Tyler Wagner

Cleaned & Rewritten Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed; the substance and voice of the conversation remain unchanged.

Henry Harrison: Welcome to the Henry Harrison Podcast — Entrepreneurs, Business, and Finance. Today we're very glad to have Tyler Wagner on the show. He's an entrepreneur, and his company, Authors Unite at authorsunite.com, is really intriguing. I'll do a plug early on: he's not Bill Gates yet, but he did drop out of college to start his company. I know that's going to be an interesting part of your story, Tyler. So hello, Tyler.

Tyler Wagner: Thanks, man. Appreciate you having me on.

Henry Harrison: Since I brought it up first, why don't we start there? What kind of guy goes to school for finance and starts a dot-com company — I don't know if it was originally a dot-com — starts an authors company and makes it go? Whether or not it's the exact same company, I think Authors Unite has been around 14 years or so now, plus whatever came before that. Tell us about that journey.

Tyler Wagner: Yeah, it's a good story, so it's a good place to start. I was going to USC — South Carolina. I had chosen that college because I'd learned, comparing it to other schools, that it had a much higher ratio of girls to guys. I was like, "That's all I need to know," so I decided to go to the University of South Carolina.

I was studying — well, I didn't even get to my major, but my plan was to become an accountant. My dad's an accountant, so something in finance or accounting, because I'd heard it had the highest first-year salary out of college. It was all money-based decisions.

Then one of my friends in college introduced me to The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was probably the entirety of the book that gave me the confidence to try my own thing. There were a lot of concepts in it that led me to conclude that starting your own business is not easy, but it's also not impossible.

When you're going through school in the younger grades, what they tell you is that 90% of businesses fail after their first year, and the rest fail after four or five years. It makes it seem like there's no chance. This book made it seem like there was an actual, real chance.

So I reached out to my guidance counselor at USC and said, "Do we have an entrepreneurship major? I want to switch from accounting and finance to that." They didn't have one. Once I found that out, literally two weeks later I decided to drop out of college.

My idea was that I was going to be the next Tony Robbins. I'm going to public speak. I'm an outgoing guy, I like podcasting and speaking, so that's what I'm going to do. Then what clicked for me, from going to a ton of conferences, was that most speakers at events were either authors or bestselling authors. I was 19, something like $50,000 to $80,000 in debt — no money, no expertise. The idea I had was that if I become an author or a bestselling author, people will overlook my age, I'll be able to build trust a lot easier, and I'll actually be able to speak at these events.

So I wrote a book called Conference Crushing. It ended up selling in the low tens of thousands of copies and hit multiple bestseller lists, which was very surprising. I launched it to my whole network, and then over the following days and weeks it was trending on Amazon.

I took a screenshot of that and posted it on Facebook. This is 16 years ago — organically, when you posted on Facebook back then, people would actually see it. You didn't have to pay Facebook. From that one screenshot of my book being a number one bestseller, I got hundreds of DMs saying, "My mom wants to write a book." "I want to write a book." "How did you do this?"

I never realized how big an interest this was for people. Once I did, it immediately clicked. I was like, "I can do public speaking" — and I did do maybe 10 or 15 gigs, anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000, which at the time was a ton of money for me, so I was happy to do it. But helping people write their books and become bestsellers — I had 300 potential clients sitting in my Facebook DMs. It seemed a lot easier. I could stay in my pajamas. I don't have to travel and stay in hotels all the time. So I chose that path, and now, fast-forward 16 years, we've done somewhere between 5,000 and 5,500 clients.

One last part of the story. When I first started the company, it was called Bestselling Book System. I changed the name because I realized the abbreviation was BSBS, which isn't that good of an abbreviation. About two or three years in, I was on a run out in nature, and it was kind of a download type of thing — Authors Unite. I sprinted back home, looked it up on GoDaddy, and it was available. So I changed it from BSBS to Authors Unite, and I think that was a good decision overall.

Henry Harrison: What a great name — Authors Unite — and you got the .com domain. It's funny: when email first started, in the 1990s, almost nobody was using it, and my wife and I got a joint email address. Her name is Olga, so we had H-O before whatever we put after it. A few years later she said, "Why do you call yourself a ho in your email address?" Or worse, "Why do you call your wife a ho?" So it's funny how those names can be. You figured that one out, though.

This must have been a wild journey, because publishing has evolved and changed since you started. I think you caught the beginning of a lot of major changes. Am I right on that?

Tyler Wagner: Yeah. I don't know when Amazon started the whole self-publishing thing, but it was definitely in the earlier days. We're in 2026 now, and it was around 2010 that I started. It was very new. Most people didn't really even know you could self-publish a book — that was still kind of a new concept. And becoming a bestseller in 2010 seemed very far from a possibility. Once I figured out the algorithms of the bestseller lists, that opened up a huge market for me. But I'd have to Google it.

Henry Harrison: I just pulled it up. I need to be like Joe Rogan — who does he call? "Hey, such and such, can you look this up?"

Tyler Wagner: I can't think of his name, but yeah.

Henry Harrison: Google says November 2007 is when it launched its digital self-publishing platform —

Tyler Wagner: KDP.

Henry Harrison: — which later became known as Kindle Direct Publishing. The real evolution was in 2010, when it rebranded, raised royalties, and things took off. So you got in right when that was taking off, and only a few years after it even existed.

Tyler Wagner: That's so funny. I'm so glad you brought that up, because 16 years in, I don't know why I never thought to look that up. I didn't know. 2007 — so it was literally only three years after it started. That's pretty cool.

Henry Harrison: And in 2010, just so we're on the subject, Amazon rebranded, updated the service, raised top-tier royalties to 70%, and later integrated print-on-demand options, absorbing CreateSpace into KDP.

Tyler Wagner: CreateSpace, yep. Funny enough, CreateSpace and KDP used to be two separate sub-companies under Amazon. KDP was for e-books, CreateSpace was for physical, and it wasn't the easiest thing to set up. Once they got rid of CreateSpace, everything went under KDP. Today, in 2026 — I haven't tried this — but you could probably have AI do the uploading and publishing process for you, because they've made it so much easier.

Henry Harrison: I remember talking to someone who did it a while back, and he said the hardest part was getting his damn book formatted properly for Amazon. That was some time ago, so you must have gone through all of that from the start.

Which brings up another topic. The Wall Street Journal just had an article about 3 million small-business millionaires in the US, and how there are bread-and-butter industries that people overlook. One guy started a hot dog company and made a billion dollars — no college degree.

Obviously, Ted Turner had a great idea with CNN. Sometimes the idea gets you a long way. With Authors Unite, you saw the opportunity right away, you seized it, you went with the vision. And then there are all these things you have to do, obstacles to overcome, problems. What would you say are some of the things that have helped you stay in business 16 years? Because even with a good idea, and being in the right place at the right time and capitalizing on it — what are some lessons?

Tyler Wagner: From my journey, I've come to realize there's definitely something special about a business lasting that long. Sixteen years is pretty good. There are obviously businesses that have been around way longer, but in today's world, with the whole AI thing, things are changing so fast that a lot of businesses are being impacted.

One macro thing I'd say is that it's a balance of taking action constantly, pushing myself forward, but also taking the time to sit back and truly reflect on what's working and what's not. A lot of times in entrepreneurship you're always in go, go, go mode, and sometimes it's the smallest things that, if you become aware of them, make the biggest difference.

To give an example: probably five years in, just by looking at my CRM and the analytics, I realized that one of our publishing referral partners had referred us a little over a million dollars in business in one year. At the time, that was probably half of our entire revenue for that year.

I had been trying all these different methods — SEO, Facebook ads, all these things. But sitting back and looking at my analytics, realizing that one book publisher was worth a million dollars a year to me, my mind went: "All I need to do is find 19 more of these publishers and I have a $20 million business."

Obviously it wasn't that easy, but that unlocked a concept for me. I stopped Facebook ads. I stopped trying SEO. Those things can work — whether it was the firms or me, it just wasn't working for me. What did work, once I found that partner thing out, is that I went on a hunt. I was doing 100 calls a week, 20 a day Monday through Friday. My entire sales team still does this today, where we reach out to people who work with similar clients as us rather than reaching out directly to a potential client.

We have tens of thousands of referral partners now. Within that, we found the 19 other publishing partners, and there are a lot more partners who refer way less, but there are a lot of them. I would never have gone down that path if I hadn't taken the time to look at the analytics and stop trying to work so many hours and so hard. It was more of a smart move.

I still do it today. I go for multiple hour-long walks in nature, and things come to me — huge realizations, pivotal moments. If I didn't do those daily rituals, I wouldn't have those outcomes. It's a balance.

Henry Harrison: So constantly evolving with those new ideas and adapting to the situation. I'm comparing you to all these really famous people, but — Sam Walton. Yours has to be one of the oldest industries in the world, publishing. And what's an older industry than selling things out of a retail store? Somehow he took that one store in Arkansas and made it the biggest company in the world at the time. Before Elon's recent jump in wealth, the Walton kids combined would still be the wealthiest people in the world. I read his biography, and he did it one step at a time — the next innovation, the next idea, the next implementation, just better than everybody else.

There's a lot of competition in publishing, and somehow for 16 years you've innovated in a way that's helped. It sounds like that's part of your strategy: to keep looking for the things that are going to make the difference. Working on the business rather than in the business, for those periods of time.

Tyler Wagner: Yeah. Specifically — a lot of people are talking about AI in general, but it's a big discussion in the book publishing industry. Like I was saying earlier, I haven't tried it, but you could probably talk to an AI agent and have it write the book for you, edit the book, upload the book, and publish the book for you.

So the question is: what's the point of giving a publisher half of your royalties when an AI agent could do all of it for you, maybe even for free? Now, I don't think they're good enough yet. You still want real people involved, especially with writing and editing your book. I don't think you want to leave that to just an AI. But it's very clear to me that the publishing side of the business will be drastically impacted.

The book marketing side is the side we play in, and I don't think that side will be much impacted. If you want to hit the New York Times bestseller list, maybe ChatGPT or Claude could tell you how to do it, but you still need to sell 10,000 or 20,000 books to do it. AI can't really do that for you. So we've been leaning more into the book marketing side and expanding it, because I think that's more AI-proof than the publishing side.

Henry Harrison: Let's talk about what you actually do. Does it fall under the category of publishing? Obviously marketing books is part of it, and publishers do that. Maybe it's a question of jargon. The original guy who published books needed to sell it himself or find someone to sell it. It seems like it's all part of getting your book to your audience. So how do you help with that? Who would you want coming to you? You're not really going after me if I want to publish a book directly.

Tyler Wagner: To answer that first part — the common misconception is that book publishers do marketing. They don't actually. And if they do, it's not effective at all. With Authors Unite, that was the big differentiator about four or five years in. Once I'd mastered the marketing side, that made us very appealing, because your traditional top-five book publisher is more looking for people who already have really large audiences — a Jordan Peterson, someone like that. They already have a built-in marketing asset, so the publisher doesn't need to do much. They help with the creation of the book, but not really the marketing side.

Ultimately, what we do at Authors Unite is that we're considered a hybrid publisher. We're very similar to any other hybrid publisher.

Henry Harrison: Does it help to be branded by "I was published by Penguin Random House"?

Tyler Wagner: I'd say yes — and the question is whether it's worth what you have to give up. In some cases, yes.

The pros of traditional right now are that you do get better distribution into physical bookstores, potentially airports. But most of your sales are going to come from Amazon, so the true value of that is more that it's cool to have your book there. Does it actually move a lot of sales? I'd argue probably not.

The second part is the logo — a HarperCollins or something. There's definitely value in that.

The last part: if somebody wants to go for New York Times bestseller, it's kind of an untold prerequisite. If you really want a chance at New York Times, you need a traditional. It's very, very rare that a self-published author hits the New York Times list.

Those are the three top benefits of basically giving up the rights, royalties, and ownership of your book to a traditional publisher. For some people it makes sense, totally. We work with a lot of those people.

Henry Harrison: I interrupted your train of thought. I think you were saying what you do.

Tyler Wagner: No, you're good. It's a great question, because when people come to us and say, "I want to hit New York Times," I can do that for them, but the only way is to link them up with a traditional publisher. Without one, the likelihood that they'll hit is very low. I can't really take their money to do the marketing if I don't get them the traditional. So it's important to know the differences.

For us: hybrid publisher, and then we do the bestseller campaigns. We've done thousands of them. New York Times; Wall Street Journal, which you mentioned — we've gotten over 1,000 people on that list, but it was discontinued about three years ago. That was a super popular list for business people. USA Today Bestseller is really popular, and we've gotten a lot of people on that. And then Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The third thing, out of what's really four phases, is that a lot of our clients have businesses that their book funnels into, so we build that whole backend book funnel or sales funnel for them.

The last part: typically when somebody does a big bestseller campaign, to keep the momentum going they'll do consistent media appearances — podcasts, TV, maybe a feature in Forbes. It just needs to be consistent. After about six to 12 months, you can really have a book take off. We have a lot of case studies where books have sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands — probably a few in the low millions of copies. We've had some pretty good success stories.

Henry Harrison: Looking at your website, it's kind of astounding. Tens of millions of books sold by clients, 4,000-plus success stories, 15 years of book publishing experience. And then you've got Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Inc., Entrepreneur, USA Today. Are those the bestseller categories?

Tyler Wagner: Some of them are. USA Today is.

Henry Harrison: And the others are how you help them market to the public?

Tyler Wagner: The others are where the company and I have been featured — Forbes, Inc.

Henry Harrison: I see, you've been featured there. Got it. I was trying to put that together.

So to go through it: you've got creation — if someone doesn't have a book ready, you can help them with pretty much everything to create a book. Then bestseller campaigns, which is marketing to all these different bestseller lists. And then book funnels. You're talking about a sales funnel there?

Tyler Wagner: Yeah. Typically, how our clients make ROI — there are a couple of ways, but leveraging the bestseller accolade is hard to put a value on. It depends on how well you leverage it. You'll typically make your money back a lot faster from the clients your book gets you, rather than book royalties, because it's very rare that people make a lot of money on book royalties.

Henry Harrison: So I guess you have a whole range of clients.

Tyler Wagner: Sorry, I didn't answer that part. Simply: most of our clients are seven- to nine-figure entrepreneurs, coaches, and public speakers. Typically they've done really well financially, but they don't have a big following, and that's why they need us. They may have a lot of clients and have done well financially, but if they launched their book, they'd only sell 100 copies from their client base. They have the money to pay us to do the marketing to get them the 10,000 or 20,000 sales to hit the bestseller lists, and then the ongoing marketing as well.

Henry Harrison: Got it. Is that your office there? Your house? Where are we sitting?

Tyler Wagner: We're actually traveling at the moment. I'm based between Miami and right here — I'm in Colombia, South America. My girlfriend's Colombian, so we spend some time here and some time in the US and Miami.

Henry Harrison: Do you have a number of employees back in the Miami office, or are you remote? Do you have contractors on top of it? How are you set up?

Tyler Wagner: That's a good question. Here's the blessing and the curse of having a dad who's an accountant: he handles all of that, and I'm completely ignorant to most of it.

My understanding of the setup is that I don't really have many employees, if any — more like contractors. Right now we probably have 25 to 30 commission-only sales reps. And through that partner method I was talking about with referral partners, what it turned into is that we have a freelancer or contractor base for everything.

So if somebody needs a ghostwriter, I have 5,000 ghostwriting referral partners. They come to me, we sell it under the Authors Unite brand, and we connect them with a contractor who's a ghostwriter. But they're not only with Authors Unite — they do their own thing and contract with us. Same with editors, same with book cover designers. I forget the form — 1099 or something. It's all contractors, I'm pretty sure.

Henry Harrison: How do you screen someone? I guess you're a partner available to help them, if you work out an arrangement, their expectations are realistic, and they can afford to be a client. Is there a screening process? Can you predict which ones are going to do well and which aren't?

Tyler Wagner: As far as my clients' books?

Henry Harrison: Books, yeah. That's probably the first question, right? Someone comes in and says, "How much is it going to cost, and how many books can you help me get published?" Is that how it goes?

Tyler Wagner: Sometimes, for sure. Other times, where I try to move the conversation — because it's just the truth — is I ask them straight up, "Does the book funnel into your business?" If they say yes, then I ask, "What is one client worth to you?" Typically that's thousands to tens of thousands. Our average client spends anywhere from about $60K to $150K with us. So if by me getting you 10,000 book sales we only need 10 of those readers to become a client — that's the way we look at it and frame it.

To answer your question, I feel like I have a pretty good eye at this point, just based on what the book looks like. I'm not a designer, but I can very clearly tell if a book cover's going to do well or not, because I've seen thousands of them at this point.

As far as whether the book's going to do well long-term based on content — I don't read most of the books, because I don't have the time. But I can bring up an example. One book that did really well with us was called Weightlifting Is a Waste of Time. The cover's good, the book is very good, and what the guy talks about is real — I've tried his system and it really works. The author is John Jaquish.

What really made it take off, I think, was that we did a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller campaign for it. And because the title was controversial, that got people online on forums arguing back and forth — "Weightlifting is not a waste of time," "Yes, it is, here's a better way." It was this whole argument across all these workout and gym forums, and that's what really propelled it forward. I think that one's now in the mid-hundreds of thousands of copies sold, and we did the marketing to launch it to bestseller in about 2020, so six years ago.

There are some common things. If the title, or when you do media, you can cause controversy and have people argue about it, that's actually a marketing technique. It's a good thing. And then the covers, and then the content. I just don't read most of them, but my editorial team does.

Henry Harrison: So you had an accountant dad when you were a kid. What was your childhood like? You went to a decent school, so you must have been a decent student. Was he upset when you were going to drop out?

Tyler Wagner: My dad was an accountant. He worked at — I think they're a Fortune 50 company, maybe Fortune 100, I'm not sure, but definitely Fortune 500. A very big company; you would know the name. He was an accountant for them for about 35 years.

What's interesting is that he did very well. My parents are amazing — I feel like I have the best parents. Their rule with me was always: as long as you're honest, you can basically do whatever you want. Which sounds very extreme as a parenting method, but I really feel like it worked. I did get into some wild things at a very young age, but I matured so much faster because I could always tell my parents anything, and as long as I was honest, I wouldn't get in trouble.

I always think that's interesting, because I don't know anybody else who was parented that way exactly. Most of my friends, if they were at a party drinking and needed a ride home, were petrified to call their parents. Whereas for me, it could be 2:00 AM, and I'd say, "Yo Mom, I don't have a ride, I need you to come get me." And she'd say, "Thanks for being honest. Love you. Be there in 10 minutes." It was awesome.

But that's not really answering your question. At a very young age, my dad — I think this was maybe not on purpose, or maybe it was — constantly planted seeds as I grew up, saying, "If you can run your own business, it's way better than a corporate 9:00 to 5:00." He would drive 90 minutes to two hours each way, five days a week. He'd leave at 6:00 AM and get home at 8:00 PM Monday through Friday. He was a very hardworking guy. I think that stuck with me.

Even so, when I went to college, I didn't know what else I was going to do, so by default I thought, "I'll just do what my dad does." Once I read The 4-Hour Workweek, everything fell into place. My dad had said that if I could figure out a way to become successful with my own business, it's a better path than working a 9:00 to 5:00 for someone else. Now I had the confidence to do it.

I think my parents were slightly worried about me dropping out, but it wasn't a scenario where I went home and was just relaxing. I was going after it, so I think they felt comfortable. And I got results — I published my book within six months of dropping out. There were very verifiable results fairly quickly, so the concerns went away pretty quickly.

Henry Harrison: It did sound like you got into some wild things — pretty entrepreneurial as a kid, trying some wild things? Or was that just having fun?

Tyler Wagner: Oh, no. I meant more like alcohol and that type of thing. The blessing behind it — and we don't have to go deep into it — was that I got it out of the way at a young age. What's funny is that my first year of college is almost when I stopped drinking. For most people, the first year is when they start. I'd already gone through all that.

Henry Harrison: So your first entrepreneurial venture was really writing the book? Some kids have this great lawn mowing business, or they're selling lemonade —

Tyler Wagner: Actually, my first one was in my first year of college. It was called Student Painters. I don't know if you've ever heard of these — Student Painters, or College Pro.

Henry Harrison: I have.

Tyler Wagner: So you know. That was really my first step. I think my first year doing it, I was the second-highest grossing in the whole Student Painters company. It was door-to-door sales, offering to paint the exterior of people's houses. I was going door to door in August in Columbia, South Carolina. It was 100 degrees with humidity. It was insane. I had a whole team with me, and we did, I think, about 75 grand in a year of painting people's houses.

What I'd say to summarize that: once you do door-to-door sales, everything after that is dramatically easier. Me getting on a sales call is the easiest thing in the world compared to going onto people's yards. In South Carolina there was some crazy stuff — I think the law there is that if you intrude on somebody's yard, they can shoot you or something. I had people let their dogs out on me. It was crazy.

But once you go through that and you get told no 1,000 times, everything after is just so basic as far as sales go. You're not scared of making a call. If I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have been able to succeed at the speed I did, because in my mind I kept comparing: selling people online is so easy compared to walking around in 110-degree weather in Columbia, South Carolina, knocking on doors offering to paint houses. So that was my first real entrepreneurial thing.

Henry Harrison: I just heard Julia Roberts talking about Dolly Parton. They were in a movie together — a couple, maybe. It was hot, and she was complaining, other people were complaining, but Dolly Parton never complained. She said, "I wanted to be famous and I wanted to be rich, and I'm rich and famous, so I don't complain." Kind of like Tyler Wagner. After you've been selling in the heat with that team, afraid someone's going to shoot you, that's different from sitting in a nice house on a podcast.

Tyler Wagner: So you don't sound like you're complaining. Yeah, this is easy.

Henry Harrison: I'm with you. Did people always say you've never met a stranger? Because you sure seem that way — a real people person, likable.

Tyler Wagner: That's what's so funny about how far off course you can go. The idea that I was going to be an accountant is the most silly thing to me now, because my entire life I've been told I have the gift of gab and that I'm naturally outgoing. I was friends with everyone in all my grades at school. I was always the guy bringing people together — almost brokering deals, where a friend would be having a party and didn't want certain people to come, and I'd say, "Dude, come on, they're cool, let them come too."

And then my idea when I went to college was, "I'm going to do a profession where I never talk to people. I just look at numbers all day." So thank God I didn't go down that path, because it probably wouldn't have worked out well.

Henry Harrison: I imagine you could have put your mind to it, but following your passion certainly makes the most sense to me. You've got to be proud, too. I'm scrolling through all these success stories and all these authors — it has to be gratifying. I'm sure not every person met their dreams or had it work out exactly the way they wanted, because life is life, but it seems like pretty good results most of the time. Well done.

Tyler Wagner: From doing it as long as I have, there are certain parts that never get old, and that's helping people. Every week we get multiple people on the various bestseller lists, and for them it's their first time. They're so excited, they can't believe it, because it almost seems too good to be true.

We guarantee most of our services, so there's really no risk. The only one you can't guarantee is New York Times — that's kind of a deep hole to go into, but you just can't guarantee that list. Either way, a lot of times when they sign the agreement with us, even though it says straight up, "We guarantee you this outcome or you'll get a full refund," in the back of their mind a small part of them thinks, "There's no way. This is too good." And then it works out, and they're relieved that it was a good investment. That never gets old.

There's only one I can think of otherwise. We really don't have many. Out of the 5,000 or so clients, there was one woman from Australia. I felt bad, but it was kind of crazy. She'd had us do an Amazon Bestseller for her, and for that you only need a few hundred sales. I think we got her about 1,000 99-cent e-book sales. And then she said, "I thought I was going to sell millions of copies." And I was like, "Why? We never told you that." That's really the only customer where the expectation and what was actually promised were very far apart, and she was not happy. Other than that one woman, we have a very good happiness score — reviews and so on. A lot of our clients are happy.

Henry Harrison: And somewhere I saw you support some causes. Is that right? Some charities, on your company site?

Tyler Wagner: Each year I do a few. They're kind of at random. But one — just because you brought it up — we haven't set this up, but my assistant and I have been talking about it. I really want to set up a charity that donates books to the underprivileged, because so many of my clients probably have so many books sitting around, and they'd probably be willing to donate some just to get the word out more.

The logistics might be kind of difficult, but I know so many authors who would be willing to donate books, so I feel like that would be such a good idea. Reading is probably on a decline with the younger generations, so maybe it could motivate kids to start reading more.

Really, one book changed my whole life. If I'd never read The 4-Hour Workweek, I don't know if I would have taken that leap. I see kids now, and the idea of reading a book isn't even something they're considering. Most people in their early 20s or younger are on their iPad. They're not reading books. So I think that would be a good way to give back.

Henry Harrison: That's a neat connection — helping people read books, when reading a book changed your life. You can't make that up. That's a story written by someone: "Oh wait, this sounds good, if that could happen, let's put that in the book." But in your case it's a real-life story about a book.

Is there anything else you'd like to wrap up on? If someone wants to contact you or your company, what's the best way to do that?

Tyler Wagner: I think we're good, dude. I appreciate you having me on. Like you said earlier in the intro, my company is just authorsunite.com. If you have any questions, at the bottom of the website there's a little chatbot, so we can answer anything you want to ask. That's really the place to connect with me. Thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.

Henry Harrison: It's terrific. Maybe a few minutes on the future — what do you have planned? Do you just keep it going? Maybe a charity cause. You're enjoying your life and growing the company. Still growing?

Tyler Wagner: Yeah, dude. It was probably five or six years in that we hit low eight figures, and we've been around that area for the last five or six years. I'm very happy. Like the Dolly Parton story, I have nothing to complain about, but everyone wants to grow. If I can get to the nine-figure mark, that would be awesome. It seems actually within reach, but not in a year or two — maybe five years or so.

The future for me is Authors Unite. I really feel like the book marketing side still has so much potential to grow, so that's what we're focused on. Me, my girlfriend, and my dog are going to be traveling a lot. We're talking about kids now — I'm 35, so maybe that. I definitely want kids.

And then charities. Maybe I'll start that charity we were talking about. I think it's a really good idea, in the sense that finding people who would accept donated books wouldn't be difficult, and all the people who have written the books — I helped them market them, so I'm kind of the right person to connect those two things. Maybe this is the podcast that motivates me to actually get it set up. My dad, technically, would be the one to set up the 501(c)(3), so I don't really need to do much. It would be him. I just need to pay my dad.

Henry Harrison: That's good. Well, fantastic. Tyler Wagner, Authors Unite — it was great to have you on. Best of luck, and I know we'll stay in touch.

Tyler Wagner: Thank you, man. Appreciate it.