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Nate Green: … what I’m helping you do right now and that stuck with me. I think if everyone kind of takes that initiative, I mean everyone is going to be successful if they want to be.
Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah. No, that’s definitely an excellent lesson and now the big thing you’re known for that has really gotten you a lot of attention is your book, Built for Show, looking good enough to hook up. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. It’s in all the bookstores. It’s everywhere. It’s blowing up online. I was reading the comments on it on Amazon. It’s really a phenomenon. What was the process of getting that book produced? Because I know that’s a goal for a lot of trainers really to get a major national book out there on the bookshelves, not just an ebook. So how did that process go? Can you talk about that a little bit?
Nate Green: Yeah, sure. A couple of points I want to make before I start with my rant. Number one, you have to write. You have to be a decent writer. You start off writing for websites like BodyBuilding.com or just writing stuff for your basic home town newspaper or publication. I’m talking to a couple of people that are really big in the fitness industry now and they told me that they used to write articles for themselves and then like no one ever saw them. So they just spend a couple of hours writing a 2000-word article and no one would ever see it but they get better at writing.
So you can’t just say, “Oh, I’m going to write an ebook,” or, “Oh, I’m going to write a book,” and expect it to become easy. There’s a lot of process that comes into it.
Number two, figuring out what kind of writer you are. Now I talked to Lou Schuler, another mentor of mine who’s a former editor of Men’s Health and the current contributing editor to T-Nation and TMuscle.com and he told me there are two different kinds of writers. There’s one that supply the information so Alwyn Cosgrove, John Berardi, Bill Hartman, Eric Cressey. These guys would be the guys that supply the information.
So you see them in Men’s Fitness or Men’s Health and it says yada, yada, yada, yada, says Eric Cressey and those are the guys that can write. Some of them can write really well but that’s not where their expertise is. They’re not journalists and so they supply information. The editor takes it and works his magic and puts them in the magazine or the book.
Then you have the journalist which is what I guess I could categorize myself in. That’s what Lou Schuler is. That’s what Sean Hyson, the fitness editor of Men’s Fitness is. Now these guys have practical knowledge of training and maybe they’ve never been actual trainers but they know the basics and they look for these contributors and they take the contributor’s information and then they work it around and they kind of make the actual article. So it would be Unstable Surface Training by Lou Schuler that he puts in the article, so there’s my big rant right there. Sorry that was too long but now I can talk about the actual book.
Kaiser Serajuddin: All right.
Nate Green: It’s really important to get those parts in there.
Kaiser Serajuddin: OK.
Nate Green: With the book itself, I have the idea. I had Ryan Lee’s boot camp maybe about three years ago. I was the first …
Kaiser Serajuddin: It’s funny how much Ryan Lee’s name comes up. I just had him on actually last week and yeah, a million dreams have been launched by that man, it seems.
Nate Green: Oh, yeah. Well, it was interesting. It was a great conference and I got a lot of respect for Ryan. I didn’t attend his last one. I know some people did. Some people didn’t but anyway, I had the idea at the Ryan Lee boot camp and I pitched it to a few people and then I got back home and I emailed Lou Schuler and he thought it was a great idea. Then he yelled at me for telling other people because apparently an idea in that stage is really vulnerable and he asked if I wanted to self-publish. I looked at self-publishing costs and they’re astronomical. They’re too high and so I’m like, “Well, maybe I will come out with an ebook,” and he kind of put his foot down and said, “Well, if you want to take this all the way, let me know. I will work with you as an uncredited co-author and I will push it through my channel.” So that’s the benefit of networking right there is I actually didn’t do too much.
People think that I like [0:04:24] [Indiscernible] to every publisher in town and tried to find an agent. Really I just emailed a guy that I’ve known for a few years and I made contact with a couple of years ago and told him what I wanted to do. He pushed it with his channel. We used his agent David Black. We used his publisher, Avery Publishing, and I started writing the book. Every time I write a chapter, I would send it over to him. He would make a few changes, make a few alterations and give me some advice and then I would rewrite the chapter and be done.
So the whole book itself was really a product of an idea I had a few years ago but also a product of having that type of network that I could reach out to and get advice from.
Kaiser Serajuddin: Oh, that’s real cool. That’s not what you would expect. You would expect someone really hustling and knocking on a lot of doors but I guess just having those channels there makes everything easy. So yeah, that’s …
Nate Green: That’s the thing, Kaiser is that like I knocked on doors and I was going crazy trying to get this but it was wild and crazy a couple of years beforehand to get these other contacts. At this point when I had this idea, I already knew the fitness editor of Men’s Health Magazine. I knew the fitness editor of Men’s Fitness. I knew Lou Schuler. I knew all these huge guys and so once I broke down their door trying to get advice from them and make myself known and try to be humble and young and confident and hungry at the same time, that’s when everything kind of fell into one place. So it definitely wasn’t easy but it took a couple of years before all that.
Kaiser Serajuddin: OK, I get it. So you did actually have to do all that hustle and break down those doors in the beginning.
Nate Green: Oh, yeah. I don’t think there’s a way around that. It’s a matter of how it works out.
Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. All right. Yeah. So we covered a lot though. Those are some really good info. The last thing I just want to talk to you about is what it is that you’re up to now. I mean it seems like you’re into a lot of stuff. I think Twitter was kind of invented for people like you and I don’t tweet so I really don’t know what’s going on with you right now. So yeah, so what’s some of the stuff that you have cooking?
Nate Green: Honestly the Twitter thing is something that’s a new phenomenon for me. I’m just trying to get it all worked out. My friend and web designer, Jason, we’re redesigning and re-launching my new site and that should be up – I don’t want to put words in his mouth. Maybe a few weeks from now and I was going to have a bunch of new stuff on there, a lot of videos, more in-depth articles and interviews and things like that.
On the T-Nation front, I’m working fulltime for them, so most of my article writing is through them so I’m traveling quite a bit. I’ve got some trips planned for Vegas, New York, DC, Oregon coming up and just can’t talk too much about that but working on some really big projects there and one topic in particular that I think is going to change the game for guys ages 18 to 35 in terms of how they look at fitness, how they look at training and that’s going to be a huge, huge project that I’m really excited about.
Kaiser Serajuddin: Oh, it sounds real cool, man. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you got on the horizon. All right, Nate. So yeah, thanks for sharing a lot of info with me, with the readers and definitely you’re a guy that we want to keep track off and see what you’re doing next. Thanks a lot, man.
Nate Green: Excellent. Thank you. I appreciate it.
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