now I can, internally - I can differentiate between my full time job income and my business income. So I have another set of books, and I can say, "Okay, this month I've got my Leanpub royalties on the 3rd. I got my Pluralsight royalties. I got my O'Reilly royalties. I got this other cash payment from this other thing I did."

And then I can have a clear accounting of all that. I keep it separate from my personal business, so that I can clearly tell where I'm succeeding, and where I'm not. So the business is really just kind of a wrapper, or an abstraction in front of me as a person. I don't have employees, and I don't do a lot of the hard-core business activities - like, I don't have a company car. I don't have a lot of expensive assets. It's just not relevant for the work that I do.

But the creation of the business was more of a formality than anything. I mean, of course it's cool to do that - but I'm still very focused on the delivery of the product, rather than the administration of the business.

And that was actually something I wrote about in the book, Len - was, when you're a small business - and this is probably true for Leanpub as well - you want to focus on improving your platform, or your product, or your service. You want to focus less on the nonstop administration of the business.

Now, I think that as you grow, and as you get employees, and as you become a multinational organization, then that balance may shift a little bit. But most definitely for the small business owners out there, I would recommend just keep your head down, and keep doing things that bring value to your customers - and I think you're going to see your business grow just naturally, as long as you keep your priorities straight.

Len: I think we'll get to talk about some of those things in the next segment in this episode. But before we do that - I'd like to talk about another thing you've been doing in the last couple of years, which is conference talks. There's a great one that people can watch on YouTube, about introducing automation and efficiency into a bureaucracy.

Nick: Yeah, that's right. I gave this talk in May of 2019, so it was about six or seven months ago. It was at a conference called "Interop," and it was in Las Vegas.

One thing in my past - for most of my adult life, I've done work for the US government, either active duty in the military, or as a contractor supporting them. And if there's any one thing that's true about the government - I think no matter where you work, especially the US federal government - is that it's just enormous. Everything moves very, very slowly, and there are infinite levels of bureaucracy at every stage.

One of the challenges for me was, how can I introduce automation in this environment in a meaningful way - without causing problems? One thing I really harp on in that presentation is that it's really important to understand the difference between business drivers in a regular commercial company, versus a bureaucracy. Because in a regular company you have goals like, "We want to either grow the company, we want to improve profits, we want to reduce costs." And reducing costs often means reducing headcount.

But in a government organization - a large organization is a respected organization. Getting rid of people just reduces power for the group. So you need to do automation in a way that doesn't reduce the number of people, and that doesn't take away their jobs, for lack of a better term, but rather transforms the work that they do.

It's actually a very delicate balance, and I was able to come up with a technical solution that managed to not take anyone's job away, but still introduce improvements. But at the same time, not rocking the boat too much.

I realize that can be a really difficult challenge, and I think for a lot of small companies that just sounds completely absurd. But when you deal with a company, I think there's like a million people that work for the federal government - you tend to end up with these solutions that are technically suboptimal, but they are operationally effective for that given environment.

Len: Yes, it's a really interesting talk. Anyone interested in this problem, I would definitely recommend you give it a give it a watch, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes, or in the transcription for this episode. But the very specific story told - it's got a very good structure. Because it begins with just presenting you with this problem, which was basically - there was a group of people that were doing a kind of work that involved copying and pasting IP addresses and other details into documents, and then into other documents, and into other documents and into other documents. And then, by the time the final result - which is an email with attachments, I believe - has been sent, there was a 33% chance that there would be an error in that document somewhere. And then resolving that error involved calling upon the resources of people with high-level expertise.

And so what's happened is - a typo has scaled up to a really big problem, because it's buried somewhere in this document that's been produced and passed around between multiple people. And when you first proposed this solution - you say you were laughed at. And one thing you realized, was that it was partly because what you were basically proposing was something unfamiliar to people, but also something that would involve a lot of lost jobs.

And ultimately - the way you succeeded in getting this change done, which brought that failure rate or that potential error rate down to 2% - was by saying, "I'm going to improve the process in ways that do not involve taking away people's jobs, but rather by minimizing stress and error."

Nick: Yeah, that's exactly right, Len. And just ironically enough, some of the technology I used in that solution is not so different from some of the things that Leanpub does behind the scenes. It's kind of similar - where you can provide some raw data or a manuscript of sorts, and then Leanpub handles the rendering, the distribution, etc. It's kind of similar there - supply the raw input, put it into the big machine - out comes the PDF and all that the configurations that you need. So the manual copy-pasting only happens once at the very beginning, and then you end up with this nice document that's readable and it looks good, and people are happy with the end product.

Len: Yes, and part of the story also was you coming up with a way of getting - not so much around, but through, the bureaucracy, one feature of which is, lots of committees and lots of paperwork. And you did this by anticipating the need for paperwork. So you would just approach the next level senior person with everything already done - and all you needed was their signature, so they could walk away.

Nick: Yeah, exactly. I think this is even true in the commercial space, when someone needs to sign off on something, the more comfortable that person is with making the decision, and the easier that decision is to approve - the more likely it is to be approved. So when you tell a very busy manager, or at least someone who thinks they're busy - whether they are or not doesn't really matter - but if they think they're busy and they think their time is important, and you show up with a couple papers and say, "Good morning, John Smith. I've got these documents. Here's our new plan. Here's what we tested. We're already using it, it's working well. I need your approval for these specific steps, and we can continue executing. Here's our plan for the next three months." And maybe they ask you a few questions to make sure they understand it, and then that process ends.

In this particular case, the government official was someone I knew pretty well. I had worked with him in the past. We generally had a trust and a respect for each other. So it wasn't terribly difficult. But there were obviously many other government officials - competing government officials, for lack of a better term - who saw this as more of a threat. So this is where the tension started to build. But once the solution came out - I think some of that tension kind of melted away, and people saw that the solution was really effective.

I think the other advantage is - even though there were no jobs lost, we also realized that this was growing so quickly and becoming so popular that even with the automation, we would still need more people to operate. Everyone seemed to come out ahead with this solution, so I was pretty proud of it. And at the end of the day, from a technical perspective - as I said before, it wasn't a terribly impressive solution. In that talk, I didn't focus too much on the exact technology. I only gave kind of a brief overview, because I don't think it's terribly interesting. It was more the application of a solution to a specific organizational problem, and that's what I was trying to highlight in the talk.

Len: You talk in the talk about the differences between bureaucracies and large enterprises. But one of the big similarities that they have - and I have had a little bit of experience with this myself, doing a version of enterprise sales - is that anytime you try to introduce a new process, that's probably displacing a process or a product that someone's career is tied to.

Nick: Yes, absolutely. And this can be - it's kind of the innovator's dilemma type approach. Is - do we do we cannibalize ourselves and tolerate the risk from that? Or do we risk having someone else cannibalize that from us? It's always a difficult thing, and there's been entire books written on that topic.

But in this particular case - again, in government - a lot of organizations are insulated by charters and policies. So it's not like some other better, more effective company could comee in and take this business away, that's not even a threat - but the similarity is still there. And in our case, it would have just been continued poor performance. So there was really very little to lose by improving it - especially under the pretext of not having anyone lose their jobs. Once people were sold on that, and once people were sold on, "Hey, all the knowledge you already have is still relevant - we're just asking you to change the process a little bit in how you build your products" - people generally accepted that.

Len: Just before we move onto the next part of the interview, where we talk about your book, I think one of the reasons this talk resonated with me so much - and this challenge resonated with me so much personally - was that I used to be an investment banker in a former life, for my sins. And I remember, one of the most important, of the many things I learned doing that job - one of the most important things I learned was, always copy and paste when you can. It sounds trivial, but I remember a colleague seeing me looking at a financial model that I'd been developing, and then typing out some numbers into a presentation.

And he said, "What are you doing? If you can copy and paste copy and paste -" And the reason was, sometimes you were doing this work when you hadn't slept for 40 hours. Sometimes you were doing this work when you were told, "I need this in five minutes." And copying and pasting reduces the possibility of error, and increases the confidence that you'll have when you're presenting stuff dramatically. So, although this might sound like a trivial kind of life hack, it's really important.

Nick: Yes, absolutely. And this is something that we see a lot, I think, especially in technology, there's a there's a habit of - it would be two seconds faster for me to just type out this IP address or whatever, rather than copy paste it. But I - it's actually kind of coincidental - just yesterday, somebody was having some errors on a specific technical solution. And I said, "You've got a lot of different variable inputs here, and I realize you could just type it out." But I said, "Just take the extra time and copy paste it, and the only way that's going to cause a problem is if your initial data source was wrong - which is unlikely. So you're much less likely to suffer through the troubleshooting, which is almost always harder than just doing it right the first time."

Len: Oh, that's so true. hat's so true. I use that in emails as well. For example, I will never type out a person's name. I always find a source and copy and paste it. That way, you can have confidence when you send - that you know it's right. And, again, it's one of those things where you almost have to fight against yourself to do it every time. But if you do do it every time, it will make things a lot better - and actually, it will save you time in the end, because you won't have to recover from mistakes.

Moving onto your new book, Fifty Pieces of Gold: An Engineer's Musings on Business and Life. I've been really looking forward to this conversation, because we just get to cover a lot of topics - because your book covers a lot of topics. But before we go on to talk about that, I was wondering if you could talk about the title?

Nick: The title was kind of an interesting one. So there was a book, I think it was from the 1920s? It was called The Richest Man In Babylon. In the book, there's a character, a spear-maker, who does a job for the king, and the king gives him 50 pieces of gold. And he goes to a banker, because it's so much money, he doesn't know what to do with it. But he wants to be responsible, he doesn't want to just blow it. So he goes to ask this banker about what to do with this money, and, "Oh, 50 pieces of gold" - there was kind of a recurring theme for a few pages in the book.

The reason I chose that name is because the book is composed of 50 blog posts that I wrote throughout the calendar year, 2019. So it was about 52 weeks in a year, I wrote 50 blogs - roughly once a week-ish. And each one of those blogs can be read out loud in about two and a half minutes. They're very, very short. It's a little bit longer than one screen length.

What I was going for here, is I wanted to have short bursts of useful and practical information, that isn't really technical. I'm generally known as a technical writer, as a technologist, as a technical trainer - just as a technical guy in general. And I want people to see the other side of me. I won't call it the softer side, because I do have some pretty hard opinions. But the personal side of me, we'll call it - where I talk about other things. About my own personal techniques for time management, and I talk a little bit about investing in my business, and mistakes that I've made. Mistakes from my past, mistakes from my military days - and even some things I've done well.

So I said, "I've written all these blogs and it was really well received. I think people enjoyed the fact that they could just casually read through a blog in two or three minutes, maybe come away with something. They don't need to make some big up-front investment in technology. They don't need to come in with six years of experience to even understand what I'm saying. It's meant to be consumed by many people." And I said, "It would not be that complicated for me to assemble all these blogs into a book. I'll put it on Leanpub at a low price and then narrate it as well."

I happen to be a big fan of audiobooks - actually, I wrote a blog about this in my book - and last year, I measured the number of hours that I listen to an audiobook - and it was greater than 900. So to put that into perspective, that's more than 10% of the total hours in a year. It's more than 2.4 hours a day, every day on average. So, I like to read a lot. Audiobooks is the mechanism by which I do that. So I figured it was only appropriate that I offer an audio narration of this book, as well, for other people who may want to learn that way. And I think it came out to be about 2 hours and 15 minutes total length.

Len: I'm looking forward to asking you about your process for that in the next part of the interview. But sticking on the content of the book, you write about - at the beginning, very seriously about how you - quote, "Want to change the way advice is shared," end quote. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, and why advice is so important to you?

Nick: As a society, I think we are trending in the right direction here. Especially for technology people, I think it's generally important for people like us to talk about the other things, that are beyond technology in our lives. Not just the success stories about how we got to where we were, and how hard we work. I don't think that's terribly interesting.

But I wanted to - rather than write what I will call a very dense kind of self-help book, where it details specific plans and strategies to overcome problems, I decided to take a more concise approach, and share advice oftentimes in the form of a story. I would say out of these 50 blogs, probably 30 or 35 of them are based on personal stories - things I've seen, things I've done, things I've observed.

The reason I do that is, I like to spend maybe a minute or so talking about my own story, and let people kind of come to their own conclusions about what went right and what went wrong. Oftentimes I end my blog post, or one of the chapters in the book, with a question or something like, "What do you think about this?" Or, "Here's my opinion. I'm not telling you what to think, but where do you stand?"

I think that sharing advice that way, it becomes - and this is a term I use in the book a little bit: it's more descriptive, instead of prescriptive. I don't want to prescribe how people think. I don't want to tell you what to think. I'm not going to tell you right or wrong. But I want to give you some context around how I came to the conclusions that I did - and I want to do that in very tight, short ways. I like to read self-help books, I like all kinds of books. But one thing I've noticed about a lot of self-help books in general, is that they tend to be very long. They tend to be wordy, and you usually have to make a pretty sizable time investment to get through it. A typical audiobook might be six to ten hours. And yeah, there's six to ten hours of content there. But I often wonder to myself, "Could this be compressed, could this be shorter? Could I get a better signal to noise ratio?" - for lack of a better term. So this book is my idea of how we can share advice in a more concise format, to give people a maximum ROI on their time.

Len: It's really interesting you mention that, the combination of time and thinking about advice. You've got a very personal story, a really good one in your book, where you talk about how it was 4pm on a Friday, and you received a non-urgent email from a fellow engineer, whom I guess you didn't personally know, but he's asking for help. And you decided to just jump on it right away.

Nick: Yeah, exactly. This was one of those stories that would definitely not make a good Hollywood movie, because it's not a terribly exciting one, and nobody got yelled at or anything. But yeah, exactly like you said. I didn't know the guy. He shot out an email to a pretty wide mailer. He needed help with something. I knew it was kind of a niche technology that a lot of other people didn't know. So it was unlikely anyone else was going to answer him, and not to mention it was Friday at 4pm - so it was even more unlikely that anyone was going to answer him.

So I decided, "Let me just call the guy." His number is in his signature. I just called him up, we talked it out for about 10 minutes, I told him what he needed - and that was the end of it. I thought to myself, "I could just wait till Monday. It's probably not a big deal. He's about to go home. The customer's not going to know."

But the question I asked myself is, "What possible benefit - either for him or for the customer, would be gained by waiting?" And I argued that the answer is: nothing. There's no reason to wait, especially because I could solve this problem now - rather than add it to my ever-growing backlog of things to do. It could end up lost in the noise, or I could just call them right now and handle it.

This is just a part of me and my personality. Some people call it the "one touch" policy, Like when I open my mailbox and I pick up a letter - I touched it once, I don't want to put it down until I'm done with it. So I'm going to open it, I'm going to handle it, I'm going to pay the bill - I'm going to do whatever, and then I'm going to be done with it. I try to follow that in my personal life.

Now, some people may have different opinions on that. I just like to show some real-life examples - some are more exciting than others - about how I apply some of the principles that govern how I live.

Len: One thing you also write about is assigning a specific money value to your time, when you're deciding what tasks to do yourself, or what to pay other people to do.

Nick: This been something I've done for a long time, even before I really had a firm understanding about investing and money in general. I tried to estimate - to put a value on my time.

So, let's say that I think my time is worth $50 an hour. If I have to fix something in my house, and I think it's about two hours of work - and a professional wants to charge me a $1,000 for it, there's a good chance I'm going to do that myself. Because I think, "In that two hours, it would it would cost me roughly $100 worth of time - versus the thousand dollars that the contractor wants."

Now of course, there are exceptions - I'm not physically able, I don't have the tools. I can't do every job in the house. But this was a pretty good approach.

Just to give you two examples. I had plumbers come and do some work. I think I paid $1,100 for four hours - and it was highly-skilled work that I absolutely could not have done myself, so I paid them. I also had a flooring guy come and do a flooring job. I don't remember the cost, but it was relatively inexpensive. He did a good job, and I knew it would have taken me longer. So actually, it would have been more expensive for me to do it myself - assuming you put a money value on your time.

I think this becomes even more important as a business person. Because you have to measure the opportunity cost of making that decision. I could be recording content. I could be editing content. I could be writing a proposal. I could be writing code. I could be doing any number of other things - or I could be putting vinyl planks down on a concrete slab. You really have to weigh, "What's the best use of my time?" I find that using money as an abstraction or a metric to try to approximate the value of time, is a pretty good approach.

Len: It's a really interesting topic, and I confess it's one I haven't spent a lot of my own time thinking about. But it's one of the reasons I enjoyed reading your book - one interesting way that you approach this kind of paradox is by invoking the concept of the time value of money and investing. Which is basically - if I could have $100 now or a hundred dollars in a year, $100 now is worth more than $100 in a year - assuming inflation is positive. Or, well - I mean inflation is inherently positive. But if there's a ten percent interest rate that I can access, then the equivalent of $100 now is $110 a year from now.

But when it comes to your own time - assuming you advance in skill, and let's say seniority - an hour of time in the future of yours, is worth more than an hour of your time now. But that's only true if you are investing time now in advancing yourself.

Nick: Yeah. And it's a little bit confusing think about - the example I used in my book was, I think, working on my car. And that 10 or 15 years ago, I like to say that my time was worth less. So, I would work on my car, and I would spend two hours to do $50 worth of repairs. Or I'd spend two hours to change the oil, which was a thirty dollar job back then. And I would probably never do that today, because it's just too much time, and my earning capacity is increased. I could do a lot more in an hour than save 15 bucks these days. So that's kind of how I look at it.

Now I think obviously - as we get older, and as we approach our 60s and 70s - that may change again. Because you'll have all the time in the world when you're done working.

But where I'm really going with this, is - so long as your capacity to earn is increasing, or you're succeeding in whatever way that you measure yourself, whether it's earning more money or becoming more famous or singing more songs at karaoke night - whatever, you could be spending time doing those things. So that way I see your future time is almost more valuable, and it would make sense to save yourself that time in the future.

Just another personal example, I've got a baby coming soon. For me - and this may seem like common sense, is - there are a lot of things I'm trying to do now - like this book for example. I wasn't intending to do this until January or February. But with the news of the baby seven months ago or whatever, I was like, "Okay, let me think about what my time is going to be worth." And like I said, towards the beginning of the podcast - the time spent with my daughter is going to be weighed very heavily, and worth more to me than the time I'm spending doing content and stuff like that - for some of the reasons I talked about.

So I kind of see that as - so long as I'm growing and I think that my future time is going to be more valuable than the same amount of time today, then I want to try to bias my decisions to buy myself time in the future.

Len: Speaking of time and money, and just to give a sense of the range of subjects that you cover in the book, one post that you have is about the rising cost of university education, particularly in the United States. I believe you have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. So, you got a formal four year university degree in Computer Science. If you were starting out now with the intention of having the same career that you've got, would you spend four years in university getting a formal degree?

Nick: It's a difficult topic and a difficult question. Because I feel like the education I received was excellent. If I recall, I paid roughly $25,000 US dollars per year, and this was between 2004 and 2008. So that comes out to be about $100,000 US dollars, which is no small feat - especially for like an 18 to 22 year old. I managed to get through that with less than $20,000 in debt. So there was a good amount of scholarships there. There was also some support from the US military, because I was serving at the time. I had some savings bonds, a little bit from family. But I did graduate with a bit of debt, that I managed to pay off quickly.

That reality is just not a reality for many people my age - even people in their 30s now find themselves not in that nice of a situation.

But to answer your question more directly, I would seriously consider some of the alternative schools out there. For example, the Lambda School, I think they're called? I don't know much about them. But they have basically the equivalent of a nine month coding training program, a bootcamp type thing. And it's an income sharing agreement, where you don't pay upfront. But once you get a job that pays over a certain amount - like say a job over $50,000, then you pay them a fixed percentage of your annual income.

For example, let's say you get a job after graduating that pays exactly $50,000, and you owe them, let's say, 20%. Then you would just take 20% of 50, which is 10. So you'd pay them $10,0000 a year for the next two years - and you basically walk away having spent money that you earned, so you never ended up in debt. I think those programs are pretty brilliant, because I think they address the debt problem.

Somebody mentioned this, I thought it was a pretty brilliant approach. It's almost like going to a venture capitalist and getting an equity investor, versus a debt investor. So you're not taking on debt to fund your venture, you're partnering with someone who's like, "I want a fraction of your profits. I don't want you to pay me now, pay me once you start making money and you have a product," for lack of a better term. I think that's a really smart approach.

My personal opinion is - I think we're going to see more of that style of approach as we go forward. We may even start to see that with trade schools and other skill-based schools, that are not traditional college. Maybe we'll even start to see it with traditional colleges.

My wife and I are still taking a pretty conservative approach. We have the appropriate tax advantage accounts for our daughters, we are populating those. The US government recently passed a law about how the money used in those accounts can be spent on a wider variety of schools, which I guess is a good thing. We'll see how that continues to expand over the next couple decades.

But yeah, the cost really just - it's a big challenge, I think, for young people. You said you were an investment banker. So, when you're 18 years old and you go and you take on $100,000 worth of debt - you have no collateral, you have no ability to repay - and you're really banking hard on getting a great job five years in the future. So there's a lot of things right off the bat that would make any lender skeptical - at least in my opinion. I feel like there's got to be a better approach there.

Len: This is a bit of a selfish question, because I agreed with everything you said about it - but why do you think that tuition costs have gone up so much in the United States recently?

Nick: I have a colleague - she earned a PhD in mathematics in the United States, and she's a couple years younger than I am. And we're not that close, but we had a brief conversation a few months ago - maybe about a year ago? She teaches at a college, and I believe she's an adjunct, and some of my opinions about adjuncts in the book are based on talking to her.

It seems like a lot of it is based on administration and administrator costs. So kind of what we talked about earlier. The administration of a business is - a lot of these schools, I think - and again, this is from mostly her observations more than mine - there are a lot of administrators and basically non-educators on the payroll that are at these colleges, that need to be paid to do the administration.

I think the result of that is we are seeing lots of managers, and not a lot of educators. We're seeing class sizes increase, and we're also seeing a lot more adjuncts and associate professors - rather than full-time tenured ones. Because tenured professors are obviously expensive. Adjuncts are kind of like disposable contractors, and from a business perspective it looks really attractive on paper when you have people like that. Because you can discard them when the times are tough, and you can surge up when the times call for it.

I feel like running colleges that way is a little bit orthogonal to the goal of providing education. Time will tell, to see if that's really the right approach.

But when I was in school, the class sizes were pretty small. I can remember just the offices upon offices, there were a lot of professors and not a whole lot of administrators. I haven't really set foot on a college campus in about 15 years, so I couldn't I couldn't tell you exactly how it - it's more like 10 years, but I still couldn't tell you exactly what it looks like today. But from what I'm hearing from people generally, we're seeing a lot more of - basically overhead people, that are becoming cost drains, basically, for these organizations.

Len: Thank you for sharing that. I call the phenomenon "admin capture." It really is the case that a lot of these institutions, many of which are public, have administrators that reproduce more administrators. One of the perverse outcomes of this is the devaluation of teaching itself, and research. This is one of the reasons that the phenomenon of the growth and the proportion of adjunct professors has happened. Which is that - an adjunct professor is typically, it's a - I mean, it's better than nothing - but if you're an ambitious person who wanted to be a tenured professor, and you find yourself in the position where you're teaching twice as many classes as a tenured professor is - and you're sometimes not even really allowed to do research, you're stuck in limbo forever, because you can't advance your career, because you don't have the time or the permission to do research - and this is all done to keep costs down.

But what it means is that there are fewer people on the campus who are actually engaged in research, and there are fewer touch points between students and people engaged in research - and it's just terrible for everybody.

Nick: Yeah, I agree.

Len: Another thing you write about is that busy is the new lazy, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that?

Nick: Yeah, this is - I think it was Warren Buffett who said it? I can't remember exactly. I think we've all kind of seen, when you're trying to have a - like you're at work, or you're dealing with someone - even family members, and I'm guilty of being lazy in this way myself - especially with my mother - is, someone wants to talk to you, or they need to talk about something of substance, of strategic value - but you're just too busy to deal with them. In reality, the work that you're doing - the busy work, it is exactly that. It's just made-up work that could easily be put aside.

The example I use in my book is - I've worked with people who, they'll go on travel, and in my opinion, when you're on travel - I like to be laser-focused on the customer, or the co-worker, or whoever I'm supporting. If I got on a plane to come see you, I want to focus on seeing you - not doing all the other stuff I could do at home. And sometimes these people will - instead of showing up at the job site at eight in the morning, they'll show up at ten, and they'll be on conference calls all day. And it's like, well - if you are going to be on conference calls all day, why'd you even come?

I feel like those people can reasonably be classified as lazy. Because they're avoiding doing the hard work that needs doing. They don't want to have the crucial conversations. They don't want to do the strategic planning, or the other important things that require them to actually think. Because I think we'll all agree that - dialling into back to back meetings, doing emails for three hours every morning, writing reports - for the most part those can be very mindless activities.

And when we fill our schedule with those things, instead of having the conversations and doing the work that has real strategic value, we really cheapen the meaning of work - and we cheapen the meaning of busy.

That's why when we say, "Busy is the new lazy," we say that we're busy - but in reality, we're just making work for ourselves. Because we don't want to do the things that really need doing.

Len: One image that you have in the book that I really love, because I've encountered it so many times, is the kind of person who puts on a show of being really busy and productive by doing emails in a meeting. You're wasting everybody's time, including your own. You're not being productive, you're not being busy.

Nick: Yeah, exactly. And I think, especially in in government, we tend to see this a lot. I mean, I've been in meetings with even high-level people, trying to have strategic planning conversations - and 80% of the people are pecking away at their laptops. And I'm wondering, "What could you possibly be doing right now that's more important than this conversation?" But as a low-level guy, I can't just come out and say that and force everyone to shut their lids. But if I could, I would - for sure.

Len: Another thing you write about is how "Zero-sum thinking is the scourge of modern business relationships." I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you mean by that?

Nick: I think this is more of a "in order for me to win, you have to lose" type thing. I talk about, for example - some of these business deals I've done with Pluralsight and O’Reilly and everyone else - and even with Leanpub; as you know, when I write a book or when anyone writes a book for a Leanpub, the book sells, the author gets a fraction of the sales price, Leanpub gets a fraction of the sales price. The customer gets a book they wanted, hopefully they get some enjoyment or some knowledge out of it.

And all three parties involved in that transaction win. Oh, and the government wins too - because the sale of that book generated economic activity, which is taxed. So really, everyone involved has won.

It's same thing for online training, it's the same effect. And when there is more capital moving, when there's money moving and there's transactions being made, and there's customers buying things, and there are suppliers selling things, and there are partners working on things together - like authors in Leanpub or whatever - then I think everyone can generally win. And there really aren't any losers.

Now if you look with a wider scope, you might be thinking, "What about competition?" For example, the books that I'm writing - what about competing books or substitute products or alternative choices that people have? I mean, yes, if you want to look at competition in that perspective - it may be unlikely that a customer will buy both products. But in general, I think that if you go into every business engagement with the mindset that there's going to be some kind of zero-sum, or, "I have to lose in order for you to win," or vice-versa attitude - then that's generally what you're going to see.

When I do business, I always - I only ever do business when there are clear winners all around. And there have been some opportunities in the past where I clearly could have won at someone else's expense. There have been times when I've been solicited to do work for other people, when clearly I would have lost. For example, doing a whole lot of work for one tenth of the cost that I would normally make from it. And in that case, I'm losing and I'm being taken advantage of.

So I try to look for those deals, and I try to avoid them - even if it's not a lot of work. Because number one, I generally don't want to do business with people like that. I truly believe that good businesses understand that winning - I call it "win together." That's actually one of the company values inside of my company, Cisco.

But I think it even expands outside of the company. When you start to look at different products, and you look at them in a different light - and in the book, there are people online who also offer training on the same topics I do. But a lot of us are careful not to start a price war, and we're careful not to flame each other online. Because a lot of us agree that it's just not productive, and me personally - when I want to learn a new technology, oftentimes I'm going to buy multiple resources. I might buy some video training, I might buy books, I might buy all these other multiple things. Because they all combine together to give me a variety of perspectives on a given technology, and I think that's useful.

Now for some products or services like a gym membership, it's unlikely you're going to have somebody that buys multiple gym memberships. So, again - in some cases, I understand the need for competition. But I think especially in the technical training space, there is a lot of coexistence, and complementary products, that can all exist together and be useful.

Len: Thanks for that great explanation. It's interesting, it reminds me of an example of - I guess, winning together - that's come up on this podcast a few times in the self-publishing world. And related to Leanpub, was - we had an author years ago, who discovered his book had been translated into another language, and the person was selling the book and making money off of it.

And instead of getting angry, and trying to stop it, he took the attitude that, "Well, what this person has actually done - if I think about it from a pragmatic perspective, rather than getting personally angry about it - is that they've introduced my book to a whole new market and me." And so, when he wrote his next book, he contacted the person who'd done the pirate translation and said, "Hey why don't we work together this time?" He had great sales in a whole new market that he wouldn't have had for his new book.

And so, often taking this attitude, of trying to see how you can all benefit together, is not Pollyanna-ish; it can be very practical.

There about 47 other things we could talk about that you wrote about in your book, but I'll leave that to listeners to go and buy your book and discover for themselves - it's really good.

So just moving on to the next part of the interview, where we talk about your experience as an author. You've written about your experience with your first book, and you wrote - quote, "The book is roughly 3,000 pages in length. This was my biggest mistake. In reality I wrote four or five books, and should have sold them individually or as a discounted volume set," end quote. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you came to that determination?

Nick: Well, the first thing - the key word in Leanpub is "lean." And a 3,000 page book delivered all at once is like the exact opposite of lean. So, even getting it into the Leanpub platform seemed a little bit out of place. But I think the thing is - and as you've probably seen, the price of a 3,000 page highly technical book is going to be generally high. And when you're looking for new books to buy and you see a bunch of books for, ten, twenty, thirty dollars - and then you see one for two or three hundred dollars, you're immediately turned off - just based on that huge price.

And also, the book was very targeted at specific people going for a relatively niche certification - where I think, if I had broken it up into smaller books - five books at one fifth the cost, let's say, so five $40 books or $60 books, whatever - and say, "Hey, this book is on technology A. This book's on technology B." But just keep it generic, and then maybe in the front matter, just make a comment, "Hey, if you're studying for these certifications - this book can help you, and here are the other books in the set." Or just say, "Hey, the books are sold individually, but if you want the certification set, here's the package or the collection or the other bundle," I believe it's called? "You can buy the bundle on Leanpub for X dollars and then it comes at a discount."

I think that would have made more sense. Obviously money has a time value, and it took me about six months to write that book. So let's assume I wrote 500 pages a month. If I had written a 500 page book every month for a total of six books, I could have been selling books every month. I would have had a new book, which would have probably corresponded with a jump in sales. It would have given me cash sooner to reinvest in the business, or do other things with.

Basically it would have just been a cleaner approach, and I think it would have driven increased sales on top of all that. Because people who only want technologies A and C and D could just buy those three books, and not have to make the two or three hundred dollar investment. So, I think that that was a mistake. But it's not one I regret, because I didn't really know - everything I just said, I didn't think about that three years ago. It was all great lessons learned.

And with my blog, I wrote a blog every week, and it continuously got built. And it wasn't until later in the process that I thought about putting it up on Leanpub. Had I thought of that earlier, I probably would have published the book nine months ago, and just kept updating it every week. I just didn't think to do that.

But I took a leaner approach, and published short blogs every week, and then ultimately ended up putting it into a book, and spending a day or two narrating, producing, and putting it up on Leanpub.

Maybe next time, if I decide to do it again next year, maybe I'll publish the book on day one and say, "Hey, here's the book with no blogs in it." And then every week it'll grow a little bit, and then customers can get those updates. So I'm still debating on what we're going to do next year.

But yeah, for all the authors out there - if you're thinking about working with Leanpub, the key word is "lean," "Publish early, publish often." Use the tooling that Leanpub gives you - it's great, I love it. Get your book out there early, get your cash sooner - and generally it's going to have a positive impact on your business.

Len: Actually I've just got - that leads me to one more question that I wasn't planning on asking, but about your old book. So, you wrote a 3,000 page book, that you published all at once. How did you keep yourself motivated throughout the six months, writing 500 pages a month? Because that is a Herculean effort.

Nick: Yeah it was, I would probably say it's the most difficult thing I've ever done. It took - in addition to being a full-time employee, one thing that was different of course is that it happened before I had my daughter. So there was a big difference in time availability, and my wife was also extremely supportive. She did every - all the cooking, the lot - I didn't have to do anything other than get up, go to work and come home and write the book for five months, six months. So it was a difficult period.

The motivation, I think, was - this was a very new exam, and it was a lot of new topics - and there were very few people in the world who knew it, and there were even fewer people in the world who had passed this test and had lived to tell about it. So I figured, "Not only can I be one of the first in the world, but I will most definitely be the first person with a product that covers these topics."

So from a business perspective, I saw a gap in the market. And I said, "I really like this stuff. I've been working with it for a long time. If I can go and do this, and write a detailed technical guide to cover these topics, no one is going to be able to challenge me for at least a year."

And that's exactly what happened. For a long time, I think it was the first - I mean, it's a 3,000-page book, so I don't think there are a lot of people that read it cover-to-cover. I didn't know how long it was going to be. It's not like I said, "Hey, it's going to be 3,000 pages," it just ended up that long, with hundreds of labs and stuff.

But even today it sells a couple every week. Obviously it's not like the beginning, where I'd sell ten in a day. But even today it still has relevance. There's still a lot of technical goodness. It's still consumed today. And that's a highly technical, super niche book. A very long and detailed, and relatively expensive - and then the new Fifty Pieces of Gold book, is completely orthogonal in every way. It's low-cost, it's lightweight, it’s non-technical - and it was published in kind of a lean-ish way.

So I took two very different approaches, and I think that's kind of a testament to the Leanpub platform. You can do it either way, and you can see success either way.

But this new approach, I decided - let me write about some of the things that people don't know about me, and get these opinions out there, so we can have a conversation about what other people think about business, or what they think about investing, or helping people open up about their own failures and lessons learned.

Len: And as we mentioned earlier, you also recorded an audio version of the book. Audiobooks are a big thing nowadays. You mentioned you spend a lot of time yourself listening to them. I sort of do the equivalent with other forms of audio myself, that's how I like to learn as well. And I was wondering - this is the part of the podcast where we get into the weeds about the processes that self-published authors have - how did you record the book?

Nick: For the book, I decided to keep it really simple. I actually used Camtasia for it. I used the same software I do for my recorded training. I used the same software, I just turned off the camera, turned off the screen recording - and just recorded the audio only. I used the same microphone I'm using now. And my goal initially was, I wanted to wake up and read one section every day.

Typically I do this early in the morning, because my voice is - it's relatively deeper, it's smoother, it's a little bit less hoarse - because I haven't been talking all day. So usually I'll be up 5:30 or 6:00. By 6:30 I'm recording. Each section's about 20 to 30 minutes, and that takes about 30 to 40 minutes, just to do the recording. So I'd wake up early, I'd record a whole section - which is 7 to 10 blogs.

I go to work, get off work at 5:00, 5:30. I'd spend several hours editing the content, editing out the coughs and the breaths and the throat clearings - making it a nice smooth transition, just like a professional audiobook should. And then producing the individual clips. Embedding the metadata in the clips. I use an online service known as Auphonic. Ten bucks will buy you five hours' worth. So I spend ten bucks, buy five hours' worth, or whatever. Upload my mp3s.

They come back - nice audio level, noise cancelled - all that good stuff. And then I put them in iTunes or whatever, make sure all the metadata showed up, I'd sync it to my iPhone, and then I would listen to it - either that night or later on. Usually at night when I'm doing chores, getting the baby ready for bed, helping out my wife - and I would listen to my own audiobook. I did that for about six days in a row until the book was done.

Len: And just so we get it clear, what was the name of the service that you used?

Nick: It was Auphonic. So A-U-P-H-O-N-I-C.com. It's really simple. You just upload an mp3, and - obviously garbage in, garbage out. So you want to provide a good sample. Not a lot of like nicks or bumps or anything. And then what it'll do, is it'll do a little bit of extra audio levelling. So when you're reading, your face might move back and forth from the mic a little bit. You might get some really loud words, some quiet words. This kind of levels it out a little bit better. For those of us who are not professional narrators, which I am most definitely not - it's a very useful service.

I actually use it for all my recorded training. I just separate the audio from the video - I use the service, it comes back. Then I re-add it to the video, and I end up with a very good audio - even using relatively inexpensive recording equipment. I mean, I'm using a $90 microphone, it sounds great. I use that service to give me much better sound, without the big capital investment.

So yeah, it was overall not too bad. I would estimate that for the audio recording and producing, about two hours of audio - that probably took about 10 or maybe 10 or 15 hours total, to do all of it.

And then once I had it all on my iPhone - I made sure all the titles were correct, made sure all the metadata is correct, listened to the whole thing - I sent it to a friend of mine. He had a couple long flights coming up. I said, "Here, this will put you to sleep right away." Just kidding, I think he enjoyed it. But I sent it to him, I said, "Hey, give it a listen, let me know what you think." He said it sounded good, audio was smooth, he enjoyed the content - and here we are.

I added it as an extra package up on Leanpub. So people who like to "listen with their ears," as I call it - which I do and, Len, you've said you do as well - there's that option as well.

Len: Thank you for sharing all those details. Stuff like that is really gold to people who haven't done it before - getting to hear the real nitty-gritty, and the lessons learned along the way.

You brought up speech volume levelling. To those who are not initiated into recording audio for screencasts or for podcasts, speech volume levelling is a really important thing - and it's really hard to do. But there are tools out there that can help you do it. I happen to use Audition, Adobe's product - which is really fantastic for that. But I also use an app called Levelator, which someone suggested to me online, because my initial podcasts were crap, and that works really well for me.

The last question we always like to ask on this podcast, is - in your use of Leanpub, is there anything that you've come across where you thought we could fix something that's broken? Or if we could build any sort of fantasy feature for you, what would you ask us to build?

Nick: That's interesting, because I remember we talked about this. I can't remember what I said last time. But the one thing I thought was - well, you've added it. I don't remember if you had the different packages last time, because I think the packages - I think the packages on the front page is just a huge advance. Because now you're really giving - not only can users choose your own price, but now they have the option of choosing which product they buy - which variant of the product they buy. It's kind of like buying a car. Do you want the extras, or do you not want the extras? But you also get to choose your price. So I thought that was really useful, especially for multimedia content like my particular book - where you can get text, you can get text with audio. Some other packages may even come with more?

I also thought - a couple years ago, when I was thinking about getting into training, I realized that Leanpub has this thing called "Courses" now. And I admit I haven't really looked into it, I don't know what a Leanpub course actually is. But the fact that you have it, tells me that you're thinking about the multimedia space - and I think that's a great idea from a business perspective.

In addition to text, there's audio - and now you can look at video content as well, potentially - or live training. So I think those are all great features to have in this platform, and especially if you're able to integrate all the Leanpub tooling.

So, for example - if someone is developing a course and they make an update to the course, is that tooling similar to what we do for books? If it is, that's great, because now people can do updates to the recorded training or whatever, with a similar workflow, in similar semantics. I think that could be very powerful.

Len: Yeah, thanks for that. I'll just explain briefly - the packages feature that we've built allows authors to upload arbitrary digital content. So it can be an mp3, it could be a video, it can be code - basically anything that you can put in a digital file, you can upload as an "extra" associated with your book - and then you can create packages.

So the first package could be, just the book. The second package could be the book plus the audio. The third package could be the book, plus the audio, plus the code sample. And then you could even make a fourth, that's like book, plus audio, plus code sample, plus video. And then you can assign different prices to those - and they're all presented in a clear way to your potential customers, so that they can choose what package they want to buy.

When it comes to courses, this is a - I could talk for a very long time about that. But the idea is that - yes, you can actually write a course, an online course, like a MOOC and a book in the same document - writing in Markua, our Markup syntax. Those courses are written the same way. And what you do is you can basically write content, like some text, and then you can have an exercise that people can take for practice, and then a quiz that people get marked on. And in the end if they pass - they can get a certificate, so that's proof.

Part of the theory there is that we think that this is just a good product in itself, but one thing we realized is that so many Leanpub books are in a sense courses themselves. And so, what happens when you read a book - you've got no kind of social proof that you've learned anything. So we think it's actually a natural extension of the life of a Leanpub book, to actually have an accompanying course.

So if someone finishes a book, then they can buy a course, and take that course - and when they pass it, they have proof of what they've learned, that they can present to employers or clients or what have you.

So that's the idea behind that that product - thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about that a little bit - I really appreciate that.

Nick: Sure.

Len: And thank you very much for your new book, and for taking the time to do this interview. I think our listeners are going to enjoy it very much. And, thank you for being a Leanpub author.

Nick: Thanks Len. I love doing business with you guys. I think you have a great platform, and I'm looking forward to many more books.

Len: Thanks very much.

And as always, thanks to you for listening to this episode of the Frontmatter podcast. If you like what you heard, please rate and review it wherever you found it, and if you'd like to be a Leanpub author, please visit our website at leanpub.com.