Self-made millionaires are a class apart in themselves, aren’t they?
They are examples of what determination, dedication, and discipline can achieve for you.
To be successful, you need to work hard, and also be smart.
You need to act on your strengths, learn skills, and grab every opportunity that comes knocking at your door.
This is what’s so special about the self-made millionaires – they’re smart, go-getters, and winners.
They know how to make the best use of the resources and time. And most importantly, they believe in themselves.
This reminds me of an age-old saying that “winners don’t do different things, they do things differently.”
You and I can also be winners by taking cues and lessons from these winners.
That’s why; I’m going to interview such a winner here who became a self-made millionaire just at the age of 21! Can you believe that?
Yes, he’s different. He went against the conventional system and created a revolution in the publishing industry.
He’s 24 now and teaching people how they can use their hidden resources and potential to craft the path to a successful future.
I’m talking of Chandler Bolt.
Chandler was included by the Influencive magazine as one of the “Top 30 Entrepreneurs under 30, ” and he became a five-time bestselling author only at the age of 22.
In 2015, the Business Insider magazine predicted that his Self-Publishing School would be a success. It sure did, and it’s now raking in millions.
Chandler’s Self-Publishing School (SPS) has disrupted the traditional publishing industry by teaching people to self-publish their books on the Amazon platform and become bestseller authors themselves.
I’ve been following Chandler since 2016 when I promoted his Self-Publishing School launch. I was happy to get rave reviews and feedback of his courses.
The Self-Publishing School’s once-in-a-year launch in 2018 starts in a few days.
As a part of the pre-launch, Chandler is offering free training for first time authors consisting of three videos.
If you too want to be a winner, grow your business, get expert status, or earn passive income then click here to register and receive Chandler’s free video training series to know how self-publishing can help you. More information is given at the end of the post.
This is an excellent opportunity. Make a smart move and grab it. You got nothing to lose!
Without further ado, here’s my interview with Chandler. I had sent him my questions, and he preferred to reply by audio so that you can listen to his answers in his voice.
Chandler Interview Audio
(please press play and wait for sometime for the audio to play : length – 11min 48sec)
I hope you heard and liked the interview. If you’ve anything to say, please share it in the comments at the end of this post.
However, if you prefer to read, then here’s the transcript of my chat with Chandler Bolt, the founder, and CEO of Self-Publishing School (SPS) that guarantees success.
Welcome to Aha!NOW, Chandler!
Transcript of Interview with Chandler Bolt
Hey Harleena, this is Chandler Bolt recording this audio to answer your questions. First off, just to say thank you for your support of the SPS launch.
Q1. Hi Chandler, I’ve already written a bit about you, but I’d like it to come directly from you – I’d like you to introduce yourself to my blog audience – who you are, where do you live, and what do you do?
Chandler: So, my name is Chandler Bolt. I’m the CEO and founder of Self-Publishing School (SPS). I live in San Francisco, California, originally from South Carolina.
And, I run Self-Publishing school and as a company, we teach people how to write and publish their first book and use it to grow their income in their business. So, especially geared towards entrepreneurs.
Q2. Okay, let’s start back from your humble beginnings, the days when you were in school. Chandler, you say that you were not the student who got an A+ grade in English – you didn’t even enjoy writing in school. How come you developed a love for writing and authored your first book at a young age?
Chandler: Yes. So for me, writing my first book – it came out of necessity. I felt like I had knowledge that I could and should share with friends and with people who were important to me.
So I had experiences like life experiences from running my first six figure business while being in college.
And I learned lessons during that time that I felt like I needed to share with my friends and so I just originally wrote it. And the goal was for it to be a PDF that I could give to them. But we decided to sell it on the Amazon.
Then the book brought in close to $7000 in the first month, continued to bring in thousands of dollars month after month after month in passive income, and pretty much the rest was history.
Q3. What and who influenced you in your initial years? Your parents were in the construction and real estate business. You sure have entrepreneurship in your blood! I learned that you were also awarded the Entrepreneur of the Year by Young Entrepreneurs Across America award in 2012. Tell us what all kinds of business you did to hone your skills before starting the Self-Publishing School (SPS).
Chandler: So, my parents were definitely a huge influence for me in my early years. I kind of started back at Scout Camp when my mom sent me a bunch of snacks to scout camp and I ended up bartering and selling pretty much all of them and buying knives and just all this crazy stuff at Scout Camp.
Then, I ran a canteen in high school, out of my high school, made a couple of thousand dollars there, and basically, felt like I got paid to go to school which was pretty cool.
Then I ran a landscaping lawn care and pressure washing business in high school that did a little over $10,000 in profit so that money I saved up to help during college so that I didn’t have to get a job during college.
And then, I ran a business – it was an internship basically like a franchise type internship, where I ran student painters. So, it was an exterior house painting company, and I took that to six figures in seven months, and I was the number one business in the country – number one big business in the whole company!
So, that’s actually what got me that ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ award in 2012. And I want to say I was 18 or 19 years old when I did that, so I had multiple businesses before then. I definitely had some failures as well, and then ended up starting self-publishing school after I dropped out of school.
Q4. Chandler, instead of becoming a real estate tycoon, you literally created a typhoon in the self-publishing industry – what motivated you to choose the self-publishing industry? What gave you the idea to start the Self-Publishing School?
Chandler: These are such great questions, Harleena. So, why I decided to do this was because people kept asking about it, you know I had successfully published two books and they did really well one for myself and then one for charity, and I helped a friend do it.
And people just kept asking me about how I was doing this, and I was working on a business that was just failing at the time (but) this was doing really well.
So, I decided, you know what, if people keep asking about it, might as well see if I can sell this. So, we did a little test pilot – we sold 44 people into the class and brought in about $86,000.
And that’s when we said, okay we can get behind this, the success rate was extremely high, and we’ve just kind of grown it from there.
Q5. One of your earliest bestseller books was called “The Productive Person.” Tell us about some productivity and time management tips or tools for bloggers, entrepreneurs, and marketers. What should one do to be productive?
Chandler: That’s a huge question, and there’s so much that I wrote an entire book about it but just a couple of things that people can do to be really productive.
I’m a huge fan of monthly goals, so I set monthly goals that match up with my yearly goals that outs me to drill down into weekly and even daily. That’s very very important.
And then the last thing I would give because I could talk for a really long time on this is to have a have a morning routine.
I follow the “American Morning” by Hal Elrad and that’s highly recommended. It’s my morning routine ever since I started that at the beginning of 2014, my life and my business has never been the same. So I’m real big fan of making sure you have a morning routine.
Q6. You hated reading and writing, yet you’ve come up with around five or six bestsellers on Amazon. Can others also do a “Chandler” even if they’re not expert writers or well-known authors? What does one need to be a self-published author and what would be your suggestions to all those wanna-be bestseller authors?
Chandler: So, we have a post on the SPS blog, and that’s a great place for people to get started – “How to Self-Publish a Book in 2017”. I’ll include a link for you to that. That’s a really great place to get started.
But I’m a firm believer; you know as they say that the best players are often the worse coaches. And in a lot of times, the worst players are the best coaches. So that’s kind of a sports analogy, and for me, I feel like the same is true for writing.
You know I was a C level English student, very bad at writing, and so I feel like now I teach it better than anyone else because I was so bad at it. So, I understand what it’s like to really struggle, and I understand what it’s like to feel like you can’t do something.
So, I’m just a firm believer that everyone has a story inside them. Everyone has a message that they can and should share with the world, and it’s just a matter of figuring out how to write the book, and that’s kind of the roadmap that we provide and that I teach that roadmap to do it. So I’m just a big believer that if I can do it, anybody can do it.
Q7. You also wrote books on “Productivity Hacks for Entrepreneurs,” “Book Launch,” “How to not suck at writing your first book,” and your most recent book “Published – the proven path from blank page to published author.” You’re certainly an authority and expert on self-publishing. Tell us how easy or difficult a book publishing process is, and – what are the steps to self-publishing a book?
Chandler: So, I will just kind of recant back to that “How to Self-Publish a Book in 2017” post. That answers your question here for how to self-publish a book. But let’s see, I’ll give a couple of other things here.
It’s much easier – it’s easier than it’s ever been because of Amazon – and Amazon allows people to self-publish books, and so it’s easier to get your book out there than ever.
And really, there are multiple steps there – there’s writing the book, there’s getting it edited, then there’s formatting it, there’s actually publishing it and then the marketing of the book. So, I’ve broken it down to kind of five steps, and those are the five steps of the process.
Q8. You’re once again launching your acclaimed and successful Self-Publishing School course this month. Tell us more about what you offer; what do people really do once they are in SPS? Can bloggers, entrepreneurs, and marketers manage the SPS tasks alongside doing what they do for a living or business?
Chandler: Yes, absolutely. So we designed the program – it’s a step by step roadmap so literally from “I have an idea” all the way to your “publishing this book on Amazon,” and that’s from “Idea to Publish Bestseller in 90 days”. And that’s a bold promise, but we hit it all the time, and it’s not just a stick.
You know we’ve had students do two books in 89 days. We’ve had so many people hit that 90-day mark. And so that’s really the way the program is designed. And it’s also designed so that you can be successful with only 30 minutes to an hour a day.
So, we have literally a day by day roadmap that says, hey here’s what you need to do today. Here’s how you need to spend your 30 minutes. Here’s your assignment.
So, it is broken down because we know that the people who take our course are exactly as you described – bloggers, entrepreneurs, and marketers. For the most part, we know that you know if you’re in any of those professions, you’re probably pretty busy, so we lay it out so that it’s pretty simple.
Q9. Do you accept international students in SPS? How many bestseller authors has SPS produced so far? What really makes SPS different, or what’s the USP of SPS?
Chandler: Ha ha, a lot of acronyms there. Yes, our unique selling proposition is helping people go “from blank page to a published author in 90 days, ” and especially it’s showing people how to use their book to grow their business.
That’s what really sets us apart as we’re very much non-fiction focused. We have a ton of fiction authors that have been successful through the program, but we’re very much non-fiction focused.
Let’s see, yes we accept international students. One of our great students is Jyotsna Ramachandran. She’s been extremely successful with the program. I mean she’s just a prime example of that.
We have a ton of international students all around the world. I mean we’ve had thousands of students go through the program, and you know whether it’s Australia, New Zealand, India, Belize… I mean I was looking at a country map the other day, and it’s insane how many countries are on there.
Q 10. Chandler, I wanted to ask you many questions, but this is the last one for this interview. This is a bit personal too. What does success mean to you? What is your concept of happiness, and what do you do to be happy in life? Also very importantly, how do you balance your personal and professional life?
Chandler: Those are all great questions, so what does success mean to me. Success to me means doing something that I enjoy and that I believe in.
And I heard success is defined as “continuous progress toward a worthy goal.” And I think that’s the best definition that I could give and that’s not my definition, that’s someone else’s. I’ve forgotten who said that but it’s continuous progress towards a worthy goal, and that’s what I really think it is, and it’s just being happy enjoying what you’re doing and making continuous progress towards something that not only you’re passionate about, but you deem as worthy.
Now, the second part of this question – ‘What is your concept of happiness.’ To me, it’s loving what I do, loving where I live, and loving who I’m living life with.
And to answer your last question – ‘how do I balance personal and professional life.’ I don’t think I do a great job at this, especially this phase of my life is very professional heavy and is very business heavy. But the way that I balance it’s kind of the only way I know how is I’m fully ON, or I’m fully OFF.
So, I travel a bunch. I take a bunch of trips; I go snowboarding, I do fun things. And then when I’m in work mode, I fully work so I’m up at 6 AM, I’m working you know all the way till 6-7-8-9 o’clock at night. I might meet somebody for dinner. I’m going to bed, and then I’m doing it again. So when I’m ON, I’m very very very ON, and when I’m OFF, I’m completely OFF. That’s how I balance between the two.
So, there you have it, there are the answers to your questions. Thanks so much Harleena, and once again appreciate your support with the launch.
Winding Up
Thank you, Chandler, for taking out time for this interview. 🙂
It’s interesting to know about your life, your experiences, your views, and your success. I’m sure the readers too would gain useful insights from this interview and takeaway your valuable suggestions.
I’d like to remind again that the Self-Publishing school is going to launch soon, and this happens only once in a year because there are a limited number of seats.
If you’re interested in leveraging the power and potential of a book to grow your business, to become famous, or to create a new stream of revenue, then do not miss out on Chandler’s FREE training course for first-time authors that’s available only for a short time.
I highly recommend this free course and the SPS courses, as they are worth every penny!
That’s all in this interview, and do let me know your thoughts in the comments.