Business Podcast Segment Plays Into Pickleball for Dummies Book Deal for Carl Landau
Entrepreneur: Carl Landau
Biz: Pickleball Media
Tilts: 50+ year-olds who don’t want to retire but want to build their (un)retirement good life and pickleball fans
Primary Channels: Podcast – I Used To Be Somebody (2K – 3K per episode)
Other Channels: Blog, newsletter (3.5K), LinkedIn (11.9K), Facebook (610), YouTube (8), Pickleball for Dummies book (+12K copies sold)
Rev Streams: Sponsors, book, tours
Our Favorite Actionable Advice
- Start with an audience: Before Carl launched the I Used To Be Somebody podcast, he and his wife Diana launched a newsletter to ensure they had their audience’s email addresses.
- Get creative: Their newsletter and podcast about second acts also included a segment on life lessons in pickleball, a rapidly growing sport Carl and many in their target audience did, too.
- Listen to listeners: A podcaster listener who once worked on the Dummies publishing series reached out to suggest Carl (and his team) author the version for pickleball.
Carl Landau didn’t follow the Content Inc. model, which recommends focusing your content business on a single content tilt.
Instead, he tackled two – managing (un)retirement and pickleball. Frankly, it might be more accurate to say his tilts manifested themselves.
After spending his career in media and selling his business (Niche Media), Carl faced “retirement.” However, six months before the sale closed, his wife Diana advised him to figure out what he would do when the emails and phone calls stopped.
Carl came up with the idea of creating a podcast about starting a second act. But before he did, he got advice from his company’s new owner. Podcast creators don’t get valuable audience data — just download numbers and locations. Instead, Carl should start with a newsletter to get the audience’s email addresses.
For three months, Carl and Diana did a weekly newsletter and built their list. Then, he added the podcast – I Used To Be Somebody. He interviews people who had been successful in their first careers and pivoted to interesting second acts. The podcast was weekly between September 2020 and December 2021 before Carl switched to a more manageable monthly schedule. He’ll publish his 83rd episode this month.
Both the newsletter and podcast include a segment related to his favorite sport to play – life lessons from pickleball featuring his coach Maureen “Mo” Nard. Pickleball was growing like crazy and still is, especially for adults in their 50s and 60s – the same target audience for his podcast.
“People loved it, even people who don’t play pickleball,” he says.
It also became the name of his content entrepreneurial adventure – Pickleball Media.
Little did he realize in 2020 just how much pickleball would play a role in his content business.
Becoming a Dummies authorIn 2021, Katie Purdum from Indianapolis, who listened to I Used To Be Somebody, sent an email with this question: “Are you interested in writing Pickleball for Dummies?”
She used to work at Wiley & Sons, publisher of the well-known Dummies series. She knew pickleball would be a great topic given its popularity, particularly with the older generations who still buy print books.
On Oct. 11, 2022, Pickleball for Dummies (448 pages) debuted, authored by Carl, Diana, Mo, and fellow coach Reine Steel.
It took nine months to get to the release date, including four months of writing. “We actually got a pretty good deal because I’ve been in the publishing business, so I have some sense of the money part,” Carl says.
His media experience also meant Carl understood book promotion better than most. “Authors just think, ‘I wrote the book, and they’ll magically do something.’ [Publishers] will distribute it and do some promotion, but we knew we would have to promote it,” Carl says.
Pickleball Media used its newsletter subscriber list. Even better, they used Reine’s list from her site, Playtime Scheduler, an organizing and scheduling tool for pickleball players with listings of over 11K courts worldwide.
To date, Pickleball for Dummies has sold over 12K copies.
Adding travel to the businessMost recently, Pickleball Media added travel to their offerings for both the second-act and pickleball audiences.
They partnered with Taste Vacations to create custom tours. The I Used To Be Somebody World Tour will stop in Tuscany in September and Portugal next spring. They will combine in-person sessions to delve deeper into unretirement plans with excursions to fascinating destinations in each location. In October, the pickleball crew will have their adventure in Arizona. Carl, who earns a small percentage of the revenue and the free trips, says almost all the spots have been sold.
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