Why My Books Go Viral (David Perrell Interview) | Ep 856
episodePreviously titled “Why My Books Go Viral (David Perrell Interview) | Ep 885” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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Welcome back to the game. Today is a guest spot on David Perel's podcast, How I Write. And so this is a super deep dive on writing. And I would say probably about 30 to 40% of it's on copywriting. And so the book and the books that I've written, the process, how I think through it. If you write for a living in any way, so you write emails, you write blogs, you write books, you write webinars, you write video sales letters. You write Slack messages. If you write words, then you might get value from this. I weirdly am not considered a writer, but it's the thing that I probably enjoy most in the world. And I actually got a full scholarship to college for writing. I decided not to take the scholarship and go to Vanderbilt instead. But writing has been a part of my life for decades. as long as I've had a brain in hands. I don't get to talk about it often, and I think you might find some value from it. That's right.
Alex Ramosi has written two killer business books that together have sold more than one million copies. And all that obsessive writing has gotten him to nine million followers across social media platforms. And this is the first interview he's ever done that's all about the writing process. One of the things that super distinguishes you is you just like go into Hermosi Cave every morning and you just write, write, write. So tell me about how you do that. I wake up and then I caffeine and then I put earplugs and headphones on. I close all the windows and I really only write on days that I know have at least like six hours or more uninterrupted. sometimes eight, like I definitely suffer from like Ziegernick effect, which is open loop, right?
The idea of like if you have something later on in the day, like it messes with me a little bit because I feel like I want to be able to lose myself in the writing and then like come up for air whenever I want to come up for air. rather than think like I have to be done by this time so that I can prep for this meeting or take this call or do this thing. And so I almost exclusively write on days where I have nothing on my whole calendar. And so I optimize a lot of my calendar around when I'm in a heavy writing season around not having anything at all on it. And then when you sit down to write and say it's 6 a.m., are you like, I want to write for six hours. These are the things I want to get done. I'm going to get to do list. How do you think about that?
Man, I feel like I'm incredibly unstructured with the writing besides just like violent effort. But that's about it. Like I write what I write. I never had writer's block in my life. I usually have a game plan of what I'm going to write. So like I would say from a writing process perspective, I outline a book with what the table of contents is first. I think we were talking about that before this started. Like the table of contents is the hardest thing that I spend my time on. Once I have that, that's like basically the game plan. And so each of the chapters, I tend to have the same structure because I write the way I would like to read. And so I like to have some sort of narrative or story that kind of puts context to what I'm talking about.
I also write obviously nonfiction. And so this just gives color to that. I give a very short description of what this thing is that I'm going to be talking about. And then usually plentiful examples. And then I will basically put all of my Alex notes basically as the end. And I pretty much stuck with that setup for all of the books that I've written. And I think that that setup has just gotten cleaner and clearer between the books. Um, because they fundamentally are like my notes brought to life in a book format. Um, but the hardest part for me is usually picking what story I want to tell, um, in each chapter that best embodies whatever the principle is or whatever the, the, the core message of the chapter is.
Um, and what visual framework I can tie to that, that, um, kind of like melts everything together or like ties it all together in a really clear way. That's what I spend. Like, and I usually do words first and I'll then put these highlighted caps marks where I'll say like a picture that looks like this and then I'll move on.
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