S2E5: Purposeful Writing: Matthew Thrush's Journey to Ghostwriting Success

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Purposeful Prosperity Podcast. My name is Seth Waters. I'm here with Jack Smith. And you know, Jack, Jack is an entrepreneur, founder, investor, and world-changer. Jack, it's good to be with you today.

Jack Smith (Host): I'm excited as always, my friend.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Yeah, we have a great conversation today with Matthew Thrush. And what a great, great guy.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. Big heart.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Big heart. One of the things that stood out in the conversation with Matthew was he talked about how money can solve problems, but it doesn't necessarily bring purpose and how purpose has to be discovered and uncovered. Jack, when it comes to being purposeful leaders, how do we get clarity and discover our purpose?

Jack Smith (Host): Well, you know, I really liked the four questions that Matthew's going to take us through as kind of his thought process and how he got there. You know, he takes a look at any project that he's going to do and say, “Do I like it? Will people want to pay for it? Is this something that I can do of service to others?” And this third question was really the one that I thought was the most interesting. And it was, “Will I continue to like it? Will I like it in 10 years from now, that I could say I'm doing this for my whole career? Will I like it?” And then the fourth question is our purposeful prosperity question is, “Can I make money doing it?” Right, and so, by looking at that and looking at your purpose, whatever that is, whatever you're called to do, asking yourself those four questions, I think really helps you align and clarify purpose. And as leaders, the more clarity you can get around that, the more effective you can be as a leader.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Well, Jack, I'm really looking forward to this interview. Let's jump right into it. This is our conversation with Matthew Thrush.

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Jack Smith (Host): Welcome, everybody, to Purposeful Prosperity. I'm Jack Smith, your host, and I'm very, very excited today to be with my ghostwriter and friend, Matthew Thrush. He's a military veteran. He is the founder of Empire Publishing, Empire Ghostwriting, and Rapid Author. You are helping people tell their stories one book at a time, and I think you’ve helped over 1,500 authors write best-selling books. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your journey, please, Matthew?

Matthew Thrush (Guest): Yeah, so I started off with publishing back in 2005 and 2006. I had a publishing deal, I was writing fiction books, and my dream since I was young was to be a successful author. And so when I got that publishing deal, I thought I finally made it. And what most people- most people believe that. They think, “Oh if I get a publisher, instantly, I'm going to become rich and famous and it's not really true. And so obviously I got the publishing, it was great opportunity, published some books with them, but it didn't actually turn into a full-time business until about 2015-ish, it's like I – obviously I made money that whole process, but I didn't treat it like a full-time career. I wasn't all-in with it. I just kind of did it almost like a side hustle, almost like a hobby. And in my view, a hobby is – anything that's not providing enough to live off of and provide for other people, that's a hobby to me. So that's where I was. And so, you know, I didn't want to live life with “what-ifs”. I was like, well, if I had this dream and I had this passion and God gave me this ability and this mind for it, why am I not going all in with this? Like I've gone all in with other things in the military and in sports and some other things. And I achieved results rapidly in things that most people think are impossible. I did it because once you set your mind to it, if you believe you can do it, you will. I was like, well, why am I not doing that with books? So obviously I went ahead and said, well, let's see what the most successful authors are actually doing. Spent about a year researching the market, seeing what people were doing. And then once I had a pretty good idea, I was like, all right, well, let me go all-in with this. Let me give it a shot. and think, okay, well, do I really have what it takes to write really good books that people want and that changes lives? Can I make good money with this, right? Will I actually like it or will I get burnt out? And so I spent about a year, and this is what 2014, 2015 was, it was about a year of testing, and I implemented what I had researched, and I started at a brand new series. It was fiction at the time, because that's what I knew at the time was fiction. And it was a brand new, a genre, a brand new niche, a brand new point of view. I was writing first person, which I had never done before. I was writing from a female's point of view, which I hadn't done before. And it was a post-apocalyptic series, which I loved movies like that. And I read those books, but never wrote them. And so I started that and within three months, it just took off.

There was a site called Wattpad. And it allows writers to be able to post their stories and readers can read them for free and get feedback and things like that. And they had what's called a featured list, and they feature the top books and stories on there, which are the ones that are getting the most people reading it and the most likes and stuff. So basically, it's almost like their version of a bestseller list like Amazon has. So within three months, I hit their featured list, which was one of my goals. And obviously that series has done over a million plus reads. It led to a lot of other opportunities, won a different contest on there, was one of their ambassadors, was accepted into their Features program at the time for top authors on there, just a lot of awesome things, met some really cool people. But it led into – it started off kind of – it led into what I do now today of like, okay, it validated that, okay, I have the skill. People like what I'm writing. I didn't get burnt out, because at the time I said I'm going to write at least one chapter a day, so 1,500 to 3,000 words a day minimum, and post it every single day, and respond to every single person personally that says something about my book or likes it or whatever. And obviously that led to writing 150,000 plus words a month. And it was easy. And that was while I was doing a full-time job, you know, when I was in the corporate world as a technical writer and copywriter, I was doing that on the side. And after I hit that, it validated, okay, I'm not burnt out. People like it. I enjoyed it. I can make money with this. And so obviously, then I published that on Amazon. It took off and exploded, and it's obviously led into, you know, making more money as a full-time author from that. But this is where it leads into what we do today. That was all fun. But, you know, there's that phrase that money won't make you happy. Well, money can actually solve a lot of things. It gives you choices and options and it can make you happy because you can use it for things. But you get the most fulfillment when you're serving other people and you're using your tools and your assets and your skills to serve others. That's where the purpose comes in.

And so I was lacking purpose. I was making good money. It was fun, but it was just me. You know, and I was like, well, so obviously I believe in God. I was thinking, God, you gave me this ability. You gave me this insight. You gave me this skill. You gave me this mind that can take complex things and make it easy. You know, I like this. What am I supposed to do with this? You know, there's got to be more than just writing fiction books to entertain people and make some money from it. What else is there? And then one night, whenever I used to watch Netflix years ago, I saw a movie called Ghostwriter, and I just read the synopsis and I said, this sounds kind of interesting, let me check this out. So I clicked it. And then within the first few seconds, I kind of felt like God was saying, hey, Matthew, why don't you be a ghostwriter? And I was like, well, what is that? So I spent the entire movie researching ghostwriting, ghostwriters, who are they? What do they do? What do they offer? How do they find clients, timeline, pricing, just everything that you kind of have to have an idea of what to do. And by the end of the movie, I knew, all right, I'm gonna ghostwrite. I don't even know what the movie was about, because I didn't watch it. I researched the whole movie. And then as a result of that, I used to do copywriting on the side, on a site called Elance, and then Upwork merged with them. So I went on Upwork, updated my profile, and then searched for projects that were on there that fit my skill set and my desire, submitted some proposals to those. Within a week, I got my first book client. And then obviously I wrote their book for them. That led into more. And then I would say at that point, that was about March 2017, whenever I shifted to ghostwriting. And I only started as ghostwriting because that's all I really knew was my skill set. So I started what I knew and what I was good at. And then I was working in the corporate world at that time, so I did some on the side. And so I just told myself, all right, well, this is fun. This is good. I like this. It's more fulfilling because I'm helping other people share their stories, and their insights, and their life experiences that can actually change people's lives and make them money at the same process. And I said well can I do this full-time? You know, is this just a fluke? Did I just get these handful of clients and it's going to kind of burn off and tailor off and so i gave myself another deadline sorry well by the end of the year I'm going to go all-in with this ghostwriting thing by the end of the year i'll know whether this is something I can do full-time almost like I did with the writing so I did another test at that point It was March, so we had about, you know, eight to nine months left until the end of the year. Within two months, it had completely exploded in a great way, very blessed. And I could have quit then, but I was still like, ah, this might be a fluke. I don't know. It's really, you know, you're, you're thinking with the, the old school way of thinking of like scarcity and a poverty mindset. There's lack. Oh, if I do this, I might lose my job. My family needs this. And obviously, we had a son at the time. We have two now. And there's just normal fear. So all right, well, let me go another, let's go a little bit longer and see what this does. And well, so obviously within four months, I quit my full-time job and went all-in with ghostwriting because it had just taken off so much and it was a lot of fun, very fulfilling, and God was just blessing me supernaturally with that kind of stuff. And then it just kind of led into where we are today, where we just provide a completely turnkey, hands-off, white-glove experience for people where they just come to us, we pair them up with a skilled ghostwriter who is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author themselves, helps them write their book, do all the editing and proofreading, everything like a normal publisher would, but we're just an agency so that they can keep all the rights, and then obviously help them launch it to bestseller, get them a ton of reviews for credibility purposes and stuff, and it just evolved to that where we are today, because the clients at the time, when I was only doing ghostwriting, needed that stuff. I didn't provide that. That wasn't my skill set.

So I started off with my team that helped me with my own books. All right, well, I have editors that help me with my books. They can help me with these and proofreaders and so forth. And so that's kind of how it started off in the evolution of things is it start off with, do I have what it takes to do this as a career for myself? Tested it. It worked. Then it was, oh, this is fun, but it's not fulfilling. It's more fulfilling to serve other people and help them. What can I do with this? Oh, be a ghostwriter. Started with what I knew, which was writing. Did that. Used my resources that I had at the time to help provide more value, which is obviously why it took off, because if you provide value to people, you know, you're gonna get paid for that, and everybody wins. And it just kept evolving from there into where we are today. And then obviously it's only been what, six years or so since I went all in with the writing books for other people element. And that's how fast things can go when you really get dialed into your purpose and passion and you're thinking of other people first and you go all in with it and you have that belief and that mindset around it to where I'm doing this and here's why I'm doing it. And you attract that to you, right? And so obviously I've been very blessed to get connected with a lot of awesome people. And as a result of serving other people, they actually help you and you evolve as a human being too. And now everybody's winning in multiple ways.

Jack Smith (Host): That's awesome. So I was pretty impressed by publishing 300 books a year, which is, well, you know, 250 books a year, which is-

Matthew Thrush (Guest): Yeah. I would say that, I mean, that included back, you know, before 2017, but you know, 10 years, 15 years combined kind of deal.

Jack Smith (Host): I mean, even 150 books a year.

Matthew Thrush (Guest): Some years, you know, you did a ton because you're doing a lot of fiction, other years, you know, but yeah, I would say maybe the last decade or so, that's how many authors you've been able to help. And it's just, it's been fun.

Jack Smith (Host): That's really, really awesome. 150 authors a month or a year on average over the last decade. That's, I mean, how many books, how many words? I mean, you were describing hundreds of thousands of words a month that you were creating even before you started this journey. So, your prolific prose is absolutely impressive. So, really, really, grateful to have met you and to have you on our team. Cause a storyteller like yourself is a great asset for somebody who knows a story to tell, but doesn't know how to tell the story, which is how I came to you so, what would you like to achieve? You've done so much over the last 10 years, 150 books a year over the last 10, you know, on average. What do you want to do over the next 10 years? And, and why does that matter to you?

Matthew Thrush (Guest): So the big thing right now that I'm at is once you hit a certain level of success, it's a lot of fun to make a lot of money because you can do great things with it. But then you start thinking, well, how can I multiply this and create true wealth? And wealth is in multiple facets of life, not just money. It's just one tool. And that could be health and that can be impact and influence, leaving legacies, teaching people, helping people change their mindsets and beliefs to what's actually true to achieve their own goals. So right now I'm in that element where the last few years I've been shifting into that more of a higher level mindset of like, okay, how do I expand and scale this business so that I can buy more businesses and scale those to where I become a billionaire so that I can use those resources to help a lot of people? And I want to be able to help a billion people plus, right? And part of that is if I help people with their books, I'm helping them share their stories, their life experiences, their skill sets and knowledge, which then, you know, even if one book only sold a thousand copies. That's a thousand people minimum that their lives were impacted, but then they're going to share it with people, and usually a lot of times they'll sell a lot more than that. So that's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people a year that are getting impacted just through books.

And so right now I'm more in the mindset of like, buying more businesses that can kind of join the portfolio of what I do right now that complement each other so that I can help more people, get better, faster results for clients, scale even higher because I want to take over the industry. I want to be able to control the messaging that's going out with books so that people are only hearing truth - things that will actually change their lives rather than drama and negativity and things like that. I want them to be fired up. I want them to be impassioned and motivated. I want them to see that there are no such things as limitations unless you believe them and that you can do big things. And then all of a sudden, you know, I saw a statistic. I forget who said this, but basically you only need about 10% of the population to believe something and it will change the majority. So 10% of the population, if they believe and do something, it will alter the majority of the population. So if I just help 10% of the population raise their awareness and their knowledge and understanding of what's possible with themselves, become a higher level of themselves where they start serving others, that changes the world.

That's a very small amount of people, and if I do my part, and each person I help does their part, you could get there very quickly. So right now, my goal is expanding the business, buying more businesses, investing all of it to increase cash flow and valuation, buying and selling more things so that I can just build up this huge chest- war chest of resources, resources is money, connections with people, things like that, and knowledge, so that then we can just go ahead and just build this awesome educational element where anyone that's struggling in any area of life, we can connect them with the right people who can help them, and either give it to them for free or a severe discount because people are more invested when they pay something into something, but just teach them what they don't know. I'm very passionate about financial literacy, wiping out bad debt, investing, mindset, and belief, learning how the mind actually works, things like that. So obviously that's what I'm really passionate about for myself. I love learning about that. I might end up actually teaching that one day, almost like a Dr. Joe Dispenza. I really like what he does. And I just, you know, I might potentially just say, “Hey, let me see if I can mentor under somebody to just master this stuff so I can share even more with people.” Because once you change their mind, you got them and they can change the world.

Jack Smith (Host): I love it. You inspire a lot of people with your words and helping you with your storytelling. If somebody wanted to make money with their books or use their books to elevate their business, what's one of the tips that you'd give them to kind of help them be successful in this journey?

Matthew Thrush (Guest): I would say, in my experience, there are two really good ways if you want to make money with books or from books. The goal should never really be making money from book sales. There is one avenue for that, and I can touch on that too, but the biggest way is if you're going to leverage a book to sell things that are tied to a business. So if you have coaching, or consulting, or courses, or retreats, or events, and you do speaking or you do a podcast, or even you might be a real estate investor, or someone that does business mergers and acquisitions, and you want to attract investors or partnerships and then books are a great way to establish trust in the market very rapidly, because books have been around for thousands and thousands of years. They're not going anywhere. It's one of the human's key ways to be able to transport and transfer information, and knowledge, and history over the years. And so they're always going to be around. The format they take might change, but they're sharing stories and knowledge is always going to be around. The number one key would be if you're going to write a book for that purpose, where you want to elevate the perception of trust and authority and credibility with your audience, your market, and you want to leverage the book for that, to sell more things in your business, land more speaking events, whatever the outcome is, you don't want to write the book you think you should write.

You want to be able to do some market analysis to see what are people currently buying in the market. And it's very easy to do. You can find out, the easiest way to do it is to figure out, all right, well, what kind of topic do you want to write about? All right, well, find the top-selling books in that topic and niche on Amazon, for example, and see, well, what's their ranking? How many books are they roughly selling a day or a month? How much money are they making? How much search volume is there for those keywords in that topic to validate whether it's something that people actually want?

Jack Smith (Host): Whether it's worth telling the story about, right?

Matthew Thrush (Guest): Absolutely. And so you start there. You start with your idea of what you want to share and why, because it's going to be tied to something that you're trying to achieve. So obviously there's relevance there. And then you just structure it based off of what people are wanting. So you give them what they think they want in terms of how you present it in the marketing. But then when they read the book, it's actually what they need. Right. And so the best way to succeed with a book, to make sure that you're getting a lot of people seeing it, buying it organically and with paid ads, leaving great reviews, which is – without a review or testimonials, it's so hard to sell anything. Try to sell anything with zero testimonials or reviews or very few. So that's why reviews for books or podcasts, things like that, are so valuable because the way the human mind works, you want to be part of a clan and a group. Are other people listening to the podcast? Are other people reading this book? Or other people buying this course or other people going to this event or this retreat or partnering with this person. And ratings and reviews and testimonials is what gives that instant validation. So by you figuring out what people are wanting and buying, you can structure and model your book around that structure, which enhances the speed that you can get your book to market and make sure that you know exactly what to share in the book so that it gets those people the results that they want and quickly. And as a result of them getting their results and their breakthroughs, you get great testimonials and reviews, obviously you make money from it, word of mouth kicks off, and then before you know it, it's serving your ultimate goal, which was to increase profits in your business, whatever you're doing, and the impact and influence, right? So that's the number one thing I would say for people is you wanna see what the market's doing and what they want, and then structure your book around that, and leverage the book for business. Don't have your focus be on book sales, because it takes longer to make money with books from book sales if you're only writing one or two books as an authority figure, right? Unless you have a huge following.

The other way you can make really good money with books, and obviously this is something that I build a ton of these accounts for myself and other clients, and they're usually their investors, but they wanna take it from the angle of, I want to own digital assets in this version, it's books. They're not tied to a personal brand or business. They just want to invest their cash somewhere like, like they would a house like with real estate, they invest their cash into digital assets. And that just happens to be where we will build accounts for people. launch them, market them, and it just generates passive cashflow. And that gives them that element of where they're just making money from the books and making good money. And then after a year or so, if they wanted to, they could sell that account for 35 to 45X, that's the multiplier of the net monthly income, right? And so sometimes if you wanna just make money from books, that's the route I would say to take is treat it like it's a business by itself. It's not necessarily tied to a personal brand or a personal business. It becomes its own business, and then it ties into what I said earlier before. You then research, all right, what are people buying the most of? What are the trends happening in the world right now? What is an evergreen topic that is something that isn't trendy? It's not, you know, you could capitalize on the trends, but they go away. But you want things that are evergreen, that are consistent. You find those topics and those niches, and then you create books around those, using the same structure as I talked about before that you would use for your business, it's just a different angle.

The first book, which is an authority book, is to use for your business to elevate your brand and you. The secondary element is where you're just focused on establishing a brand that's more of a pen name around a specific topic or niche. And then you just push out a ton of books around that topic as quickly as possible and just keep marketing and scaling those. And then obviously, those are going to generate really good money passively for you, and then you can sell it if you want to. And you can even do both where they kind of work hand in hand. So that's, I mean, there's a lot of different ways to make money with books, but those are the top two ways I've seen that are the fastest, the most consistent, the most scalable. First one, if you're writing an authority book to use as for your brand, make sure that you structure it based off what people are wanting and serving and kind of tied into what you want to share and teach. The second one is treat it like it's its own business where it's not tied to a personal brand, but you're putting out a lot of books. So you're basically like a publisher, right? And that's the only way to make a ton of money with books is put out a lot like you're a publisher or leverage the book to sell things in your business.

Jack Smith (Host): Well, very cool. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you helping me tell the Fortuna story and how we grew. And we've got several books to your point, kind of planned in the pipeline. So, but really with me, what you shared the helping a billion people. Right, Matthew, that's awesome. I love big hairy-ass goals. And that is definitely one that I hope you accomplish 10x. So thank you. If you inspired our listeners today, is there anything that you're doing to help those billion people that our listeners might be able to help support you with?

Matthew Thrush (Guest): I mean, the big thing, the biggest way that people can help achieve that goal is obviously we're going to hit that goal by writing more books. And that could be where we're helping someone personally with our team, or we just give them education so that they know how to do it, right? And so if every book reaches 1,000 people, well, it's not going to take very many books to reach a billion people. But the fact of the matter is, if you write a good book, you're going to reach a lot more people than 1,000 people. Maybe it's 10,000 people. Maybe it's 50,000 people, right? And so the more people we help share their stories, their knowledge, their information, their expertise, things like that in books, the more people you can reach, because there's so many people reading those books, and not everybody reads a book, but the people who do, they get transformed, then they share that transformation with the people around them, whether friends, family, colleagues, or random people they meet, and that impacts those people, and then that's how we ultimately reach my goal of where we transform and change a billion people's lives, is every single story that we share is a potential chance to change a ton of people's lives. And, and a lot of times, if you transform one person's life, that one person may have a calling on their life to reach millions of people. Like when you think of someone like a Billy Graham, well, he went to a church, got saved, and he went and he reached millions of people.

Jack Smith (Host): Right.

So if you reach one person like that, and they've reached millions of people, or you reach someone like a Dr. Joe Dispenza, and he reaches millions of people, you can get to the goal really quickly by just sharing, just being honest with people, sharing your wins and sharing your mistakes so that people can learn from it, being transparent and honest, loving other people. And if you just be a good person in that regard, and you share your knowledge and information, whether it's in books or just through conversation like this, we transform the world.

Jack Smith (Host): I absolutely love it, Matthew. Thank you for being at the fulcrum of purpose and prosperity as the storyteller. I really appreciate that. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners today that you haven't had a chance to tell them? You're great at telling stories, so thank you.

Matthew Thrush (Guest): I would say make sure that you pick up Jack's book, Purposeful Prosperity. It's going to be coming out very soon. So if you're listening to this before it came out, it's coming out soon. If you are listening to this later on, make sure you go to Amazon and buy it. You're going to want to make sure you read it because Jack has a great story. He can help you big time if you read his book and then share it with other people.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. Well, thank you very much, Matthew. Thank you for your time and thank you for sharing other people's stories, right? That is really how we impact the world. People remember stories. We've passed on stories from generation to generation dating back before the printed work. So thank you for being our modern storyteller.

Matthew Thrush (Guest): Appreciate it, my pleasure.

Jack Smith (Host): Thanks. Have a great day.

Thank you for listening to the Purposeful Prosperity Podcast. Tune in next week. We'll bring you another amazing entrepreneur and doing world-changing things. Please like, follow, and share, and keep doing good in the world. Thanks for listening.