Most people think a book is the finish line.
Modern authors know it’s the starting point.
Book Is the Hook breaks down how thinkers, founders, consultants, and creators use books to build authority, open doors, and create real leverage.
Host Eric Koester is an award-winning entrepreneurship professor, author, and founder of Manuscripts, where he’s helped thousands of professionals turn ideas into published books and high-impact platforms.
Each episode explores one core question:
How do you use a book to change your trajectory, not just your bio?
You’ll hear behind-the-scenes conversations, frameworks, and case studies on:
- Turning a book into clients, speaking, and paid opportunities
- Using writing as a low-risk, high-upside career bet
- Building a platform while the book is still being written
- Why most “author brands” stall and how modern authors avoid it
This isn’t a podcast about writing better sentences. It’s about using a book as leverage in a noisy world.
Episodes
Sunday Apr 30, 2023
Sunday Apr 30, 2023
Most people don’t fail because they aren’t talented.
They fail because their ego can’t survive the early stages of being bad at something.
In this episode, Eric Koester talks with Matt Thomas, world champion in chessboxing and founder of Brawl for a Cause, about what actually creates commitment when the work gets uncomfortable.
Matt has taken hundreds of everyday people through a 90-day fight program built on the hero’s journey. He’s seen the same pattern over and over: when the goal is status, people quit. When the goal is purpose, people get gritty.
They also dig into a wild personal story, Matt goes from losing to an eight-year-old at speed chess to winning a world championship in India, by mastering the one skill most people ignore: the transition between intensity and focus.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How to build commitment that survives embarrassment
- The difference between purpose and performative ambition
- How to use the hero’s journey as a real execution system
- A practical approach to worst-case thinking (stoicism)
- The transition skill: shifting from chaos to clarity on command
This one’s for anyone building something that scares them, a book, a business, or a new identity.
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