Fake It Till You Make It? Not With These 13 Pillars Of Perceived Leadership!

Perceived leadership plays a crucial role in how experts and thought leaders gain influence in their industries. Today, Juliet Clark sits down with none other than Vince Warnock. Vince is a marketing expert, best-selling author, and champion of helping people amplify their voices. They dive into the 13 pillars of perceived leadership, the key elements that set thought leaders apart and position them as authorities in their industries. From publishing a book to leveraging media and building influence, these insights will change the way you think about leadership and visibility. Stay tuned as we uncover the secrets to standing out, being seen as an expert, and creating a lasting impact.

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Fake It Till You Make It? Not With These 13 Pillars Of Perceived Leadership!

Introduction

We have an Aussie guest that I think you folks are going to love talking about thought leadership. Before we get started, I want to remind you we have one of our free trainings and it’s Tracy Hazard. She’s going to be talking about Podcast Guesting for Authors: Turning Your Listeners into Readers. That’s what we do on all of our show tours that we put people on. I’m pretty excited.

If you’re tired a podcast book tour that result in no books sales, interested in connecting with readers who are primed and ready to discover your books? Ditch the guests and pray approach and zero in on the insider secrets for show guests success. She’s going to be bringing us some hard distilled wisdom over her years of guesting. I know from my years of guesting, you folks are probably going to find out some tidbits as well.

You can go register for that. It’s going to be on Friday at 9:00 AM, MST, so Mountain Standard Time. You can register for it at www.BAMagTraining.com. It’s free. You folks know if you’ve shown up for these before that you can always ask questions, which I love because you folks get a lot of good information when you ask specific questions.

Our is guest is Vince Warnock. He is an eleven times best-selling author, publisher, and award-winning Marketing and Visibility Coach. He is known for his expertise in neuro-marketing, publishing and AI, and has been presented with numerous awards, including being included in the Fearless50, a program designed by Adobe to recognize the world’s top 50 marketers.

Vince is also the host of a top show, Chasing the Insights and he is the Founder of ATG Publishing and Business Mind Magazine. As you can imagine he and I had plenty to talk about because I’ve got a publishing company, I use AI and I got a magazine. We could have talked for hours. Stay tuned for Vince Warnock.

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Vince, welcome.

It’s so good to be here.

I have to give him kudos being in Australia. I told you what I do every day Monday through Friday. I’m that early. If it’s Saturday morning, I’m not getting up for you. Thank you.

I didn’t not want to miss this. It’s been a crazy week, so this was perfect.

Entrepreneur Journey

Tell us a little bit about what do you do, and how you got here?

My background is pretty a clickbait. I’m trying computer engineering and software engineering, then discovered how boring it was and discovered the people with the things look cute about. I went on a weird journey going in and out of corporate and having my startups. In the early days, it would be like create a startup, fail and go back to corporate, then finally got to create a startup, succeed, sell the startup, and go back to corporate.

I had just come off the back of selling our largest startup. It was a figure eight after three and a half years of extreme stress and anxiety, but it was a worthy journey. I came off the back of that and thought I need a holiday, so I’m going to get a corporate job. I end up becoming the chief marketing officer at a Fortune100 company at an insurance company. I was there for five years and honestly, on paper, it was the dream job. I would look at this, and the pay was ridiculous. You’re in a Fortune100 company. We had three bonuses a year and they were ridiculous. I got to travel the world and speaking on stages everywhere. I published my first book while I was there and got recognized by a huge amount in the industry.

Career Reflections

I finally got recognized by Adobe as one of the top 25/top 50 in the world. I was miserable. I know this because I literally was in my office writing down all of those things that made my job so special because I didn’t want the job. That made me feel so guilty and so ashamed. because I thought every marketer this is the dream job. You’re in a Fortunate 100 company, all those accolades and everyone would kill for that.

I had that and I was ungrateful because I didn’t want it. What it boiled down to, I had to work it out. I was like, “Why am I so miserable here?” I came home and I was talking to the wife. She recognized and said, “You’re not happy, are you?” I said, “No.” We suddenly realized it was because I wasn’t doing what I was meant to do, which is help people. At that level, when you’re a C-suite executive at that size company, there is no people. There is just numbers and data. Every person are related to a number and a dollar.

I found myself getting angry going into meetings. We went into examine, there were twelve of us on the senior leadership. We’re sitting there and they’re waiting for the CEO and CFO to come into the meeting. The rest of them are all talking about their bonuses. They’re talking about, “What are you going to do with yours?” One is going to buy a McLaren because the price is coming down half million or something. One of them talked about a new holiday home in the Hamptons. I’m like, “This is not me.”

They asked me one, “What are you going to do with your bonus, Vince?” I don’t where it came from. I just got bubbled up out inside of me. I turn around and said, “I don’t know. I want to take my wife on a cruise but only if I have that stupid bonus.” I realized I don’t fit in at all and these people are not my people. It was such a toxic culture and everything. I gave it all in. I said to the CEO, “I’ve done my time here. I need to move on.” She was like, “      No. You can’t move on. Do you know how much we pay you?” I said, “It’s not about the money.”

She thought I was having a breakdown. She asked if I need a psychologist. “Do you want me to give you psychologist or to get someone in to talk to you?” I’m like, “No, I’m very clear on my decision.” I left there to do what I do now, which is to help people. The best way I know to do that is by giving people a voice. This was the epiphany I had. I’ve got seven different businesses and I couldn’t figure out the thread between the seven of them. I’m like, “Why am I so passionate about three key areas, which is marketing, AI, and publishing? I don’t understand.”

Finally, I realized all of these three things tie back to giving people a voice and that tied back to my childhood, which was growing up in an abusive home and in a place where you did not have a voice. In fact, if you used your voice and stood out, you were a target. For the first probably eleven years of my life, I hide from the world. When I finally found someone who believed in me, which was a teacher. I was eleven and she believed in me and showed me that I didn’t have to be defined by the way I was brought up or my environment. That I could write my own future.

That was the most freeing, but it was the most incredible feeling. It was like a bubbly feeling on the inside. “I don’t know what’s going on here. This is hope. I’ve heard of this thing.” It’s crazy, but it did instill in me the desire for other people to feel that as well. That’s what we do. I said we have publishing company, so we help a lot of entrepreneurs particularly neurodivergent entrepreneurs, anyone with dyslexia or ADHD.

We help them to write and publish their books and keep their voice out there. We have a magazine called Business Mind. We are quietly launching a new magazine in 2025 as well. We have our own show, Chasing the Insights. All of those are about telling people’s story and give them voice. I do marketing coaching work, which is amplifying their voice and helping them to put it out there. We have a couple of AI businesses which are all around automation and using AI to accelerate your voice and get it out there as fast as possible.

That’s great. There’s something you said, and we’re going to go off topic a little bit. I didn’t grow up in an abusive family, but I did a very blue-collar family. It’s funny because I made a lot more money than I do now when I was in real estate. The money wasn’t making me happy, because I didn’t have values. I think it’s the values. When you come from something like that, you’re straddled in both worlds and I feel out of place everywhere.

ADHD Insights

You feel like you’re not yourself, and that was the big thing for me as well. Part of this is, I’ve struggled with ADHD as a child and part of that means I never felt like a fit in anywhere anyway because you were always told, “Why can’t you be like everyone else? Why can’t you behave like everyone else? Why can’t you sit still? Why can’t you follow instructions? Why can’t you read or write like everybody else?” By the way, growing up in the ‘70s, not a great time to be a kid with ADHD. They hadn’t invented it back then. One of my teachers decided that they knew what was wrong, why struggle to read and that was because I was retarded. There was her voice.

They told you that?

Yes, to my face. To be fair, she was annoyed with me because I keep asking questions all the time. I was a super curious and super bright as a child. When it came writing and reading, I was struggling. It’s because my brain was too fast. Her conclusion was, “No, it’s just you’re retarded.”

Thank, God, nobody ever told me I was retarded.

Honestly, there were two teachers who were pivotal in my life. There was her from a negative perspective, there was the teacher when I was eleven. I got to tell the teacher how much he impacted my life. In fact, before he passed away, bunch of us got to tell them the impact he had on our life because he was an incredibly inspiring individual.

I never got to tell the teacher that told me I was retarded. I was thinking about myself, “It would have been so good to go. I’m an eleven times bestselling author. I run a publishing company and have a magazine. Look at this. Look at what I’ve done.” Someone pointed out to me, “If I ever done that she would have turned around said, ‘I inspired you.’”

That’s a very good point. I too have ADHD. I think we’re lucky because it was before they would have given us medication. Now, all these kids are on medication, but my dad had it pretty bad as well. He taught me skills. I didn’t realize it at the time that they were things that controlled that lack of focus. Now I think I’m hyper-focused, so I’m swinging between the streets.

That’s what my wife discovered. There’s a downside as well. She researches ADHD as well. She was a therapist. One of the things she discovered is hyper-focused. The downside hyper focus is sitting there, working away forgetting to eat, drink, and go the bathroom. You get to the end of the day and be like, “Why am I so sore and nauseous?” She’s like a ninja. I’ll find myself sitting if I go on a hyper focus mode. All of a sudden, there’s a couple of coffee in front of me or a glass of water or something. I’m like, “How the hell did that get there?” She sneaks in and puts it on the desk in front of me. Don’t forget to drink or eat or anything like that.

That’s so funny. Mine makes me less people-y I would say. I’m directing to the point that I want to get back to what I was doing. Sometimes my people skills lack when I’m hyper focused, which probably isn’t good either.

We don’t talk about the hyper focus rage enough. Honestly, there are moment where you’re in hyper focus and it’s not anyone’s fault because they don’t know this. They don’t know how your brain workds. They walk in and they just say something to you like, “How’s it going?” You feel the rage boil up on the inside? You’re like, “You lost my focus. Thank you.”

Thought Leadership

I can see that. You have a great talk on the Thirteen Pillars of Perceived Thought Leadership. I would love to hear more about that. Especially the difference between thought or perceived and actual. What does that look like?

Quite a lot. Now this is funny, this came from when we started this project when I had a previous startup. We were entering into new markets. We were a hard growth tech startup. The two of us that started on the macular and we had a developer. Neither of us had a background in the financial services industry, which is a high trust industry. You can’t just walk in and say, “I’ve got this technology that’s going to deal with all your financial data. Let’s hook it up to your system.” They go, “That’s a good price. Sure. Let’s do it.” It doesn’t work that way because they need to know.

We had to build that thought leadership. We had to basically position and seen as industry leaders. We started then doing a huge amount of research, which I continued all the way through to what I do now. Our teams go out there and do this research. We do interviews and qualitative and quantitative research around thought leadership.

What we wanted to do is come to the conclusion of what is thought leadership itself and that is simple. Honestly, it is just having something to say, basically. Either having something t hat’s contrary to the market or slightly skewed in the market or a different way of explaining something or a different framework, which illustrates something. It’s basically just having something to say and an audience that’s willing to listen to it.

That’s thought leadership. That’s pretty simple, but then we see, “Why is some people perceive as thought leaders and others not, if that’s the case?” That’s where we discovered there were these pillars of perceived thought leadership. These are the thirteen things. We’ve gone through and found thirteen of these. The thirteen things that you can do that make people go, “You know what you’re doing, so you’re a thought leader.”

Honestly, when the research came out, I think I said this to you. It was hilarious when we got the research back because some of them are obvious. When you hear them, you’ll go, “When I see people do that, I immediately think there are thought leader.” There were some of them that were like, “What the hell? Seriously?” I see it in my team. One of them in particular. I said to my team, “This cannot be right. We need to go back and check the data. We need to make sure that this is accurate.” While they’re doing that, someone reached out to me and funny enough, I fell for this exact thing. Immediately thought, “They know what they’re doing,” because they had one of these pillars.

What are those thirteen pillars? I want you to go back to which one you were like, “Let’s double check this.”

Personal Background

We written down into four key areas. The first one is the obvious but the most important ones. The number one pillar by far is being a published author. The moment you’re a published author, people taking more seriously. People perceive you as a thought leader. I have a publishing company and we help people with this. I teach people that’s not that big deal. Writing a book is a lot simpler than you think. It still requires a lot of effort, but it’s not impossible anyone can do it. People with dyslexia who never think they could write a book and yet they write and publish a bestseller.

We teach this stuff and yet, it always works on me. When someone pitches to me and says, “I want to be a guest on your show, or speak at one of your events.” They say, “I’m a bestselling author.” I always go, “Oh.” I’m like, “Why did I do that? Seriously, I know already know that’s not their big deal,” but it makes sense. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense because for most people, the thought of writing a book is completely overwhelming.

When they think I want to be an author. I want to sit down and write a book. The first thing that happens is they go, “I don’t even know what book to write.” That is a huge barrier. They go, “I don’t know how to write a book. It must take so much time,” so 99.9% of people don’t write a book, which means that when they see you’ve done it and, in their subconscious, even if you know this, it still works. In your subconscious, you look at that and go, “They must have something pretty special to say if they’ve taken the effort, done the hard yards, written, and published a book.”

There’s the other aspect of that as well, which is most people don’t understand that you can self-publish or go through a hybrid publisher. They all think the same thing, which is you have to pitch to a traditional publisher. They’re going to go through a bidding process and all this stuff. You have to be the best of the best. Immediately, they think if you published a book, somebody out there has recognized that you are amazing at what you do. That’s number one on the list.

The other two in that category is speaking of people’s events. Simple as that. By that, it’s going on a show like me on your show now, or speaking in a virtual summit or on a conference on a stage somewhere, then immediately positions me as a thought leader because you will need to watch thought leaders and also listen thought leaders.

The other one, which is the one that everybody has to do, as a thought leader, anyways, consistent thought leadership content. This is consistent content that positions you as an authority in your industry. That’s the top three, then we break it down into what people are saying about you, the external ones. These are things like TedX Talks. Immediately, when you get selected to do a TedX talk and you get on that TedX stage. People go, “You must be the best of the best. You must know what you’re talking about.”

There’s things like getting press, like getting featured in magazines, newspapers, on TV and radio because there’s somebody else recognizing your expertise. I listen to the radio quite a lot. I’m a radio fan. I used to work on radio for years. I work in a radio station in Australia. I listen to the experts that they get on there.

They always get like a marketing or an AI expert. I’m like, “You’re not an expert. What are you talking about?” Everyone listening to that goes, “They are an expert.” I’m like, “This person just literally picked up AI as soon as chatGPT came out.” Awards fit in that category as well, getting recognized by winning an award. Whether that’s a book award. Whatever your industry is, and then authority sites. You can do a lot of this yourself, but getting featured on like Wikipedia or you have your own Wikipedia page. I can’t say I’ve done that yet.

That sound weird to me. Does it feel weird to you?

My team keeps me harassing me and say, “We should do this?” I can’t bring myself to do it.

It feels so egocentric.

It does, but the other one is IMDb. By the way, as podcasters, people don’t realize this you can feature your show on IMDb, which is a giant database.

I didn’t know that.

Merchandise Impact

We need to talk about that later. I was going to say it’s simple. It’s a pain in the ass process, but it’s simple enough. You can put all your episodes on there and things like that as well. Those are what external people say about you. When you do those things like TedX, express, awards, and authority sites in there. Again, people perceive you as a thought leader. The next two are platform based, which is basically having your own platform. That could be your own show, YouTube channel, radio show, or TV show.

If you have your own platform, you’ll perceived as a thought leader because somebody is recognized that you deserve to have your own platform or running your own events. I encourage everyone to run their own summits or conferences. There’s a lot of work involved in that, but when you do that, you not only get positioned as the thought leader there, but you get the halo effect of bringing in quality speakers and same as qualities speakers on your show or YouTube channel. You immediately get labeled as the same as those people, the same level.

This will be the weird ones come in. The last one is next level, we call it, which is, first of all, setting up something like a contribution to the industry. That could be doing your own industry paper or industry reports. It could be creating your own qualification framework or your own standards. I’ll give you an example. As a publishing company, we want to stand out from other people. You’ll love this, Juliet. This came from somebody bad mouthing me at a conference.

We’re at a publishing conference. It’s a bit of a laugh face because most publishers out there are great people. I have a lot of time for other publishers because they all have the same thing. We have a desire to help people will be seen. I’m in there and one of the publishers said, “Vince, we saw your new book covers. You design is brilliant. I passed it on my team and said ‘This is the benchmark. We should be watching what these guys do.’” I’m like, “Thanks.” “I love the way you did on this collaboration book.” He said, “Thanks,” but he was a traditional publisher in there who was a bit older than all of us.

He’s soft. I was like, “I’ll check in with them.” He goes, “I’ve seen your books, Vince. I’ve seen the layouts and the formatting. Is it amateur hour?” Which is not what you’d like to hear as a publisher. Honestly, that cut deep because we’re very proud of the books we do. We’ve got a track record of 100% bestseller. Every one of our books has become a bestseller. I’m like, “What do you mean?” He goes, “I’ve looked at your formatting. You obviously don’t even understand the concept of a standard.”

It was because we had like line breaks after paragraphs. We had bold headings and things like this. It cut deep, but everyone else there jump to my defense. They were like, “We like Vince’s formatting. We’ve adopted a very similar ourselves.” I went back to my team and I said, “Why do we format the way that we do?” They immediately responded with, “That’s easy stuff.” They’d be like a standard that we’re working to or something like that. They said, “It’s because that’s what you like.” I’m like, “That can’t be why we format the way we do. It can’t be just because I like this.”

Until I realize why I liked it. I had to sit down and go, “Have a look at the books that we produce. Have a look at the books that there’s other publisher produce.” The moment I open up his books, it was just pages and pages of run on ticks. No gaps between paragraphs. It’s just an indent. My brain looked at and went, “I’m not reading that. Seriously, that’s too hard.” I realized, we’ve accidentally created the ADHD publishing standard.

We’ve created a format that makes it easy for people in neurodivergent to be able to digest the content, so we leaned into that. We decided we were going to create our own framework, so we created the ADHD publishing standard. There’s two layers to it. I put it out there free for the industry as well. I have to tell you, in August 2024, that publisher adopted those standards.

That’s great.

I hope he read this because seriously, I was so tempted to reach out to him and say, “How’d that work out for you,” but no. I decided not to be childish.

What people don’t understand about what we do is you have to be flexible with each client. We published a book that we recommended no edit. Nobody would ever do that, but it was stage four cancer. It was a journal called Cancer Ramblings and done in real time during chemo. She’s living and thriving. She’s overcome it, but she goes into hospitals because the doctors that worked with her promote her.

They thought what she did during chemo sessions to inspire other patients to do this journaling as well. They thought it was tremendous. We took a chance and put out a book that wasn’t edited because we thought it was the raw emotion of someone doing that. You have to look at each book and decide, what is going to be the standard here? I used to work for a additional publisher. I will tell you, they are snotty.

I was going to say, we do ghost publishing program, so we know.

You’re very cliquish.

I’ll tell you now, that is incredibly brave and also so obvious when you think about that. We have never done a full no edit book, but we’ve done a partial one before where it was literally that. It was a guy who his journey around and basically almost died in COVID. They keep asking his wife to turn off the ventilator and turn off his life support multiple times. She was like, “No.” The book was in three parts. The first part, which is very difficult to read as his journey. Difficult because it’s very emotional and hearing the impact their hit on his wife and his family.

The second part of it is that nobody edit part, which is his wife’s generally through all of that. Her leaning into her faith and doubts. We keep the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. We introduced it as that well. The last part is what they learned from their journey and their critique of the medical industry in a very professional way. They don’t just go out there and slam them. They talk about the issues that they had around that. It’s very brave. I’m so happy you did that. That is fantastic.

She’s been a bestseller. She gets out there and she hustles.

As a publisher, I’m so jealous. We wanted to publish that book. It would have been amazing. I love it.

It was a good referral. It was one of our most looked at clips when we interviewed her and did our shorts. She has a story about her left lung was basically dead. She did this whole session where she was in the shower. She talked to her right lung about, “Your sister’s dying. We got to do something about it. You need to be gentle with her.” She self-talked into it. This is disgusting but a ton of stuff came out of her nose. The lung cleared itself and revived, which sounds disgusting but that’s probably one of our most looked at clips. People are just like, “You just coughed and nurtured your way through that?” That’s one of those lessons.

I love those books because they’re difficult to publish, to be honest. I realize this then. Even with ADHD, I read every one of my clients books about seven times. When it’s a tough book like that, my wife knows. She’s like, “You’re being sloppy.” I sit there, and I’m just crying reading these books. People’s personal journeys are so powerful. I love it. Anyway, back to the pillars.

That was a sketchy pillar right there.

We’ve got three pillars left. One of those is anything technology and that’s what we call this Cutting-Edge Tech. That is if you have your own Chrome extension or application. Your own mobile app or wing base app and things like that. Anytime you have something that’s coming in technology and at the moment, everything’s AI. If you have your own AI tools, even your own custom GPTs, to be honest. Most people look at that and go, “You must know what you’re talking about.” There is the element of social good as a business.

I think business should be doing this anyway, but your way of giving back to the community. There is a perception that if you’re giving back to the community, you’ve reached a level of success, which means you’ve reached a level of thought leadership. The last one is the one that I was telling you about before, which is having your own merchandise. I don’t mean putting your logo on a T-shirt or a cup or something like that, but I mean having your own brand around this as well.

That was the one where I said to my team, “This is not real. This cannot be true. How has someone perceive you as a thought leader because you’ve got the boss b*tch range of T-shirts and things?” While they were doing this, I got to go back to the research. We questioned everything with these things. Go back and let’s dig in deep and find out. Make sure your own biases and entered in here. While this is happening, I had a client reach out to me and/or a potential client I should say. She reached out and said, “I’d love to you to help me to generate leads and to build my community because I want to be a thought leader.” We’re like, “You came to the right people.”

I did my research on her. When we talk about the thirteen pillars, this woman was crushing it. She was a bestselling author twice. Her show was almost as large as mine. I’m like, “What’s going on here?” She was constantly speaking at different events and ran her own summits. She spoke on TedX. She was constantly in the media and all this. I’m like, “This woman is huge.” We saw what she had her own merchandise range. She had her own range of they will literally boss b*tch.

They had people on social media wearing her T-shirts. I immediately thought, “This woman must be huge. She must be a thought leader.” I said to her, “Why do you need my help?” She goes, “I have a very small audience.” I was like, “No, you don’t. You’ve got your own merchandise line. You’ve got everything.” She told me that she was basically doing these thirteen pillars without knowing what they were.

She was doing all these different things to position yourself. I made the mistake and I’ve challenged myself ever since that I’ll never use this term again. Generally, I said, “You’re faking it until you make it.” She challenged me. She turned around and said, “I know where I’m going and I’m going to behave that way now.” I’ve always been uncomfortable with the clients faking it until they make it because there’s nothing fake about it. It’s real.

When you write a book, there’s a lot of work. When you put a show out there, that’s a shell of a lot work as you know. This is not faking anything there. That’s when we change our narrative and said, “We know where we’re going, you’re going, and we’re going to get you to do those pillars things now so that people can see how much of a thought leader you are.

That’s cool. When I worked in advertising, we got like a shirt a quarter. I hate to say it but one of them was like, “Shy a day Mojo. Good enough is not enough.” Talk about people who think they’re not enough. It’s like, “What are you trying to do to us? We have to wear a T-shirt that says we’re good enough or best effort isn’t enough?” We used to joke about that, but it was. That’s our philosophy. We’re going to go above and beyond, but it was just when I got the T-shirt. I was like, “I have to wear that a lot?”

The high growth did stand up before I went to this event. I had developed an idea that was big on T-shirt. He got me to design multiple T-shirts for him. As a company, we have our branded ones, which we would wear to events. We have ones with 8-bit characterizations of a whole team on the cover like on the T-shirt and all this. We have ones where it’s like, “You’re my new favorite client,” things on the front. That way, when we go to people, we can point to the T-shirt and they always giggling and laugh.

It does make an impact on other people. It sounds crazy. I was talking to someone about this, even talking about awards and talking about how a lot of awards are relatively easy to win. You pay your submission fee. Some of them just pay your submission pay and you win an award. I don’t agree with those ones at all. With other ones, that is about who you are. It is about how well you know and all this. This client was working with this. It’s not about merit, is it? Knowing what’s partially about merit. It’s not for everybody.

You look at the New York Times bestseller list. It’s an absolute joke. James Patterson proved them wrong anyway because I was with a traditional publisher. Decided one day, he’s getting like a dollar a book if he sells about 8 million copies of a book a year. He’s like, “That’s not enough. I’m getting a dollar per book and all these people getting a huge amount of money. I don’t want to do this anymore.” He decided to create his own publishing company where he can control everything. Now, as a new publishing company, he’s not whining and dining times bestseller. He’s not out there with the judges saying, “You keep an eye on my client eyeing me.” He puts like a book year out.

More than that. He’s putting up like a half a dozen books a year, at least.

One of his books, 8 million copies sold and didn’t even make the bestseller list on New York Times. Yet the estimation is, and you can never know the full numbers because no publisher ever tell you this. The estimation is the winner of that only sold half a million copies. James Patterson is like, “This just shows you.” New York Times is pretty upfront with people and says, “It’s not about book sales.” even though it’s a bestseller list.

The problem is the name, but they’re like, “It’s all about quality.” In other words, that’s who’s whining and dining them and who’s on their radar. From that perspective, it’s not real merit, but if you were that New York Times bestseller, if you’ve got that label against your name, you are a thought leader. Everyone will perceive you as that. It sounds fickle and things, but it is practical things that you can do to be present.

Our simple thing is, you’re not pretending to be anything you’re not out there going, “Everyone’s going to think me as a thought leader and I have no idea what I’m doing now.” No. You know what you’re doing. You’re good at what you’re doing. You’re passionate or what you do and you want to stand out from all of your competition. You want to stand out from other people. Why not do the things that position you as the authority and the thought leader so that you can get in front of the clients that you know, you are going to be able to help?

That’s so true. That New York Times bestseller list has also gotten very political. There are a lot of books that they’ll say, “This organization bought 50,000 of them to give to their membership. We’re going to back that number out.” Those are sales.

It’s shocking. I understand there are ones out there like Wall Street Journal will be selling us, which they are about book sales but they’re waiting book sales. They’re like, “We’re not going to count Amazon books sells,” for example. We will count them but it’s a lower tier on sales. We want the books ones that were in bookshops. I don’t mind. I’m like, “I agree with that. I love bookshops.” Even though we work with Amazon very closely. We love being Amazon bestsellers, but reality is, bookshops are dying. I don’t think they should die. I think books are amazing.

They are. One of my friends who started with her fiction novel the same time I did, made the New York Times bestseller list a few years ago. She just has a brilliant email strategy that she uses. Its daring, but it works. She’s got a very large list of people who do buy. It took for a long time to do it. She has it segmented where she’s figured out where these people buy. It’s amazing that the work that she’s put into that to do that. Vince, where do we find you if people want to talk to you and find out about you?

All they got to do is go to ChaseTheInsights.com. That’s the home of my show. You’ll see links to all my books and what we do. You’ll also see links to where to connect with me on social. If you want to be positioned as a thought leader and you want to become a sensation. Grab some free time with me. We’ll sit down and put together a little strategy for you and work out where you should be focused and what you should be doing. Honestly, I love meeting new people. It’s one of my favorite things in the world. That’s why I love having the show, but if you’re a spammer, maybe don’t reach out to me.

I scold people for this. If you’re not serious and you’re going to cancel appointment. Our calendars are rainmakers. If you’re taking a broom on my calendar and you schedule 5 or 10 an hour before, you’re more than likely not to ever get to me again.

If someone reach out and want to be on my show, I’m always open to talking to people about being on my show. This person said, “I’d love to chat with you.” I said, “Sure. No problem.” I send them my Calendly link and said, “Book sometime with me to have a conversation to see if you’re a good fit.” They reply, “Can you book on my Calendly?” I said, “This is connected to my automations and my team to review everything before it comes in. You’ll need to use mine.” He came back and said, “No, you’ll have to use mine. My business won’t allow me to use somebody else’s link.” Now, he’s the CEO.

I’m thinking, “This is really odd.” At first, that doesn’t make sense to me then I looked at his Calendly link. It was name, Chris, phone number, physical address, and about fifteen questions about the size of your business, the challenges you’re having now. I’m like, “It’s a sales pitch.” It was somebody being brave enough to say, “                I want to be on your show,” but wanted to sell me something.

I went back to him and I said, “First of all, I would never give you that information unless I knew you and I don’t know you. Even then, I’m hesitant to give you that information anyway, because I don’t like people cold selling to me. There’s no point. You’ve got to build a relationship first. Get to know me. I only work with people that I know. You will either do this or we can’t have the conversation.” He pushed back one last time and then said, “Finally, I’ll get in your calendar.” I said, “Don’t bother. We’re done. You broke the trust. You’re gone now.”

I get carpet cleaners and home cleaners. It’s like, “What are you doing? You just alienated me for a life with that.”

My favorite one I get at the moment and I’ve been getting quite a few of these. It’s, “Vince, I’m super impressed with your work. I love what you’re doing out there. You’re so passionate about your industry.” They never get specific because it’s just generic stuff. He goes, “I was wondering, did you want to take that to the next level? Have you ever thought about becoming an author or a bestselling author? I don’t even bother responding.

“I think about it a lot.”

All they had to do is go to my website and see if I’m eleven times bestseller. There’s no way I’m going to be engaging with these people, so I don’t even bother replying.

Closing Remark

That’s so funny. Vince, thank you for being on the show. I appreciate you coming in and chatting with me. I have this feeling like we could like do a whole summer were we just sit on stage and talk all day.

I love that. yes.

Talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Important Links

• Vince Warnock Website
• Vince Warnock on LinkedIn
• Vince Warnock on Instagram
• Chasing the Insights
• ATG Publishing
• Business Mind
• Cancer Ramblings
• Free 30 min Strategy Call – Vince Warnock
• Superbrand Publishing

About Vince Warnock

Vince Warnock is an eleven times best-selling author, publisher and award-winning Marketing and Visibility coach. He is known for his expertise in neuro-marketing, publishing, and AI and has been presented with numerous awards, including being included in the Fearless50, a program designed by Adobe to recognize the world’s top 50 marketers.

Vince is also the host of the top podcast “Chasing the Insights” and the founder of ATG Publishing and Business Mind Magazine.

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