My guest today is Mike Rohde who is founder of Sketchote Army In this episode, we discuss the following: - Benefits of drawing as a kid - Origin story of Sketchnote Handbook - How Mike Rohde got the deal to do illustration for @Jason Fried Rework book - How to get a book deal - How to gorilla market your book - Trade publication books vs tech press publication books - How much money can you make from publishing a book - Publishing a book is like having an expensive business card - Sending free sample books to promote the book - Getting new business deals by sending free copies of your published book - How to get in touch with Mike Rohde For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show
Mike Rohde is a designer, teacher and illustrator with a passion for visualizing ideas and teaching people how to think visually and be more creative.
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Namaste and welcome. I am Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to the design MBA which is a real-life MBA program for designers. You will learn how to launch a side hustle and level up your design careers from the interviews rock star designers.
Jayneil Dalal: Today's amazing guest is Mike Rohde who's a designer, teacher, illustrator with a passion of visualizing ideas and teaching people how do you think visually and be more creative. As a designer, he's designed software experience and services using a human centered approach and collaborative attitude but as an author, he's written the two bestselling books that you've probably heard about or seen it somewhere on sketchnoting, The Sketchnoting Handbook and the Sketchnote Workbook, right? He also conducts online and in-person workshops where he teaches students how to learn Sketchnoting techniques and build their own creative confidence. He's also a star illustrator for very famous books Rework, Remote, The Hundred Dollar Startups, and The Little Book of Talent. As a founder, he's also created the Sketchnote Army, a showcase of sketchnoters and their work from around the world. He is also a family man, a husband, father, happily living and working in Wisconsin, cheering for his team the Green Bay Packers. And if you ever thought about “I have all these notes I want to take in a meeting and visualize my ideas” and you were “I really am not that good of an illustrator or sketcher or something,” you don't have to be. And that's where Mike is going to help you out. So, if you really want to get better at Sketchnoting, I would say check out Rohdesign.com. The links are going to be literally in the show notes and you can use the code Rohde40 for 40% off to buy his books. And we're going to link to all these awesome things in the show notes.
Without further ado, Mike, welcome to the show, man. Super excited to have you.
Mike Rohde: Good to be here, Jayneil. It's really fun to talk with you.
Jayneil: Yeah, man. It's just I’m … it's Saturday afternoon, 2:00 p.m. or 2:17 p.m. in Central Time in Dallas and I am excited to be talking with you this is something I just really enjoy having talked to you before, I don't know if you know this, but maybe I want to say eight years ago or maybe a little bit less, I’d actually bought your sketchnoting book and tried to be a sketchnoter. So, this is coming full circle now from buying an author's book to finally interviewing him. I guess, I’m living the American dream right now.
Mike: Well, I mean that's that seems like the cycle of my book too that there was sort of an initial bunch of people that got into it and liked it and then there's been continuing to be people that discover it even almost 10 years. I mean, next year will be 10 years since that book was launched and there's still people who've never heard it and discover it and fall in love with it and make use of the ideas. So, one of my … first things I’ll say is the things that you do have a longer life than you realize sometimes. So, when you're doing them, make sure that you do the best quality you can because sometimes the things that you don't want to last the longest or that you don't always do it as a throwaway have the most impact. That's happened so many times with blog posts or Instagram posts or tweets, right? The one that you're just like “Eh" and just throw it out there and suddenly it takes off and the one you that you work over and you make it perfect and you do all this great stuff, nobody cares. It’s crickets.
Jayneil: So true. And I want to certainly just go back all the way to your childhood, just like all the way U-turn.
Mike: Way back.
Jayneil: Way back, yeah. So, were you always in the creative art space growing up or did you know that you wanted to get in the design space? What was your childhood around your hobbies and things that interested you?
Mike: Yeah. I mean, as a kid, I didn't know that there was a creative anything, right? You're just a kid, you know, you ride your bike and you play with your friends. And the one thing that probably was unique about me is we grew up in a probably lower middle-class family. We didn't have a lot but if we wanted to make things, my mom and dad were very encouraging for me to make stuff. So, I always drew since I was a little kid and I think there was never anything that stopped me like no one really got on my case at school or … So, there wasn't anyone to really deter me from that path. So, drawing was just a natural thing that I just kept doing where … What I discover is a lot of kids, when they get to middle school, it's not cool or somebody's really good and so, you stop or whatever the case was maybe. I was the kid that was good enough to keep going, I don't know, but I’ve always drawn. So, as an example, I loved comic books but I couldn't afford that many, I would get a few here and there but I would make my own comic books, I made my own characters. I would fold up you know printer paper and draw on them. I made my own newspapers. As a kid, I lived … I grew up in Chicago and we lived in an apartment we were in the bottom apartment of this building, which is basically the basement. So, sometimes we would have these floods where I’d wake up and there's water in my room. So, we eventually solved that but one of the cool things was at the top of our room were these windows and I took advantage of those. So, I was a pretty good artist and I loved a few things. I loved hot rod cars and superheroes. So, what I would do is I would take these sheets of paper and I would draw … spend time drawing a car or whatever I thought my friends would buy and I put them in the windows at the top of my room because I’m in a basement. So, you're … put them in the top. And it was like a showcase. The kids would come by “Oh, that's a really cool drawing. Can I buy that one?” So, I would sell it to him for a nickel. And then what's really interesting is like … So, all summer I would do this. I would sell these pictures. New ones would go up every Tuesday or whatever, whenever I got them, and I would sell all of them. I kept the money and then I basically took all my friends to the local convenience store and we'd had a party. We would buy stuff like candy and we would enjoy it. So, it wasn't really even about the money. It was more about the excitement of creating something, somebody liking it and buying it and then celebrating together by taking all the earnings and spending it on the community. So, I guess, that's been true through my career when I look back that that sort of mindset has still been true in much of what I do.
Jayneil: So, I see this latent talent or hobby or passion that you have as a kid of just sketching, drawing those comics. And then years later, you're working in the industry as a designer and you're designing experiences, products for other companies. What made you realize that the way you take sketchnoting, your framework is something that can help a lot of other people? How did the whole genesis come about like “Hey, I should write a book on sketchnoting?”
Mike: That's a pretty interesting story. There's a couple of parts to it. Number one, it was probably around 2006 I got really into technology. So, I grew up pretty analog and then my dad, when I was a kid, he knew that the technology stuff was coming. So, he immediately bought all kinds of computers. Computers were around for us. They weren't fancy. We had like Commodore 64s and old IBM amber screen PCs. His whole goal was “Don't be afraid of the computer. You can learn how to manage it. You need to use it and find out how it works because it's going to benefit you in the future,” which it has greatly, right? So, we had computers around all the time.
Jayneil: If you still have them, you would get a fortune for them. If you still have any of those …
Mike: Yeah, I don't know. I’m not sure if my dad ever kept them. I think they probably died or something. I’ve got some old Macs and stuff which certainly could have value but yeah, so, sort of being not afraid of this technology was a good thing but on the other side of it, I got so into it that I started typing a lot of my notes, which is fine like I still do that now, but I sort of lost the drawing part of it after I got out of college. And so, I got into this phase where everything was technology focused but I was really getting frustrated with it. So, I thought “Well, I need to go back to analog” but I wasn't really sure how to get back into it. And so, I ended up with these .,, I just happened to have these big, I think, they were like 8.5 x 11 notebooks with lined paper and the first thing I thought is “Well, I should use a pencil because if I make a mistake, I can fix it. And then I should probably do notes when I type them I need to try and write everything down” but what I found was it became a huge burden to make notes this way because I felt I was always under pressure. I would get to the end and feel I must have missed something. I really didn't use the eraser to the pencil because there was so much content. And then when I went and looked at those pages and pages of pencil notes, I don't want to go back through them and find out what was valuable in there, just too much pain to do that. So, I realized pretty quickly that this wasn't the solution. So, this was around beginning of 2007. I said “It has to be a different way.” As a designer, I’m often faced with constraints, things like “Hey, you only have two colors with the logo that you can use on that project” or “It's got to be done by Friday.” There's always a constraint, as a designer, many industries but specifically in this space, I said “What if I put a constraint on myself? What if I inverted what I was doing this other way? What if I …” If you ever watch Seinfeld, George Costanza, there's one episode where George decides to do everything opposite of what George would do and suddenly his life gets better, right? He has a beautiful girlfriend and he gets a great job and a nice car and all that stuff. So, I started to do that. I did the George Costanza. I went from this big book to a little pocket moleskin that I purchased at a bookstore but I didn't know what to do with. It was too beautiful to use it. So, it just laid around for, I don't know, a couple months. So, I’m going to use that pocket notebook because it's been sitting here and it's small. And the thought was if I use a small notebook, it sort of limits me from writing too much. It's a constant reminder that I don't have much space to write in. And the second thing I did is I gave up the pencil for a gel pen. I think it was a Pilot G2. So, those are my two tools. I wanted them to be completely pocketable so I could carry everything in my pocket. I didn't have to carry bags or anything. And I went to a conference in Chicago which is about a train ride away from Milwaukee where I live. And I went to this design conference and was sitting there and I found that this note-taking method really was attractive because I was actually doing analysis in the moment. I was listening, I was making decisions, and then I was drawing it on these small pages with the pen. And what the dynamic of that was, again, the pages are small, I can't write that much and I’m using a pen, so I have to be careful about what I write. So, I’m doing a lot more analysis in my mind and then drawing that down and starting to use some of my design skills lettering, I love lettering. So, I started doing lettering. I started drawing pictures that I saw in the presentations up on the screen or ideas that were popping in my head, I was capturing these. And I was still writing some text. And at the end of the day, I think I had maybe eight or maybe nine pages or something. So, it's really compact. It was really fun to do. I enjoyed the process and then I was able to flip through the whole day's notes within a minute or two and get a lot of the nuggets that I knew I would use tomorrow when I got back to the office. So, that was really the moment where I knew it was valuable for me. When I knew it was valuable for other people was when I posted it on social media. And at the time, in 2007, the hot social media platform was Flickr, by the way. So, I put these up and actually some of the presenters were on there and they thought they were pretty cool, which is a nice bump like psychological bump but what really caught my attention were people that were not at the event, maybe they were in Europe or Asia or somewhere else, and were looking at these and saying “Hey, these are really cool. I get a pretty good sense of what you were learning. It’s valuable. And if that event came near me, I would consider going because it seems like good quality.” So, that was the part that I thought “Okay, there must be other people like me who struggle with note-taking, who feel like they either write too much and they never look at it and it feels like a burden.” And so, this was the way out for me and I thought “Okay, this has to be a way out for somebody else too. So, I need to start doing more of it and sharing it.” So, that's really the spark that made this all happen.
Jayneil: You have this awesome spark going. I wonder if after, because of the spark, did you first get to do illustration for famous books or did you end up getting the book deal first? What happened first?
Mike: Well, these were happening all kind of around the same time. So, this is 2007. My first book illustration project was around 2010 and that was Rework with the guys at Basecamp which at the time was called 37 Signals, Jason and David. So, the interesting thing is one of them sort of led to the other. So, I was doing these sketch notes. The first one I did in Chicago was a design conference. The second one that I did was an event that Jason and David created and spoke at along with a few other people in Chicago. That was number two. When they saw the sketch notes, they posted them on their blog which suddenly got all this attention from the development community. So, that was the first real community that noticed this stuff. So, they were very aware of the work that I was doing because I was doing sketchnoting in their space at their conference and they invited me in the future to come back and be the sketchnoter at their event.
Jayneil: You were there and they didn't ask you to do sketchnoting? You just did it on your own volition. You just did it and shared it.
Mike: Yeah, I just went there on my own because I was … remember, this is only the second time I tried it. I think I did … the other one I did in, was it February or March? And then this event that they put on was in May or June. So, I mean, this is the second event that I attended. So, I was still like “Can this thing work” like “What's the boundaries of it? How do I do it? What's the right way to do it?” I think I naturally thought this way. And when I look back in time, when I look back to my college years, I was actually doing this sketchnoting stuff. I didn't have a name for it but my notes in design class were all drawings and writing and visualizations and this is just the way I thought. I don't know, I lost my way somewhere in the in the middle and this sort of brought me back to my natural way of being but it was still being formed when they saw it and they really liked it. So, the couple things, I think, that they realized and that they've told me is they like my visualization because it was really clear and bold, tend to be black and white, and they knew that I understood their space, I knew their products, I knew their mindset because I was at their conferences and I could show that I did because my work was public, right? So, they already had two positive things to go on. So, when they thought “Well, who can illustrate our book?”, they thought of me. So, sort of doing that on my own and sort of having stuff out there for them to be aware of was a huge foundational part that I didn't even realize like I couldn't have planned this, right? It's just the way things worked out. So, that ended up being a good thing.
Jayneil: Oh my god! And then once you become an illustrator for a bestselling book, is it fair to say that other potential famous authors also contact you because they're like “Oh, who illustrated the book for Rework?” Is that how it works?
Mike: Right. Yeah, it does. One of the challenges … one of the byproducts of their book is they put all the credits in the back of the book. So, a lot of times, people, if they don't see it in the front, they just forget. My name is in that book but it's way in the back. So, people have to hunt for it a little bit. I would say, there's downs … that that's the downside is like it's not immediately apparent that I did the illustrations. And that's because Jason and David wanted to shake up what a book looked like. That was their thinking – “Let's get right to the meat of it” – which is a cool idea. The good thing is the people that are really dedicated and want to find out who did it will find me. So, in some ways it's kind of a filter for good quality. So, it's not necessarily a bad thing either but, yeah, having that first one … I’ve always believed that the first one leads to the next one. Once you can lean, you can leverage on that first one, now you can go to someone and say “Yeah, I did the illustrations for Rework,” right? That makes it possible to do something else. So, that's pretty important.
Jayneil: Oh my god! And then you're doing this illustration. So, how does a book deal happen like you just go to a publishing house and say that you've got this amazing idea for helping people learn sketchnote or they have people out on the ground that notice some trending like stuff your notes going trendy and then just tell you or ask you “Can you make a book about this?”
Mike: Well, that's another interesting story. So, I have been doing it about five years. So, I started this in 2007. So, five years later it's now … or, I guess, four years later, 2009, 2010, somewhere in there, I went to lunch with a friend in Portland. His name is Von Glitschka, you can find him online, he's an amazing illustrator in his own right, and we were having dinner and he's like “Mike, you have to write a book about the sketchnoting stuff.” He worked for Peachpit. He was an author for Peachpit and he had an editor who he thought would be into it. And so, he said “Dude, you got to make a book. I’m going to make a connection for you.” And there were other friends too. My friend Patrick Rohn was bothering me saying “You got to make a book about this and teach other people.” So, about five years in there, there's voices in my head saying “Make a book. Make a book” and I kept thinking like “Am I really the right person to do this?” I had the old imposter syndrome kind of thing, probably some midwestern whatever like be nice and don't think you're too big for your shoes and all that stuff. It was probably mixed in there but anyway … So, Von said “Hey, I’m going to make an introduction to my editor. So, look for an email.” So, he had just dropped off my wife and I at our hotel after we had dinner and his wife was driving and he was in the passenger seat. I guess he had his laptop with him at the time. So, the next thing, you know, we get up to our hotel room and there's already an email. He had typed the email while he was sitting in the car as we left to go into the hotel to his editor Nikki saying “Hey, my friend Mike has this really cool idea. I think it would make a good book. You should talk.” So, that then opened up the discussion with Peachpit as a publisher and we just started talking. We hit it off. Nikki had some great ideas and knew how to run a publishing house to make a book and knew what boundaries she could push to make something really different. She had ideas that I wasn't even aware of. And she was my … I think the big advantage is she was my lobbyist inside the company for this book idea. So, she really pushed hard for it. She stood up for me. She told me what to do and what not to do. So, having somebody in the publishing industry who's got some guidance for you can be valuable, I think.
Jayneil: Wow!
Mike: So, that's something to think about,
Jayneil: And when people see that you published a book, if you don’t mind me asking, how many books have been sold right now on Sketchnote that you did, your book?
Mike: That's a good question. I asked that about every year. I haven't done that yet this year. I know we've surpassed 50,000 units altogether. So, that includes printed books. That includes digital books. That includes all the translations too. So, it's been translated, I think, in eight languages now. It's a tough book to translate because it's so visual. So, you have to have a commitment from a publisher to almost hire an illustrator or a designer to kind of redo it in their language. So, that's why it's not as easy to translate but I think in the languages that it's in, it's really sparked. In one case, in Germany, it's a huge … there's a huge community of sketchnoting in Germany specifically but in other countries too. So, yeah. So, it's about there. It's probably beyond that now and … it was all guerrilla marketing like we had no budgets. They didn't give me any money to market it. It was all me trying to figure out interesting ways to make it happen. So, I learned a lot by marketing the books that has helped me a lot in marketing in general, I think.
Jayneil: Well, I mean, I would assume that if you got a deal from Peachpit, isn't it assumed that they have all the shelf space in Barnes & Noble and airport kiosks and stuff and they just put your book there? Is that how it works and it just like goes viral that?
Mike: That's what you would think but I think depending on your publisher. So, a lot of people don't know, there's sort of two general branches of publishing. There's tech publication which is where I ended up. So, that's like the books on Photoshop or your favorite code editor or … O'Reilly sort of lives in that space. And then there's trade publication. That's the stuff when you're at an airport, if you ever go to an airport, and you see it in a bookstore. That's trade publication. So, that's like … Rework was a book that or Tim Ferriss' books or any of those books that you would see on a bookshelf. That's trade. And they have … they typically will offer you more of a budget and the timeframes are much longer but the downside of a trade publication, depending on what you're doing, is they're super formulaic. You have to fit into the structure that they want to produce a book in. And if you veer out from that in any way, they're going to squeeze you into their format typically unless you've got some heavy leverage, right? So, if I’d gone to let's say Random House, just to pick a name thinking about … at least at this time, I think now … I think now trade publications have changed. I think books like Rework and Remote and a bunch of other books, a couple of them I’ve illustrated, but many others, have sort of broken this down a little bit to where they're accepting of more visuals. So, I think today it's maybe a little different story that they're more flexible but at the time, if I went to the trade pubs and I had this idea for this book, they'd say “Oh yeah, you can't have orange. You can't do illustrations. You can't do handwritten text front,” like all the things that make that book unique, they would have squeezed it out like a lemon, right? So, by going to the tech press and by going to Nikki who knew the tech press and knew what boundaries she could push, we were able to craft something. The other thing I’ll say is in trade pub, you probably lose a little bit of control like you're sort of dependent on them. You might get a better advance which is basically money to work on the book and not do something else. It's like opportunity costs really, basically covering opportunity cost, right? So, you would get probably a bigger frontend budget, the timelines are longer. On my side, on the trade publication side, the timeline was really short. We did the Sketchnote Handbook in nine months from beginning to end. We also did a video which many people don't know. I had a friend who I worked with, Brian, who shot video. So, there's a video component to the book and we did all that in nine months too. So, we wrote the whole thing. The other thing I’ll say, the big advantage that I saw at least in my situation with the tech press, I had complete control. So, because Nikki was on my side, she knew what we wanted to do and lobbied for me. I wrote the text, I illustrated most of the pieces …
Jayneil: Sorry, I think I got confused a little bit. So, I just wanted to ask you if I was following along correctly. The two types of book publishings that happen is when you said it's like the tech press and the one is the trade publication, right?
Mike: Trade publication, yeah
Jayneil: And then, the tech press is more of like the Rework, the Tim Ferriss’ books, right? The mainstream ones or something like that.
Mike: It's just the opposite. Yeah, trade publication is stuff that you see in Barnes & Noble. So, think of trade as like consumer maybe, right?
Jayneil: Consumer, okay.
Mike: And tech press is like super niche.
Jayneil: Niche, okay.
Mike: So, it's like consumer and niche technical press, so like O'Reilly. Most people are not going to buy a book on C++, right? It's going to be a specific niche of people that want that or design books are very niche too, right? So, by going to the tech press which had more latitude because typically a tech press book at Peachpit, they would do four colored printing, they could do screens because they're doing like Photoshop and Illustrator, right? They have to show color. So, we took the space to make that color and we said “We're going to spend it differently. We're going to use a solid spot color, orange with black.” We're going to round the corners on the book so it feels kind of a moleskin.” We did a special cover treatment that made it matte. So, it was kind of when you (inaudible) print. The paper was thicker. It was mostly illustrated. For the text, I created a typeface out of my handwriting and we used that. So, I mean, it was there were so many weird things about this book that we pushed the boundaries. And I had total control. So, because I was a print designer in my history, not only did I write the book and illustrate it, I also secured all the samples. So, I reached out to every person in that book and got their rights to use their samples. Then when it came to production after we did editing, I did all the production work because I was a production designer. So, from the minute we started writing the book to handing it off to the presses, I did all that work in the middle just because of my unique situation. Now, not everybody has that opportunity but the flexibility and the power to do what we wanted really, so the book that you see is because of all those elements being available, right? So, when you're weighing decisions, yeah, I mean, trade press or the public press could have given me a lot more money but the technology press gave me a lot more latitude, flexibility, control. That was more important to me because now, looking back, I have a lot more control over the whole brand and sort of owning it and it also trained me to be a better marketer because I had to think about “Who is my audience and how do I reach them?”, right? I didn't just hand it off to some department and then I had no control. It sort of forced me to really learn how this worked.
Jayneil: And speaking of money, you said that … because I might have an assumption like “Oh, you know what? Mike published the book. I saw it somewhere. He made a million dollars.” So, what would your take on that be like when people see that you published a book, is it a fair assumption like “Oh my god, he's made it because he's made 50,000 sales in the books, he's probably getting killer royalty and stuff.”
Mike: I do get royalty still. I’m fortunate that this book has continued to sell. So, that's something we could not have predicted that it would sell so well and continue to sell 10 years later but my advance was not that big. I think I got 5000 dollars to do the design work. So, they would have hired someone inside to do the layout of the book. I did all that. I did all the illustration, all that stuff and probably was undervalued. I think my advance was probably close to that, probably like five Grand. So, let's say I got about 10 grand to do all the writing, to do all the illustration, to find all the samples, to do all the production and hand it to the printer. And I still had a day job at the same time, right? So, I’m doing this all on nights and weekends and whenever I can squeeze it in, right? And in nine months. So, you think about all those things mixing together. So, when you think of it that way, 10 Grand is not much money for all the work that was done. It was hours and hours and hours of work. So, if I really thought about it like … know I was maybe making three bucks an hour, I don't know, something like that, right? But again … So, my editor was really good at this. And I also hired a literary agent through another friend, another author and he liked the idea too and he advised me, he told me all the stuff about the difference between trade press and tech press and why you should consider one over the other and the advantages. So, I really believed in having an agent because they were on my side no matter what even though they're taking cut of the work but I can ask them questions that would be weird or I’m not sure like … I could ask something of a publisher and they have a bias maybe not tell me everything, I don't think they would but having someone to ask questions was worth that value and it's been a good relationship but I think Nikki inside the publishing house was really clear on what to expect like “Hey, look, you're not going to be a millionaire writing a book.”
Jayneil: Oh, she was upfront about it.
Mike: Yeah, she was pretty upfront about it.
Jayneil: Oh okay. So, delusion that you might have like anybody might have is gone like you're not going to make a million, a couple million dollars from this. Okay.
Mike: And then she said “Hey, look, a lot of the … so, here's our goal. We want to write this book, we're going to make it evergreen. So, in other words it could last for 10 years and still be relevant like we're not going to make it technology dependent,” right? So, she had it in mind. She'd seen all this stuff before and she wanted to do something really different, something that could continue to sell, which has worked out. So, she sort of laid out that and said “Our goal is to basically earn out the advance. So, let's say they give you 5000 dollars. You need to earn back like in sales, you have to earn that money back for them to consider it broke even, right? And then you get a percentage.” So, once you break even, then they start giving you royalties which is a percentage of the sale that they make. Having the agent, he was able to negotiate for a higher percentage which I think … I think we scaled it up like we … it was sort of based on like “If it's between zero and this number, it's this percentage and from that percentage to this percentage.” So, it kind of upscaled. So, basically it said “If we do a good job and we sell lots of books and they last a long time, then our royalty rate’s going to go up because we proved that we did a good job and we should get more of a percentage, right?” So, he structured it that way. So, the goal was to do that because so many books, I don't know what the percentage is, maybe it's 8 out of 10 or maybe it's worse than that, maybe it's 5 out of 20 will earn their advance. They're very few. I know several people who wrote books and never earned their advance back. So, to earn the advance is huge. We did it within nine months. So, like …
Jayneil: And what's the incentive for a writer to earn the advance? Let's say you write a book but you never earned the publishing house their advance. Does that mean that they're not going to work with you again on another book because you never broke even with them?
Mike: Maybe. Yeah, maybe. They might think … I mean, it could be anything. It could be the market's not ready for it. It could be we didn't approach the topic the right way. It could be buyers are fickle and they don't know what they want or we launched at a time when something else was more popular and we just missed it, right? So, there could be all kinds of reasons why. If you don't earn your advance out and the publisher doesn't feel like the book is worth holding on to, sometimes they'll revert the rights to you. So, I had a friend who that happened to. They basically gave her all the rights to the book, the manuscript because it's copyrighted in her name. So, if she wanted to republish it on Kickstarter five years later, she could, right? So, that can happen.
Jayneil: In your case, you wrote the book, the Sketchnote brand that you've created since the first book was published like 10 years in the making, you created the Sketchnote Army’s podcast now, there's so many peripheral things you created around the main thing. Is that brand yours or did you negotiate from the get-go that “Hey, whatever I create with my own podcast and Sketchnoting, if I want to sell a course on it, I want to do something around and build my own brand,” you own the rights?
Mike: Right, yeah. If you look inside the book, it's copyrighted to me. So, they sort of have a first right to refusal if I’m going to write a book. So, if I want to do another book, I need to go to them. And I have two books out. There's a whole story about a third book that we considered but things changed at the publishing house and they weren't interested because my team was missing, I wasn't interested either. So, it was a an agreed this walk-away from this third book but there could have been a third book, right? And I was more than happy to work with them because they gave me the flexibility, right? So, you're right. You've noticed correctly that the books were a foundational element for all kinds of stuff. So, you were saying like what's the value of a book? Well, part of it is you need to love that the book exists. My friend Austin Cleon says you should write a book that you think should exist, something that you want to exist and that's when you produce really good books. So, you have to have a passion on your own to produce it and a reason why you want this message in the world. So, that's going to be a lot more motivational than even money, I think, but then the idea is that once you build it, now you've got sort of a really expensive business card that gets you in the door to speak at events. I know the book gave me opportunities because …
Jayneil: What do you mean by that?
Mike: So, because I wrote this book and like say when we first launched it, user experience designers and other designers really liked it. So, I started getting calls from companies that said “Hey, can you come in and talk to our group and tell us about sketchnoting and apply it to our business?” So, I might come in and teach the basics and then we would take a challenge they had inside like one company said “Hey, we've got … we have all these … we have this PowerPoint that we produce but we don't … we're kind of bored by it. Can you help us turn it into something else?” So, we worked together and they went through their PowerPoint and we sketched icons for all of it and we thought of different strategies for how they could use these images differently. And that led to turning those sketches into artwork as a designer. So, that's an example of a design thing in the education space which happened about five years … I guess, five years later. Suddenly, educators discovered the sketchnoting concept and they found like “Hey, my kids pay attention. They feel a lot more interested in the content that we're producing and they're able to use the drawing and doodling that they want to do but we always have to stop them. Now we can actually use it in classes. So, would you come out and talk to our school district? Would you come out and talk to this group of teachers?” Usually, there's a passionate teacher that will bother either their principal or their district into hiring me and then they would fly me out, I would come and do a keynote speech or do a workshop with them to teach them the basics so they could integrate it and then start using it in their classrooms.
Jayneil: And this happened because of your book.
Mike: Yeah, exactly, because I’m seen as, I guess, a thought leader … yeah, a thought leader and expert in this space having written this kind of … I guess, it's considered a classic book now. So … I mean, there's many others that have come after but it's always seen as this classic. So, that's kind of …
Jayneil: You're the …
Mike: That's a nice byproduct. Yeah, exactly. I’m the OG of sketchnoting. When you're doing this like … I didn't plan any of this. I didn't … we were just hoping that people would … will people buy it? I don't know. We're going to do it because we love it and we think we're going to do a really good job so when you buy this book and you hold it in your hands, you're going to love it. And that's all we could really control. Once we released it in the world, it really was up to the world to decide is this going to be something big or it could have fizzled and never been heard of but it turned out it to be …
Jayneil: I mean, there's so many books. I’m in a library right now. I’m literally in the library and then there's so many books here that you can't see but it's just like … I don't even know if rest of the world has heard about it. It's there on the shelf and …
Mike: Right.
Jayneil: What I took away from you is this interesting concept of looking at books is not just a way to make a massive payday but it's more of like … business cards are gone. I don't even remember the last time I gave someone a business card but I like this idea that book can be a really expensive business card where if you meet someone, you can say “Hey, by the way, I wrote a book and I’m going to give you a copy of it. We'd love to hear your thoughts” kind of stuff.
Mike: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So, I’ll tell you some of the guerilla tactics we did around the book. I knew I had no budget. Peachpit was going to do minimal stuff with it. It's just because we're just one of 30 books they're releasing at that time, right? So, we knew that we had to do more than that. So, a couple things that we did that were really unique. As I was writing the first book, I wrote a blog post about every couple weeks to give updates. So, I said “Hey,” first I made this announcement “I’m writing this book on sketchnoting. You can follow my blog and see what I’m going through.” So, I just got really diligent about taking pictures of what I was doing. I was really fortunate that it was a visual topic that pictures would be interesting to look at right. If you're just writing text, maybe it's not so interesting but … I would go to the cafe and shoot pictures of the sketches I was doing or if I would do thumbnail layouts of the pages, I would take pictures of those and write “Hey, this week we flew to San Francisco and I pitched the whole board on this concept” and had like stories. I wrote a story every couple weeks about the process of writing the book. And so, people started following along. So, it's the whole idea of this pre-release. If you ever see books like, yeah, if you buy a pre-release, you get all these … you can get special stuff. We didn't do any of that. Ours was just sharing the information. So, if you're an insider, you could be the first one to buy the book. And you knew the whole story, right? So, it became part of the buyer's story in that way. So, that was something interesting we did. Another interesting tactic that we did was I had an awareness of people that I’d sort of paid attention to over time that I really liked the way they thought, their influence, their perspective on design or just like I had interacted with them and liked them. And so, we had a whole list, an Excel spreadsheet of everybody that I wanted copies of the book to be sent to. And my publisher has been really great about sending books all over the world. If I can give him an address and information, that book will show up in a couple weeks anywhere in the world that I wanted to go to.
Jayneil: And how did you get the address?
Mike: A lot of times, people will be on social media and say “Oh, I wish … you know, I saw this at the library. I wish I had this book.” Sometimes I’ll just dm them and say “Hey, send me your address and your email address and I’ll put a submission.” And then two weeks later, the book will show up.
Jayneil: Oh my god! That is amazing.
Mike: I just reached out to them. I had a template email that I would customize for each person and I sent out 100 of them. I got probably 80 replies back and we entered their information. And when the book released, they all had copies which is now pretty standard stuff these days. And I continue to do that. If I see people or run into people, I say “Hey, let me send you a copy of my books” and I’ll get their information and send it to them because I think if people are passionate enough to kind of reach out to me at a conference or talk to me, this is my way of saying thank you. And, again, I don't know where that book is going to go like that person could lead to a huge job for all I know, could be a good speaking gig somewhere, I don't know, maybe it leads to nothing, but ultimately, they're going to have an impact somewhere and I have to seed it somehow, right? So, it's sort of like you have to keep … it's like a farmer. You keep putting seeds out. You don't know which ones are going to turn into plants but if you throw enough out, you're going to have a field full of crops that you can harvest later on. So, that's the way I’ve always thought about all this stuff is like invest, invest, invest, invest, so give away, give free talks, present, answer questions, be on … podcasting was another guerilla tactic. At the time, podcasts were happening. So, I appeared on podcasts all the time and it was a way to get the message out. So, all these little things sort of built up into providing an awareness. And then once the book got out, then fans who loved it started presenting it. They would take pictures of the book. They would take pictures of their sketch notes. They would name check me all this stuff like I didn't have to do anything. They would just do it on their own. And part of it was building a community around this. Once this started rolling, then I started noticing people popping up over and over again. So, I started becoming friends with them. Then I started a podcast, it’s Sketchnote Army, started to interview them like “Why did you do this sketchnoting thing? How did you get in this visual space? How are you solving problems?” So, it starts building this community and we start building all this stuff so when somebody enters into it feels, this “Wow! There's all these people and they're all different kinds of people and there's all these resources. So, if you come into it, you wouldn't have to spend a dollar. And I really like the idea. The last thing I’ll say is when I thought about the books, there was always sort of a scale of cost. So, there's a ton of free stuff and then there was samples, those were free. And then at some point, you would buy the books so that would maybe be your cheapest entry but then if you wanted to do a workshop, then you could hire me to do that or if I did a workshop, you could buy it for somewhere … and I sort of had a whole sort of a curve of pricing. So, there's all different entry points based on where you were at and where your mind was at so that you could enter in and you could always get free stuff. And then that was sponsored by promotions in the podcast. So, I’ll promote my own books and the last few seasons I’ve gotten sponsors who are in the space like marker makers or software makers or screen covers for your iPad are three examples of sponsors who, once I proved after five seasons that I’m doing this, whether you can you can add on here, you cannot, I’m still going to do it, right? So, I think once they saw that commitment, it made it a lot easier for them to jump on and sponsor. So, that's a just a couple of samples. There's probably more stuff that I’m not thinking of but there's … it's just thinking about like starting with the passion for doing it and then finding creative ways to deliver and then just opportunities open. You just need to be organically ready to kind of flex and adapt and move in the direction where things are moving.
Jayneil: And this is the question I was just like dying to ask is as I was listening to it is I love this idea that you have guerilla marketing and giving your book free to influencers or people you think can potentially lead to a future collaboration with you, whatever that could be, and it's much better than “Oh, let's keep in touch,” the usual networking meetups or something like “Let me know if I can help you.” You're already saying “Here's a free copy of my book.” So, you're already providing value, you're helping them become better notetakers, right? You're giving them something for free. So, if you, let's say … and you're a master networker. Let's say in a year you meet like thousand people and you give a list of those thousand people to Peachpit, was there like a cut off on “Okay, we can only give like this many free samples a year but not more than that”?
Mike: Well, it's interesting. While Nikki was involved, they were … so, they knew that they had limited budget but the one thing they had facilities for was sending samples because they were an educational publisher. So, their review copies is like built into the fabric of the company. That's something they do. So, there's a funny story. Nikki left. There was a new regime that came in and someone who's not my current editor representative there reached out and said “Hey, you know, your Amazon reviews are really good and we've, you know, sold a lot of books. We're going to stop sending these books out.” And I wrote back and said “No, you don't understand. The giving the books away is the heart of the whole thing. We have to keep this and here's why” and I laid out all the reasons and how we did it and what the impact was and I said “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll limit it to one per month if that's what you need but I want to have at least one per month that I can give away to somebody. And I’ll just email you.” We built a spreadsheet that they could follow which … still all the ones are there, I haven't counted. I should count and see how many people are in that list but they agreed “Okay. Well, one a month.” And then after they started seeing like how effective it was, they don't ask questions anymore. I just put names in there and send them this. Sometimes they want a digital copy. Sometimes they … I think the physical copy is always my first priority because it such a tactile book to feel it and to smell it and to touch it is so important but I also understand some people just are not in a position to want that. Some people like digital. And so, sometimes, I would even send one of each, right? So … yeah, that did happen where they were questioning the value and I pretty quickly clarified how valuable it was and why. And now they're totally on board. So, when I tell them that I’ve got samples, they go out immediately. They're looking for opportunities for me to hook up with other people. I mean, I’ve been doing this for 10 years. I’m still selling their books. I think it's kind of hard to argue against what I want to do, right?
Jayneil: And I’m going to kind of put you in the spot here and ask you does any story come to mind where you gave the book for free to someone and it led to a future collaboration. Maybe it was like they invited you to give a talk, maybe they invited you for a paid workshop, maybe they asked you to sketch something for them. So, I just am trying to look for any kind of theme where you have this thesis where you want to give value upfront for free and that led to in some way future collaboration or monetization. Does any story come to mind when you think of that?
Mike: There's a few that come to mind. I know that the person who discovered my books … so, here's an example. I think it was in New York City. There was a really passionate teacher who discovered my books. And I think I sent samples to him and he started to really promote it. He bothered his principal. They were down in Jamaica, New York. And his principal was like “Totally. This is cool. Let's do it.” So, he reached out to me and said “Hey, we want to have you come.” And we talked a little bit about it. And at the time, this is two years ago, he said “You know what? There's all this paperwork that I’m not sure how to get through but there's an opportunity to come and speak and do the keynote speech for our teachers for their last meeting before they go off in the summertime. You would have to come down to Brooklyn and speak to us. Would you be willing?” I said “Yeah.” So, I went through all the paperwork with another person. I flew in, went to New York, I hung out and I did a keynote and then I did some workshops and they really loved it. And so, then I was in the system and that same guy from Jamaica said “Okay, the next year's is like, all right, now we got you. You're in the system. Now it's easy for me to request you.” And so, he brought me out. It was the last place I went before the pandemic in January was to Jamaica, New York, and I taught this team of teachers for a whole day. So, it's one book led to a keynote and workshops and stuff like … you just don't know. You hope that it works but there's no guarantees.
Jayneil: It's amazing. And I’m trying to figure out this missing link where how did you find out about this person that led to all this consulting for you? How did you figure out “This person needs a sample.” Yeah, you send in the sample but how did he even reach out to you or how did you figure out like “This is a person I should send a sample to” in the education space?
Mike: That's a really good question. I think because I knew that I had an uphill battle, so not only do I have to convince people they have to draw, which I try to do in the book, but that it's a commitment. You're going to have to practice and do some work and make this thing work for you. I knew that. So, I had to start with a more generous starting position. So, what I do, and I don't do it as much now but I do keep an eye on Twitter … so, people are mentioning me on twitter and I have a service called Mention which will send me emails and say “Hey, someone mentioned your book” or they'll mention you on Twitter. So, I’ll go on Twitter and I’ll sort of look and sort of examine what are they talking about. A lot of times it'll be “Hey, I just discovered this book my friend had. Oh, I wish I could take it” or “he wouldn't let me borrow it” or something. So, then I’ll follow that person and then I’ll direct message them and say “I can send you a copy of the book. Send me your address,” right? So, I’m sort of actively looking for people that are ready for it or that would be open to it like they're already reaching out or making a comment or I’m having a discussion. So, if there's … when in doubt, I will offer to send books to people because it's so easy for me. All I have to do is get their information. I send it to a person at Peachpit and they deliver books in two weeks anywhere … pretty much any in the world … anywhere in the world, right? So, I haven't had a problem having too many requests yet. That would be an awesome problem to have. I think my publisher would love like “Okay, 10 years later you got 10 people that are requesting the book? I think we could find a way to make this happen especially with the track red record of if we sent out 10 books, one of those is probably going to turn into a bunch of sales, right?” So, yeah, I sort of actively look for people. So, I have sort of a … my mindset is to be forward and to be generous by nature and to look for people that … and there's something in me that says “Oh, that person looks if I sent them a copy, they would dig it, right? So, let's offer it.” And pretty much … I don't think anyone's ever turned that down before unless they've got the book already but … Something interesting that I’ve sometimes done on occasion depending on the person, and I learned this from my friend Ryder Carroll who wrote the Bullet Journal Method and sort of runs bullet journaling, is when he did his promotion of his first book, he sent two copies and he sent two Leuchtturm notebooks. The idea was you keep one book and one notebook for yourself and then you give the other one to someone you think would like it, right? So, now it's coming from a trusted friend. So, it already comes with some credibility, right? – “My friend gave this to me. It's this cool book and this notebook to actually do the work.” So, something I’ve been doing here and there is rather than just sending one book, I’ll send two and I’ll say “I sent you two books. Keep one and give one to someone who you think is the right person to have that book.” And maybe it sits around on their desk for six months until the right person comes but eventually it will pay off. And, again, it's sort of a long game looking forward to … we're building into this network and it may not pay off for maybe two years but I think the karma that you send forward comes back in a positive way. That's my belief. That's my observation.
Jayneil: I absolutely am speechless because I love the forward thinking you have there, which is like not just one book but two books. So, these people can find other people who are interested in the topic and keep growing the movement, so, it's just like blown my mind away.
So, Mike, how do people get in touch with you? How can they contact you if they have any question or how can people just keep up with what you're doing these days?
Mike: Yeah, there's a couple places that work well. One is my website Rohdesign.com. So, there you can check out the books, you can see products I offer, you can see what sketchnotes are, sign up to my newsletter, it's about a monthly newsletter and that kind of stuff. Another place to go is SketchnoteArmy.com. So, there you can look through archives of different sketchnotes. If you have a specific kind like how do math and sketchnotes work together, you can look for that. There's a podcast that I’ve been doing. My 10th season, so there's 100 episodes. You can listen to visual thinkers there. And then social media, the places I’m most active are Instagram and Twitter are the two spots where I probably hang out the most and my handle there is Rohdesign and just say hello and reach out. And you can see my stuff there on Instagram. It's sort of a mix of some sketchnote stuff, some personal stuff, family stuff, work stuff, like the whole blend of things. So, it's just me but I’m available to talk there if you want to reach out.
Jayneil: Awesome. Just want to say I had a blast talking with you, Mike. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Mike: Oh, it's been so good. I’ve been looking forward to being on the show for a while and love listening to the episodes. So, it's a true honor to be on and be represented with all the cool people you've had on the show before me.
Jayneil: Likewise. Thank you once again.
Mike: Thanks. Have a great day.
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