Editor:
Today’s guest is someone who helps people turn their knowledge, their experience, and their stories into beautifully published books. Christopher John Payne is a publishing expert who’s helped hundreds of clients bring their books to life, from writing and layout to getting them live on Amazon and into readers’ hands. With a background in psychology and marketing, Christopher knows exactly how to guide people through the process, even if they’ve never written a word before. Chris, it is lovely to meet you.
Chris Payne:
Thrilled to meet you too. Thanks for having me on.
Editor:
Well, let’s start maybe with a little bit about your story. How did you get into helping people publish their own books?
Chris Payne:
Well, I had a background in magazine publishing. I used to work for a computer magazine publisher. And then set up a mail order business called LifeTools. So I was importing speed reading courses and meditation courses and general personal development courses into the UK, and selling them via direct mail. So I was mailing up to a million letters a year around the UK. That was just little old me writing these letters, which were 8- or 16-page sales letters, and mailing them around the UK. I put adverts in Men’s Health magazine and Cosmopolitan magazine, New Scientist, and all the national newspapers, and getting a quarter million people writing in. The key out of all this, what matters is, I learnt how to write. How do you write something that gets people to order online or ring in and buy it? I have to have that now. I’ve only got a first page through a sales letter, and I’m having to buy. That’s what I learnt, and I just learnt from the best.
Editor:
So, have you always been a writer?
Chris Payne:
Yeah, I developed it. The guy I worked for many years ago, it was a guy called Derek Meakin. Derek launched the first free newspaper in the UK. Eddy Shah was a guy who created the Today newspaper, and he’s quoted saying, “Derek Meakin was my inspiration.”
So, I worked for Derek, and he taught me how to write. He would get me to write stuff for a magazine, and then he’d cover my printout in red ink, and I’d have to retype all the corrections. I’d go back to him, and then he’d change it all again. After a year, every time I used to give him something, he’d say, “Oh, Chris, you’re not giving me anything because I’ll never find anything, because you’re so good now.” And he’d literally find one tiny thing. We were like best buddies. I mean, he was decades older than me. He was like a surrogate father at the time. He taught me so much about how you communicate with a reader and get them excited about a magazine or an article or whatever.
Editor:
So, when was this? How long ago were you working on those computer magazines, and then subsequently starting your own business?
Chris Payne:
Oh, you’re looking at 40 years ago that this happened. I was working with him for seven years. He eventually made me managing director of the software division, and I launched various bits of software that were very successful. Anyway, I left and literally started from scratch. From my kitchen table, set up this business, and slowly but surely built up a business that ended up with big offices and up to 25 people in the team and big warehouse with full of CD sets and DVD sets and video sets that I was mailing out. But it was me.
I don’t think I was the best manager or anything, but what I learned, understood was the power of writing. I just loved spending a lot of time sitting and writing these long-form letters which anybody watching has read. That power, when you’re reading it, you’re shaking arm and thinking, “Oh, my god, this sounds so exciting. I got to hope it’s not too expensive.” And then sure enough, they think, “Oh, it’s less than I thought.” And then they buy it and they buy the upsells. Well, that, for me, is such fun to put that together.
Editor:
Going back to that time as well, you must’ve seen the dawn of the internet, almost like as a revelation in itself?
Chris Payne:
Very much. When, of course, I started, there wasn’t the internet. So I could launch stuff in the UK and put much higher price.
I’d buy something in from America, and almost maybe double or triple the price, and add in all these extra bonuses, and there’d be enough margin for me to make a good profit. But when the internet came, people could say, “Well, I can actually buy this from America and save five pound or fiver dollars.” But they’ll take three weeks extra to get the thing delivered. So the business just changed when the internet came along.
Editor:
What was the process for that? Was it a case of finding a product in the US, and then buying the licence rights to that so you could republish it?
Chris Payne:
Yes, the process was that I would find products at exhibitions, conferences in the US, or through reading personal growth magazines from the States, going through them, and then ringing up the company and saying, “I would like to sell this product in the UK for you.”
I think of one case where the company in the States created this product, and it wasn’t doing well, and they were really struggling financially. They sold the products to me, and I rewrote all their sales material, wrote it more enthusiastically, and I was selling far more in the UK, which is a fraction of the size of the American market, selling far more than they were selling in America. And then they saw what I was doing in how to put together a sales letter, and then adopting some of those practices themselves.
Editor:
That’s amazing. So fast forward to today, now you are helping people write their own books. How did that transpire? How did you get to that point?
Chris Payne:
Well, one of them was just a life change. I mean, I had a difficult marriage. I had a complete breakdown with the behavior of my wife at the time, I’ll just be honest. So I completely collapsed. I ended up having to close LifeTools as a result. It’s just one of these things that happened. I thought, “Well, what would I do differently?” So I decided to be a consultant. So what I would do is take people who were interested in making money online. They might have a small email list, and that they’d have a product, they’d spend six months developing it, they’d launch it to their email list, and it would fail.
They’d come to me almost in tears, and I would say, “Right. Sit down with me in my home, and let’s rewrite the sales letter. Let’s redesign the website. Let’s go into one of my bedrooms, and we’ll set up some lights and record some new videos.” And then they would have much greater success. Part of that journey was, a couple of those clients wanted help to create a book. And I owned not many, just 3,000 books. Is that many?…
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