Anna David's Blog, page 14

How Authors Can Get Media Attention with Kristin Marquet

 

Kristin Marquet is the owner and creative director of Marquet Media, LLC, where she executes client campaigns, develops partnerships with leading brands and entrepreneurs (like me!) and gets her clients media attention everywhere from Inc and Forbes to Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur and so many more.

With an academic background and advanced studies in data science, business, and public relations, Kristin has attended Boston University, New York University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kristin is also a member of the Young Entrepreneur Council.

In this episode, we discussed how authors can get booked on TV and featured in interviews, the secret websites that showcase what sources journalists are looking for and why it's crucial to figure out your angle.

Want links to those secret websites? Here they are:

HARO
SourceBottle.com
QWOTED.com
JournoRequests

RELATED EPISODES

Talking About Your Book on TV and Podcasts with Media Coach Susan Harrow

    How Do I Get Media Attention From my Book?

Cameron Herold on Generating Free PR and Creating a Vivid Vision for Your Book

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE OR CLICK HERE TO GET THE POD ON ANY PLATFORM

How Authors Can Improve Their Google Footprint with Josh Greene

 

Josh Greene is the CMO for The Mather Group, a digital agency that helps companies manage how they’re found online—through Wikipedia and Search Engine Optimization—and drives targeted high-value leads for B2B companies.

In other words, he's the guy to contact if you want a presence on Google—before or after launching your book. He tends to help founders who are already "out there" improve their visibility but he's also full of tips on how anyone can control their own Google narrative.

In this episode, we discussed how challenging it can be to get a Wikipedia page if you don't already have one, ways to improve your chances of getting one and the three steps you should take right now if you want to control what people find when they Google you.

RELATED EPISODES

What to Do 60 Days, 30 Days and 7 Days Before Your Launch

Cameron Herold on Generating Free PR and Creating a Vivid Vision for Your Book

Katie DePaola on Building Your Brand with a Book

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE OR CLICK HERE TO GET THE POD ON ANY PLATFORM

Talking About Your Book on TV and Podcasts with Media Coach Susan Harrow

 

Susan Harrow is a world-renowned media coach, marketing strategist and author of the best-selling book, Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul (HarperCollins).

We met in a cave in Mexico, which isn't untrue but also just makes a better story than the literal truth. And that way of explaining our relationship is highly relevant in this case because our conversation was all about how to tell your story in the media in a way that's compelling—and gets viewers interested in your book. My big takeaway from the interview was, after doing media for over a decade, I had a lot more control over how I was presented than I realized.

For over 32 years, Susan has helped thousands of CEOs, entrepreneurs and thought leaders shine on Oprah, 60 Minutes, Today, Good Morning America, Fresh Air, Marketplace, NPR and CNN—without selling their soul. Her course, The Zen of Fame: Your Genius Gone Viral™, shows people how to promote themselves with integrity and spirit. 

FIND SUSAN

PR Secrets

Susan on LinkedIn

Susan on YouTube

RELATED EPISODES

How to Get on Podcasts to Promote Your Book with John Corcoran

How Do I Get Media Attention From My Book?

How Do I Use My Book to Get on Podcasts?

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE OR CLICK HERE TO GET THE POD ON ANY PLATFORM

  

How Authors Can Get Booked to Speak with Topher Morrison

 

Topher Morrison has tips aplenty when it comes to authors getting booked to speak and it makes sense: he is, after all, the founder of Personofi, a firm that specializes in brand messaging for small business owners. He is the author of four best-selling books and was voted one of the top 10 business speakers in Tampa Bay. His extensive speaking career, spanning over the past 30 years, has earned him a global reputation as an expert in mass communication and influence. He has spoken for top execs with American Express, Microsoft and Google, just to name a few.

In this episode, he shared so many gems I'd never heard before—including where authors who have never spoken before can get experience for a reel, the importance of a one-sheet, how to make a book into a speech by using the vignettes in it, why the opening of the speech should not be the same as your first chapter and how to sell your book while speaking without sounding like a douche.

It's all in there!

For more about Topher, go to Topher Morrison. To pick up one of his books, click here. And to see some of his educational videos about how to kill it as a speaker, click here.

TRANSCRIPT:

 

Anna:

Okay Topher, thank you so much for coming to chat with me today.

Topher:

I am stoked. It's been first off way too long since we've chatted anyway. When did we meet each other, 10 years ago, maybe longer?

Anna:

Hold on. It wasn't quite 10 years ago, but this is sort of an awesome thing. I was thinking about it because there's a comedian that I used to know pretty well and I haven't seen him since then. I think it was John Heffernan, right?

Topher:

John Heffernan. We are still good buds. Yes. That's how I met you.

Anna:

But I think what happened is I saw him tweet about you. Or he told me directly. He said, "I know this guy, I work with this guy who's the best speaking coach." And I reach out to you and you were so sweet. And you said, "I'm going to be in LA. I'll just work with you." Or maybe you even said, "I'll come to LA."

Topher:

I can't remember.

Anna:

And I remember because I had this office at WeWork and you worked with me and you really helped me restructure a talk that I had and deliver it. And you are just such a sweet, sweet person and so good at what you do.

Topher:

Thanks.

Anna:

I'm really happy that you're here to talk about something I've never talked about on the podcast and my listeners are very much interested in, which is how do you convert a book into a talk? And how do you use the fact that you're an author to get booked as a speaker? So let's actually do it backward. Because as I always say, if there are two people that a booker is considering, and they're equal, but one has a book, they're always going to book the author. Tell me about that.

Topher:

Every single time they will pick the published author over the unpublished author even if the other speaker is a better speaker and has a better demo reel and is more entertaining. They will almost always, I guess I should probably preserve that, not be so hyperbolic, but they will almost always pick the author. Because there is this perceived notion in society that authors are experts. And that's probably rightly earned as well. At least if it's a good book, they probably are an expert in it and they took a long time, you know, you've written a book, it ain't easy. It's hard. So by the time somebody's gone through all that process, they are probably an expert. But it's a false assumption, but it is a societal assumption that the authors are the experts. Yeah.

Anna:

Yes. It's why we do what we do. Because a lot of our clients are experts, but nobody knows that because they've sort of been working towards their expertise, doing their 10,000 hours of work, and they need that book to show the world.

Topher:

Yeah, they're working on their craft. They're the world's best-kept secret because they're an expert in it and they are bonafide phenomenal and they don't have the book. And there's just no social proof. In fact, the scary part is that, especially in today's society, because publishing has become such a mainstream thing, nowadays the question people get is, "Have you written a book?" And you know, if somebody ever asked you, "Well, do you have any books? Have you written any book on it?" you know you're six months or a year behind if people are asking if you have a book and you don't. You definitely want to have one, no doubt about it. And the only anything better than having one is having two or three or four.

Anna:

Or eight like me, right.

Topher:

Yeah. Ooh.

Anna:

And, oftentimes bookers are quite excited to have a signing. So I think that that's... And/or a lot of speakers will gift their book or they'll say basically, "Hey, if you buy 200 copies, you don't have to pay me." Tell me a little bit about how that works.

Topher:

Yeah. So there are several different packages that you can offer as a speaker when you have a book, which is just what you just said. You have your speaking fee and then you will gift a certain number of books. Or you could have bought my book and I will speak for free. And something people might say, "Well, why is that important?" Because the monies to buy the books come out of a different account than the money to pay the speakers in large corporations. So they may have already blown their budget on their conference for their speakers, but yet they still have money in their budget for swag bags. And by the way, that's a great way to say, "We'll get the books in time for you to put them in your swag bags," and they love that as well. So it comes out of a different purse. And so, while you may have a budget that you have to stay within the speaker fees, the book fees could be added. And it's just a great way for you to have more flexibility and still get maximum dollars from that event.

Anna:

That's so interesting. I've never thought about that. And then, of course, if you have a business and let's say you one client is worth anywhere from a thousand dollars to a hundred thousand dollars, it is well worth the investment in the $3 a book or whatever it's going to cost for you to gift that.

Topher:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Although, definitely don't gift it first, sell it first. And then if they don't buy, then go down to hard costs. And then if they don't buy, then you can gift. Start off with the price that makes you the most amount of money, obviously. Because like I said, sometimes these big corporations don't bat an eye. Remember this, the one thing I love to tell people when they're thinking about charging their speaking fees and like, "Oh, how much is the right fee and blah, blah, blah, blah," remember that the bar tab at a conference for a large corporation will outweigh your speaking fee by at least five times, at least five times. Just keep that in mind. It may seem like a big fee for us when we charge it. It is a drop in the bucket for these large corporations that are hosting and spending $300,000, a half million, $2 million, $10 million on their annual conferences. A $10,000 or a $20,000 speaking fee is nothing for these companies.

Anna:

Let's say I'm a first-time author. And my book, maybe I feel, because I hear people say this, not qualified to be an expert, even though I have all this hard-earned personal experience, but I don't have a master's degree or I don't have whatever, and I go, "Okay, I want to be a speaker." How do I start?

Topher:

Okay. And you don't have a book or you do have a book?

Anna:

You do have a book. You have your first book and you're like, "Okay, here we go with speaking. What do I do?"

Topher:

Perfect. Well, at the risk of sounding self-promotional, hire a speaking coach for one, because you could have the best information in the world and if you don't know how to present it in a palatable way, they're never going to book you back. So you absolutely want to do that. And by the way, you should probably get a media coach as well, because you're going to be asked to speak on TV or on the radio. And if you've never been in front of a camera or you've never had a microphone shoved in front of your face, it can be quite intimidating. Anna, you know this. You've done this for years. So for you, it's second nature. But if you can recall back to that first time you were on the bright lights in the camera, it's unnerving, right? And so you could have all the... The natural law of memory, it is inhibited when you are relaxed. It is enhanced when you're relaxed, it's inhibited when you're stressed. And nothing can cause more stress to a new time author than is the first time they're on a show. You could forget your damn name when you're on TV. So hire a media coach for sure or a speech coach.

Topher:

But beyond that, and I'm not trying to push my services either, I'm really not. What I'm saying, though, is that the delivery is as important as the knowledge. And that's the point that I want to make. Absolutely. Yeah. So you want to make sure you have that. Then once you do that, so the question is you're a new time... You want to break into the speaking gig, you need to have a one-sheet. It is the most important marketing piece for a speaker. It's more important than a sizzle reel, by the way, is the one sheet. The one-sheet is exactly what it sounds like. It's one piece of paper. It probably has your picture. It has your brief bio. It has a highlight of what you are going to learn in the keynote or one of the takeaways that the audience will get. And it probably has some quotes from people that are impressed by you that have some name notoriety that people if they were to see those quotes who go, "Well, if this person's saying they're good, they must be amazing." That's really all it is.

Topher:

And oftentimes, the one-sheet will make a bigger impact than the sizzle reel. Because the sizzle reel requires a computer to watch. And keep in mind, sometimes these board meetings where you've got the planner and you've got the board and they're all sitting around, they don't have time to sit there and watch 15 different speaker reels. So you're lucky if they'll watch it. They probably won't. What they're going to do is they're going to refer to the person who found you, who's [inaudible 00:09:02] and saying, "Hey, this is a great speaker. Here's their one sheet." And they look at it and they go, "Yeah, they look like they're smart. I like the photo. It was a professional headshot. It doesn't look like it's a stupid selfie." By the way, also be sure that you're investing in a good professional one sheet. And it just gives a quick highlight. That's oftentimes all they make the decision. They don't need to see the sizzle reel.

Anna:

I'm curious, so they'll book speakers without seeing how they speak.

Topher:

Yeah, absolutely. It depends. If you were referred to them, almost always they don't need to see the sizzle reel. If you're the one knocking on their door, doing the Oliver Twist, "Please sir, may I have a cup of porridge," then yeah, you might need to get them to watch the sizzle reel to know that you're good. But for the most part, you want to get your message out to as many people as possible so people who are on those committees hear about you and then they come to the committee and they go, "Oh my God, I saw this person on YouTube," or, "I saw this person on a podcast," or, "I heard this person on a podcast. They were amazing. I think they'd be great for our presentation." It can literally boil down to that. And they're like, "Yeah, good. Let's get them booked."

Anna:

Okay, but so then, and I remember how I solved this, here's the problem, you go, "Okay, I want to get booked. I don't have a sizzle reel because I've never spoken." So how do you get around that?

Topher:

Okay. Well, there are a couple of things. Nowadays, at the risk of aging myself, back in my day, it was hard to get video production. But nowadays, for crying out loud, you've got a 4k camera on your phone. You can set something up. It doesn't have to matter. Have a small event at your house if you have to, invite some people over. If you don't have a nice house, go to your friend's house who's got a nice house, I don't care. And do a quick presentation. Have it set up. The only thing that I'd recommend is that if you're going to set up an iPhone or a smartphone, don't use the microphone. As powerful as phones are in their high definition, 4k recording quality, they still suck when it comes to the recording of audio. So go get one... Nowadays, by the way, it used to be like an $800 lapel mic you'd have to get, nowadays, you can get it for 50 bucks, you can get these wireless lapel mics that plug right into your phone, you clip them, and the sound is just impeccable. It's beautiful. And just do something like that just so they know that when you get up in front of people, you're not going to stumble and fall and make a fool of yourself. It can literally be something as unofficial as that.

Topher:

But also, it's not that hard to get booked to speak nowadays. There are so many organizations from One Million Cups up to your chambers of commerce, all of the animal clubs, the Elks, the Moose, the Eagles, whatever. Those people are starving for speakers to come in. And just reach out to all of the local chapters, all of the local organizations that are in some level of professionalism and just say, "Hey, you know what? I've just published my first book. It's on this topic. And I think that your audience might benefit from it. I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm just trying to get some exposure and some experience speaking in front of the stage. I would love to come out to your group and give them a 20 minute or a 30 minute or a 15-minute presentation," whatever it is that your keynote is, "And there's no catch. There's no sales pitch. I just want permission to record it so I can improve and do better later." And honestly, you could book yourself up a month straight with local chapters for organizations that are just looking for people to come out and speak to their audiences.

Anna:

That's an amazing, amazing tip. So let's say I have my book. How do I make my book into a speech?

Topher:

Okay. Remind me, by the way, before we get off this call, to share with your listeners some techniques on how to sell the hell out of their books when they speak without being a salesy, douche-baggy guy. So remind me to do that.

Anna:

Love it.

Topher:

So what your question was, how do you turn the book into a speech? So let's first break down what a speech comprises. A speech, the best analogy that I can give, and I'm going to roll credits to this, by the way, to a gentleman by the name of Bill Gove. Now, I did not learn directly from Bill. I learned from his mentee, which is a guy named Steve Seebold, and he's a good friend of mine. And Bill Gove by the way, is kind of like the grandfather of motivational speaking. He is the guy who started it all. All of the great speakers that we admire love today, most of them are trained by this guy named Bill Gove, 30, 40 years ago. And he had it so well. He said, "A keynote speech is nothing but..." I'm paraphrasing his statements here, "A keynote speech is nothing but a concert in spoken word." So you want to have, just like if you were to go to a concert, you want to have your songs rehearsed. You want to be able to know in what order those songs are going to be played. And you want to have practiced those songs so well that if something were to happen on stage, it wouldn't throw your game off. In fact, you could even improvise and play around with that a little bit and make it look like it's effortless.

Topher:

So think of your speech as a concert in spoken word. And your concert is broken down into short little songs. Yours are vignettes. And a great speech is made up of short little vignettes, no more than five minutes apiece, as short as 30 seconds apiece. And they are stacked together one after another, in whatever order makes the most sense for the flow and the feel of the concert, just like a concert. You want to start off with something dynamic, but not your best hit. You want to start off with something that just kind of warms up the crowd. And then you want to build up. And then at some point in time, you need to slow down and you need to relax and you got to put the ballad on. Because you can't have a concert that's just loud, nonstop. And then after the slow, then you got to build it back up again. And presentations have that same flow. I call it the charisma pattern, by the way, which is that there is a cadence to a presentation, which is you start off at a medium pace, you work up into a louder, faster pace, and then as you get louder and faster, then you drop it down to something slow and soft.

Anna:

It's interesting because a book, the best, the most effective way to do a memoir is to have your first two chapters be the bottom, the most dramatic, and then you move into childhood so that doesn't... And then you start going chronologically. And then around chapter eight, you catch up to whatever that first chapter was. And that's not what you do with speaking.

Topher:

No. Yeah. So interestingly enough, the same strategies and skills that make a great book a great book, do not translate into what makes a great presentation. Nor do great strategies and skills as a speaker in a live audience translate to being a great speaker on camera as well. There are differences between all of those things. But there are different environments. I'm glad that you brought that up. It makes a big difference. With the presentation, you don't want to start off with your best. You want to just kind of warm up the crowd a little bit. Because let's face it, they're still sussing you out. If they bought your book, at some level, they're kind of convinced. But remember, buying a book is this person has something I need and I want to hear it. But in a presentation and a keynote, it's completely the opposite. It's, "Who is this yahoo, and why do I have to sit here and listen to them speak?" Totally different market. So you kind of got to win them over. And if you go in too hard, too fast, you're like that guy at the bar who's just hitting on the girls a little bit too fast and too hard. Slow your roll, cowboy. Just bring it down a notch or two. Be cool.

Anna:

Yeah. You don't walk up and propose.

Topher:

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe you don't even walk up. Maybe you just sit there and just let them come to you. You got to know your game, right?

Anna:

Look at that. And so how do you know, do you need 10 anecdotes? How many do you need? Let's say this is a 10-minute speech. Do you need 10 anecdotes?

Topher:

Sure. Fantastic. Yeah. Listen, if you could do 10, I'll call them vignettes, because that's my language, but an anecdote is the same thing, yep, 10 anecdotes, 10 vignettes in 10 minutes would be an unbelievably awesome speech. Most people are not that well-rehearsed. They could maybe get two to three vignettes out in a 10-minute speech. Only a pro could do 10 in 10 minutes. And I always think back to, and I'm sure you've heard this quote, I believe it was Mark Twain, who said, "I apologize for not writing a shorter speech. I didn't have time." Or something to that effect. I'm sorry it was so long. I didn't have time to write a shorter one, or something like that.

Anna:

It's been attributed to so many people. Allegedly, it was a note to his wife, and who knows who he is. And it said, "I wanted to write you a short note. I wanted to..." Oh, you know. Yeah. That basically it's harder to do short than it is long is the point.

Topher:

Yeah, yeah. You get the idea. Same thing with the presentation. If I just wanted to tell some ideas and I didn't have them rehearsed, I would ramble on and on, I would get derailed, I would come back and I would be disheveled. And I would be like, "La, la, la, la." But on a keynote, you cannot do that. You have to have everything you're going to say rehearsed and prepared so you know how to do it. Now, the question is how many vignettes do I need for an amount of time? What I would say to that is this, it's not so much how many vignettes for a certain amount of time, it's just that do you know how much time each vignette takes?

Topher:

So create a vignette book with all the different stories that you have. And by the way, go into your book. This is back to your original question, how do you convert a book into a keynote? You take the best stories in your book. You bring them out of the book and you say, "Okay, what are the lessons or the big takeaways that this story in my book reveals?" And by the way, you could twist your stories just slightly to focus on something just slightly different. And one story you could have 10 or 15 different takeaways that you would use depending upon the audience that you're speaking with. So for example, oftentimes you'll hear keynote speakers, they'll say something like, "And we will customize the presentation to your audience." They don't. The good ones don't anyway. But what they do is they customize the takeaways to the audience, but the stories are always the same. And they're repeated the exact same way every single time with the right inflection because it's a song in spoken word. You got to practice it. But you do want to know what those takeaways and those lessons are.

Topher:

And then what I do is when somebody books me, I say, "Okay, well what are the current challenges that your company's dealing with? What are the things, what are the takeaways that your audience wants?" And then when they give those to me, then I go, "Okay, now what stories do I have that would fit into that category?" And then I'll apply that story to that takeaway. And then I just simply go, "All right, well, this is the number of takeaways," and I add up, this is a three-minute speech, this is a five-minute speech, this is a 30-second speech. And I add them all together and then I've got my presentation length. Now, sometimes though, your committees, your speaking committees, will go, "We just want them motivated. We just want them to be grateful that they're here at the conference. That's fine. We just want them having fun." "Okay, good. Then leave it up to me and I'll do my thing. How much time do you want me to speak?' And they'll say 45 minutes. And then you go, "Great." And then you go through and you put your song list together of all your different vignettes that add up to 45 minutes.

Topher:

Now, here's the cool thing about breaking a speech down into little bite-size vignettes. I have never in the history of speaking professionally in over 30 years, I have never, ever shown up for a keynote presentation where they have said, "Remember the agreed-upon time we asked you, that's exactly how much time we want you to speak." It has never ever, ever gone that way. This is always what happens. Once again, I'm speaking a little hyperbolic. I'm sure that I had one or two, but I just don't remember them.

Topher:

This is what normally will happen when somebody books you to speak. They'll come up to you backstage, usually five minutes before you're ready to go on, and they'll say something like this, they'll go, "Our next speaker is stuck at the airport. They're not going to be here. I know this is really last minute. I'm so sorry to ask this. I know we only asked you to speak for 45 minutes, but could you speak for 55 minutes?" or, "Could you speak for an hour and 15 minutes? If we have to pay you more, we will." By the way, they will say that too. But if they don't offer, by the way, that's fine. Just be cool. And they'll go, "Can you stretch it out to an hour and 15 minutes?" And then you go, "Absolutely. No problem. Because you know you've got a bank of other stories that didn't make the cut and you're just going to add a couple more of them in, not a big deal.

Topher:

Most commonly, though, that's not what's going to happen. Most commonly, they're going to come to you five minutes before your presentation and go, "Hey, I know we asked you to speak for 45 minutes, but the vice president just showed up and he's on a tight deadline. He's got to get on a plane. He wants to get on stage a little bit of earlier. I hate to do this to you. I know we asked you to speak for 45 minutes. Could you cut your presentation down to 30 minutes?" That happens, I'm going to say that probably happens, and I'm not exaggerating 90-plus percent of the time that's what will happen. And then you smile and you go, "Absolutely, no problem." You don't throw a fit because now you just know, "I'm going to cut a few songs out of my playlist and I'm going to get it down to 30." Whereas if you design a 45-minute presentation that has a beginning and a middle, and then I'm going to tell them what I'm going to tell them, I'm going to tell them and I'm going to tell them what I'm told them, the old Dale Carnegie speech stuff, which is just dead and done now, that doesn't work. Because now what do you? Do you tell the promoter, "No, I'm sorry. My presentation is 45 minutes. I have to do 45."

Topher:

No, what'll end up happening is you go, "Okay," and then you're like, "How do I speak really fast to get it done?" And then you end up going over and you piss off the promoter and they never bring you back. So yeah, take your best stories out of your book, make a list of all the different lessons or takeaways that could come from them. Create your vignette book, which is all a different story. And by the way, you might have five different stories for one point. That's okay too because you know what? They might have loved that point so much you need to drive it home again, and then you have another story as well. But that's the most time-consuming and professional way to build a speech from a book. Take your best stories, pull out the takeaways, build it based upon the takeaways and the time.

Anna:

And is it have a 10-minute, a 20-minute, and a 40-minute version? Do you think that's-

Topher:

No. I think you should just have 30-second to five-minute vignettes. And then when somebody books you, you go, "Oh, I got a 15-minute speech? I'm going to pull out my three best five-minute vignettes," or, "I'm going to pull out my four best three and a half-minute vignettes." And then you just add them up that way. Yeah. If you do it that way, you'll be golden. But that takes practice. It takes preparation. And unfortunately, most people... And by the way, this is just the mark between a professional speaker and a professional who speaks, there's a difference there. The professional who speaks is working on their slide presentation the night before. The professional speaker doesn't even deal with slides because he knows that they're a hassle and is going to entertain the audience with their stories anyway.

Topher:

So a couple of other things. The biggest misconception that I think people make that aren't professional speakers that have been asked to speak and it's their first keynote presentation and they're nervous about it, they think that they need to wow the audience with all of this great information and you're going to change their minds and their hearts and their lives with this dialogue. I think getting in perspective what it is that the keynote speaker does is very helpful. Your job, in my opinion, and I think if you were to talk to most professional speakers, people who run the circuit and they do this for a living, I think that most would probably agree, your job is not to change their lives in 45 minutes. Your job is to entertain the crap out of them for 45 minutes. Get them to laugh, get them to cry, get them to feel, get them to emote. Entertain them for 45 minutes. Don't try to change their lives.

Topher:

Which means you don't need a bunch of slides. You don't need a bunch of bullet points. You're not teaching them strategies and techniques and steps and processes. You're simply telling them stories and entertaining them. And if you do that, think about entertainment, emotion, don't worry about the content, don't worry about having them walk away with three successful strategies. Most people aren't taking notes anyway. Remember, they didn't even know who you were five minutes before you got on stage. So don't think that they're sitting there with baited breath and a pen and paper going, "Entertain me with your amazing words." They're just not going to be there. And I will say this, these smartphones have become the world's best feedback tool for speakers, because you will know exactly how good you are as a speaker based upon how many blue lights you see, glowing faces from the audience. Because they'll be on their phone. If you can see phones lighting up, you know you've lost them. Because they're, "Ah, screw this guy. I'm going to check my text messages now." And so they start-

Anna:

That's the worst.

Topher:

It is the worst. Yeah.

Anna:

But, speaking of the phone, I will say what I do to prep is I do it into my phone, then I listen, then I do practice again, then I listen again, then I practice again, then I listen again. I find listening when I'm practicing really, really as helpful as the practice.

Topher:

Yeah, absolutely. Now I will tell you this, by the way, technology has made our job so much easier as well. There's a difference between... By the way, as an author, everybody knows this, the typed word is different than the spoken word. If you just transcribe audio into a book, it's an average book. I hope I don't offend some of your readers, your listers.

Anna:

Yeah, they know that.

Topher:

Yeah. Don't transcribe your work. It just doesn't sound... It doesn't translate. Well, guess what? It doesn't translate the other way as well. You don't want to sit there and recite or memorize your book because that's not human speech as well. But I do believe that there is a need for a script when you're starting your presentation in your rehearsal. So one of the best strategies right now is to use otter.ai, I think is that software. Holy heck, that thing is incredibly good. So just hit record, start telling your stories and talking, and then it'll transcribe for you. And then you go through. And the strategy that I like is to take three highlighters, a green highlighter, a yellow highlighter, and a red highlighter.

Topher:

And I go through the script after it's been transcribed, and I read through and I highlight red, yellow, green, red is unnecessary dribble, yellow is, "I like it if I have time," and green is, "This is so good I have to keep it in the presentation." And go through the entire speech and just highlight it red, yellow, green, red, yellow, green. And if you're like me and you're being honest, you'll have mostly red, a lot of yellow, and just a few greens. When you're just talking a story out, it'll take 20 minutes sometimes. And you can edit that down to a two-minute story if you give it the time and the attention that it needs, for sure.

Anna:

So great. We have to get close to wrapping up. So how do you sell that book from the stage without sounding douchey?

Topher:

Yeah. Okay. I learned this technique from a guy named Tom Antion. He is one of the few people that when he sends me spam email, I read it because the man just generally makes me laugh. His sales copy is just hilarious. And this was his technique. In fact, I think he had a presentation called How to Sell from the Stage Without Being a Douchebag, I think is what it was called. I was like, "I love this guy already." Here's the technique. You have on stage your book, but you're not going to hold it up and say it's for sale or anything like that. All you do is you take one small piece from your book which is a really golden gem, and you just pick it up and you go, "Let me just read something for you real quick." And then you open it and you just read 2, 3, 4 lines, that's it. And just read it, and you set it down. You can say, "I just want to read something from my book." You can say that. But you just read it.

Topher:

But you're not saying it's for sale. You're not saying it's $29.95, but today you can buy a copy for $10. You don't say any of that stuff. You just read one paragraph out of your book and then you set it down, respectfully, it's a nice piece of art. Set it down. Yep. Don't just throw it off to the side. Set it down. And then you continue with your presentation. That's it. That's all you do. You just read one small... And what happens is people get obsessed. They're like, "I loved what he just read," and they make this assumption, "The rest of the book must be just as good." And they want to buy it. Yeah. And I will tell you, literally, I saw my book sales, I'm not exaggerating, they probably jumped 60%, maybe more. I remember calling Tom going, "Tom, you are a genius. I tried that." And every person I've told that to, they do this technique and they're like, "People were running into the back to buy my book." I'm like, "Yeah, I can't even really explain it other than I think they feel that was so profound, the rest of the book must be just as profound."

Anna:

And you're doing that thing where you're closing the loop, like how marketing people will talk about how you sort of give the first part so that people are psychologically very invested in whatever the ending is.

Topher:

Yeah. Well actually, let's talk about that. Because once again, going back to the biggest mistake people make because they want to give, give, give, give, give, just give so much value, so much content, so much information, if you have 10 steps to transforming your life, don't try to talk about all 10 steps. But here's what you could do. You could say something like this. You could say something to the effect of, "For the past 25 years, I've been trying to narrow down what it takes to succeed in speaking into the most succinct, small, and easy to get patterns. And I've discovered that there are five things, that if every speaker does these five things, they will hands down get standing ovations, sell books at the back of the room without having to sell it. And out of those five, here's the one that I want to talk about today."

Anna:

Oh, that's so good.

Topher:

Right. And now, you didn't say, "But we don't have time to go through all," or you say, "Here's five, but I'm only going to give you one today. But if you want to buy the others, you can." No, you just say, "There are five things. And here's the one that I think is the most relevant today." You make it like, "I picked this one just for you guys." And what a beautiful open loop. They want to know what the other ones are. And by the way, maybe that chapter one, that's that good thing, the big, whatever your 10 steps are, that's the one you... Be the good one.

Anna:

Well, Topher, this has been absolutely fantastic. Tell people how they can reach you. And this is reaching you for help converting their book into a speech as well as help training.

Topher:

Yeah, sure. They can go to tophermorrison.com. That's probably the easiest way to do it. Tophermorrison.com. Yeah. And I have a book on public speaking. It's called The Book on Public Speaking. I get to say I wrote the book on public speaking. Not being self-aggrandizing, it's just the name of the book. It's called The Book on Public Speaking. So they can go to their Amazon and get that if they want to as well. Yeah. But listen, I've got tons of YouTube videos for free. Listen, they don't have to buy anything. They can get a lot of my stuff for free. They just go to YouTube and search for my name.

Anna:

Except of course, by giving out these gems, you were doing exactly what you advise people to do in a speech, which is giving the gem so that they go, "Well, God, booking him and reading that book must just be even better." 

Topher:

Listen, hey, I'm a squirrel trying to get a nut just like everybody else. So I'd be honored if somebody feels so inspired and they would like to do business with me. I would love that. But believe me, I'm just here because I think the world of you. I remember meeting you so many years ago and had such a blast with you. For you to reach back out to me so many years, I was just like, "Oh, this just made my day." I was just thrilled that you reached out. You made my day.

Anna:

You're the best. Thank you so much for doing this. And you know, you listeners, thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you next week.

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Writing a Book About Your Greatest Passion with Robert Sikes

 

Robert Sikes is one of the sweetest men you'll ever encounter.

And that may not be obvious when you first look at him.

Because, you see, he's a bodybuilder and massive.

And I don't just mean massive in terms of bulk. He's also massively influential in the bodybuilding space, as the leading spokesperson about following a ketogenic diet for bodybuilding. He's a natural ketogenic bodybuilder, author and entrepreneur as well as the CEO and founder of Keto Savage, a health and fitness company that offers coaching, training and nutrition for athletes and bodybuilders. He is also CEO and founder of Keto Brick, a company that produces ketogenic meal replacement bars for efficient nutrition with the highest quality ingredients. And he holds first-in-class titles from his bodybuilding competitions within the OCB and WNBF federations and lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife Crystal.

I'm truly honored to be able to say Legacy Launch Pad is launching his book, Ketogenic Bodybuilding, this week. And while he has a built-in audience (his podcast alone has millions of downloads), he still has to have a specific plan in place for how to use the book to build his business.

In this episode, we discussed a few specific launch plans (including releasing the first three chapters of his book as podcast episodes) as well as his ideas for how the book will add to his business—specifically, by selling copies with his Keto Brick bars, using a lead magnet to bring readers to a download and his mailing list and teasing out his upcoming online program. But his greatest message is perhaps this: write your book and build your business around what you were most passionate about as a kid.

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Why Book Quality Doesn't Matter with Angela Lauria

 

Dr. Angela E. Lauria is the founder of The Author Incubator and creator of the Difference Process for writing a book that matters. A Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of several books, she has helped over 1,000 authors write, publish and promote their books and her clients have been responsible for over $100 million in cumulative revenue.

In other words, she's a big believer in using your book to build and grow a business—a woman after my own heart!

In this episode (transcript below), we talked about when the publishing industry broke, how why she believes it's possible to write a book in a week and why the people who read your book are never the people who hire you.

TRANSCRIPT:

Anna:

I would love to have my listeners hear about your approach to books. I think you were very early in going, "Hey, book sales don't matter; it is really about what a book can do for your career." And I really liked that because in a way it was controversial.

Angela:

Oh yeah, it was super controversial. I started in the publishing industry in 1994. I was a senior in college, and one of my professors recommended me to work for this New York Times bestselling author, who was a investigative journalist. And then I worked with all the DC investigative journalists on like journalism e-books. That was the beginning of my career. And they all made money from writing books, and they all had big book contracts, which at the time for like a journalism book was like 500,000 to $2 million book advance. These were dudes, and they were all old white dudes that I worked with, just that's just who I worked with at the time. And these were dudes who had all made money on a salary from a newspaper. All the fancy publishers that I worked with, they would wine and dine the dudes that were producing the content that was making them money.

Angela:

It was very classy. I used to get to go to dinners at like Duke Zeibert's, which was like this CNBC place in Washington, DC, for all the investigative journalists. They were held on a pedestal in a very special way as published authors, like these were the best journalists. And now, instead of making a hundred-thousand dollars a year as a reporter, they were making $500,000 a year to write books. It was beautiful. It is not the way it works anymore, and it's not the way that it works for the coaching and consulting industry. When I started in publishing, there wasn't really an internet in it. There was America Online CD-ROMs. And so when you run into a bookstore, that was how you got books. You were not buying books online. People were afraid to put their credit cards in online. So when you walk into a bookstore, there's about 250,000 books, the average bookstore. When you pick a book from 250,000 books, that book has a very good chance. One out of 250,000 is actually really good compared to what happens now, which is we go to Amazon. There's about 25 million books to choose from with 250,000 books coming out every month. There are 250,000 books published every month. How do you stand out in that? Those numbers don't make sense anymore.

When David Wise, my first boss, was giving up 90% of his revenue to a publisher, he was giving up 90% of his revenue because how the fuck else was anyone going to find his books? We needed an intermediary to take a book from his hard drive and turn it into something and put it in bookstores. People think they're paying publishers for marketing. Publishers don't do marketing; they do B2B marketing to get your book in bookstores. They do printing and logistics. And most of us don't need that anymore. We don't need printing and logistics.

Anna:

I come from traditional publishing, too. And I sold my first book to Harper right when it broke, when everything changed, so I was like right on the cusp. It was 2005. They took me to lunch at Michael's. You know what I mean? That movie, Down with Love, did you ever see that?

Angela:

Yes.

Anna:

I was like, oh, this is my life. It's super glamorous. I'm very important to my publisher. And then I sold six more books to Harper and I just watched it dwindle away. And it kills me, because they never did anything. I'm a very slow learner. Even when I had a New York Times best seller, they did nothing because it wasn't like a number one.

Angela:

Yeah. You weren't Dan Brown.

Anna:

I wasn't Dan Brown. So I listen to people all the time go, oh, I want to go on a book tour. I was like, oh, good luck, good luck. I want that support that a publisher brings. And like, they just don't want to listen.

Angela:

Yeah. Because people have the fantasy. It's like an old fantasy. I remember coordinating David's book tour for a book called Nightmover that he had about a $1.5 million advance on. And they did a 25-city tour. They paid for hotels and flights and dinner. And I had to keep all the receipts, and I sent them in, and they got reimbursed, and then his next book came out and they said, we're going to... Which was '95, I think. Maybe it was '96, beginning of '96. And they're like, "We're going to do five cities for this book." And then by the next book, which I wasn't his assistant anymore, but by the next book, there was no book tour anymore. They were going to set up an AOL, Ask Me Anything, with AOL keyword book. So it's this old fantasy of the way the publishing... And I think the publishing industry even has that fantasy. I don't even think they know how much it's changed.

Anna:

So you have this realization, what year did you realize this is all broken?

Angela:

It was really 2014, and it happened by accident. I had been a ghostwriter, helping people write books, researcher, publicist, since 1994. Then in 2013, I launched The Author Incubator. And that was specifically with the goal of working on personal development books. So all my books before 2013 were espionage, politics, and then technology. Those were kind of my spaces, so I've ghostwritten a lot of books with Microsoft MVPs. Very exciting.

Anna:

Very.

Angela:

The books I would read, I would take the money from ghostwriting a book on Windows Server Backup. And I would take that money and I would go buy personal development books. I would go buy Marianne Williamson books. And all the books I bought were from Hay House. And I was like, why don't I do books like Hay House does? I want to have the next Hay House. I want all those authors.

Angela:

So I started working with those authors, and I realized something in that first year in business that changed everything for me, which was these personal development authors didn't have any fucking clue what they were doing. So everyone I had worked with before, they were like journalists and writers, and they had a strategy, and they were being paid by publishing companies, but that was their salary. And they worked, it was like a job. The only thing they did is they were a writer, and they would get up in the morning and they would go to their office and they would write and research and do interviews. They were journalists. Or I was working with these computer companies. These guys knew nothing. And they were like, "We are going to give you $50,000 to ghostwrite a book for us," and I'd make between 30 and $50,000 a book.

They're like, "We know nothing, you do it." They knew how to make money from software. They knew what they were doing. Personal development authors, I would do all the things I did with my other authors, and these people would change their topic five times, they didn't fucking finish their books. That first year I had 350 clients, maybe it was 250, 350. It was around 300 clients, which is great. Who gets 300 clients in their first year? One person finished her book, Jill Farmer, bless her heart. She like saved my soul I think that year. They didn't even know how to write books. They didn't even know what the fuck they wanted. They wanted to call me and talk about books.

Anna:

How did you find these people?

Angela:

I went to events for life coaches, and I would be like, "Hey, I've been in the publishing industry for 17 years. I'm a ghostwriter and a book coach and an editor," and everything I've been doing, "and a publicist. And if you need help with your book, I'll help you." I think I charged so many different, I didn't know what the hell I was doing either, but I don't know, $50 an hour I think is where I started. I was like, "I will help you with your book." And then I had this crazy idea that people would come to me with a book idea like all my other clients had ever hired me in 17 years. They're like, "I want to write a book about Windows Server Backup." And then six months later we had a book on Windows Server Backup. And I'm like, these people are fucking crazy. They just want to talk about writing a book. If you want to write a book, you'll have it done. It doesn't take that long. It's three to six months.

Anna:

I know. What takes a long time is, first of all, not knowing what you're doing when you're writing. And second of all, making a lot of excuses and claiming writer's block. That takes a lot of time. A lot of time.

Angela:

Oh, yeah. You can spend years on that. And nobody that's a real writer does. Like as a ghostwriter for 17 years, in 17 years I wrote 29 books. I also had a whole other career as an editor. That was my side hustle. In my free time, I wrote 29 books in 17 years.

Anna:

It doesn't take that long.

Angela:

It's really not that fucking hard.

Anna:

It's not. I'm with you. It's not that hard.

Angela:

You might need to do research, and that might take time. Like if you're doing a study over a year, you might need to put the study into the field and wait a year to gather, but writing up your findings, it takes three months to write a book. It's just not that fucking hard. And so I tried all these different things in my first year in business, and then I realized, oh, I'm asking the wrong question. The question isn't, do you want to write a book? The question is, do you have a business that would benefit from a book? Once I switched that question, then I had personal development professionals that had a business, and they were like, "I would like more clients for my fork-tuning sound healing business." I'm like, "Great. I can get you sound healing clients." Or "I do life coaching, and I would like life coaching clients," or "I do career coaching, I'd like career co- "

Angela:

Once I flipped the question and started with what's your business and do you need more clients? Then I went to, we now have a 99.6% completion rate. I think this year we have one person who didn't finish.

Anna:

How many books do you launch a year, and is it under your publishing company?

Angela:

Yeah. So that's a trick question because we did change that during COVID. Our biggest year we did 400 books. This year is definitely a slower year for us on purpose. I moved to the beach, half retired, and I've been much more selective about where I spend my time. I also have a teenager, but I think it will do about 200 books this year.

Anna:

Do they do all the writing and you guide them through it?

Angela:

Yeah. I find it's much faster and better to do your own writing, and I'll tell you why: as a ghostwriter for 17 years…when I write books for people, if you want me to write your book, I'll write it. It's a hundred-thousand dollars now and I'm happy to write your book for you. I don't think you should, though, and this is why. When you write your book, you change. Your brain just gets more organized. And you could think about this. If you ever had to put together a slide deck to pitch anyone anything, your potential clients or an investor or your mother, you have to organize your thoughts to do a slide deck or to write a proposal. And when you write your book, you become a better coach and you get more clients just from your own confident. You'll be like my shit's badass.

If I write it, you'll think I'm a badass. And luckily I already know I am, I don't need help with that. So it will change you and you could do it in less time and with less frustration, because when you work with a ghostwriter, you're going to tell them what you want in the chapter. That's going to take as long as it would take for you to just fucking write it, then I'm going to write it up slightly wrong and you're going to read it, and it's going to be like nails on a chalkboard. You're like, "Why does she say it takes two weeks? I told her it takes two months," but you actually misspoke and said two weeks and you don't remember that, but you would've caught it if it was your own thing. And so you're going to read it, you're going to be annoyed. And then you're just going to rewrite the chapter, or you're not going to read it, and you're going to say "That's good, publish it."

Anna:

I vehemently disagree, but we're all allowed as fellow bad asses!

Angela:

Tell me your perspective. That's just my experience after ghostwriting, I don't know, 50 books now I guess.

Anna:

Well I only ghostwrote one, but it did become a New York Times best seller. So I do think, I do know... And I'm a writer. I wrote for every magazine. I wrote for the New York Times. I majored in writing.

Angela:

Yeah, but did the person who came to you have a book contract?

Anna:

No, we sold it together. I got him the agent. He was a disaster. I don't ghost write at all. I won't do any, it was such a bad experience. I would never write another person's book. And the way I started my company is that so many people came to me and said, "Would you write my book?" And I said, "No, no, no." And finally someone said, "I don't care." So I said, "Look, I'll ask my friend to write it." And then that started the company. I believe if you don't write every day all day and you haven't for a decade, you're not going to write as good a book as someone who does

Angela:

Yeah, I get you on that. I get you on that, but I think that happens in the editing phase.

Anna:

I find it really hard. My team does the editing, I don't do it. I find that I watch them struggle - it's easier to start from scratch than to fix something that's broken.

Angela:

A hundred percent, a hundred percent. But I really feel like if the purpose is to get clients, then the quality of your book, not that it doesn't matter, but if your focus is on writing a really good book and not on attracting clients, then you're just doing something different, not better or worse,

Anna:

Fair enough.

Angela:

Just a different thing.

Anna:

I think that's a middle ground, too. I mean, I think it can be... Look, a lot of people not only don't care about quality, but they can't even tell the difference. They can't even tell-

Angela:

Most people can't tell the difference, and 16% of people read the books they buy. None of them are your clients. The way you know someone is going to buy from you is if they get your book and don't read it. Once they've read it, they're not a client.

Anna:

That's so interesting.

Angela:

Now after they become a client…

Anna:

Then they read it.

Angela:

They will then read your book, but people will read your book after they become a client.

Anna:

Basically, how does it work? People come to you and you say, "Go write the book and we'll help you with the cover, and we’ll launch”?

Angela:

No. We do an elaborate developmental editing process. We're developmental editing every single chapter. There's three months of work before they're allowed to write.

Anna:

Okay.

Angela:

We have to figure out what the fucking book is. Because most people's ideas are horrible, and they would never finish. So for each chapter, we design...We do this for the whole book first. And then we go chapter by chapter and we design a purpose statement, which is like a main topic sentence. And then we have a certain layout that we have them use, and then they come up with 10 slugs. The slugs are what's going to be included in the chapter. You don't have to include all of it. So when you go to sit down to write, I know everything that's going in that chapter. I might not know the order, and I can finesse the sentences, our editors can finesse the sentences, but we've crafted what is each chapter, what's in it, what's the purpose of the book, how do we want the reader to be different?

Once all that developmental editing is done, when you go to write the book, we do it as a timed test. We'll actually proctor it with you. You have two hours to write the chapter. And I want the shittiest job, if that's what it is, but it's just the best job you can do in two hours. I don't care how good it is or how bad it is, just give me something in two hours and no more. And then the editors take it over and we can turn it into good writing.

Anna:

When you say proctor, are you sitting on a Zoom call with them?

Angela:

Sitting on a Zoom call. Ready? Go. You got two hours. And then I do a little Tim from Project Runway and I say, "All right, you got 30 minutes.”

Anna:

Make it work.

Angela:

"Even if you haven't started writing, make it work, because this is your chapter." And then we pull it out of their hands and they can't look back at it until the whole book is done.

Anna:

And then you do copy editing, layout, launch?

Angela:

Yeah. We have three levels of edits. We do a high-level edit, and then we do line edits, which take about six weeks, and then we do a proofread.

Anna:

Yeah, and it's launched under your imprint?

Angela:

Yeah, you asked that before. We've done three things with this. I have an imprint, which is called Difference Press. We also have partnered with companies that have in-store distribution. So we put it out as a collaboration, a Difference Press collaboration with another partner that gets it in bookstores. When we do that, we give up 80% of the book revenue to get it into bookstores. And when COVID hit, I shut down all of those partnerships, because I'm like no one's buying books in bookstores, and they're not buying these books in bookstores. And they're definitely not buying these books in bookstores when the bookstores are shut down. So we canceled all those partnerships, which I had kind of wanted to do anyway, because I looked at how much money we were giving up and the percentage of sales online versus in stores, and it just didn't make sense.

Eight-five percent of our sales were happening online, but we were giving up 80% of the revenue. So we now teach self-publishing, and if people really want their books in bookstores, we can hook them up with partners, but then it's not a collaboration anymore. We make an introduction, and they put it under their publishing label. For most people, I don't see a good reason to put your book... That's not for everyone, but for most people we work with... If you want to make a quarter of a million dollars from your book in a year, don't work with a publisher. We have 76% of our authors make $250,000 in the first year from their book.

Anna:

Not from book sales.

Angela:

Not from book sales, not from book sales.

Anna:

Do you help them set up a system where they're going to get more clients? How does that work?

Angela:

Yeah. We build book funnels for our clients, teach them advertising, show them how to do what we call a thank-you video, so how to connect with their readers, how to build a list from your book. I teach something called the L.O.V.E. Sales Method, which is how to turn your readers into clients by just listening to their problem and offering to help solve it. The focus is get as many readers as possible. We have a really cool calculator. If you go to the author incubator.com/calculator, most of our authors can make $250,000 by giving away about 2000 books, between 2 and 3000 bucks.

Anna:

Who do they give them to?

Angela:

Prospects. We identify prospects. For instance, one of our clients, Lesley Moffat, wrote Keep the Job, Lose the Stress. And she works with teachers, stressed-out teachers. She now has a six-figure consulting business with teachers, and she specifically started with band leaders, high school band leaders. Turns out there are organizations of high school band leaders. Who fucking knew? She's in all those Facebook groups, all those groups. She speaks. We have a keynote speaking coach, as well, Nina Sossamon-Pogue, who trains all of our authors in how to use their book to get speaking gigs. She is the top speaker for high school band leaders. You find a high school band leader, they will know Lesley Moffat. She speaks at those events, and then she gets contracted by schools and teachers to work with them and has a six-figure business as the world's top coach for band directors. Who knew?

Anna:

You're a firm believer, I assume, in the riches are in the niches, like find your niche.

Angela:

Has to be. Has to be. If you do the kind of books that we loved growing up, like if you do the self-love for women in transition, generic books, those books that were successful, like my favorite book of all time from one of my best friends, Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love, that book changed my life and so many others, but it wouldn't sell now. If you are even as good of a writer as Marianne, which is like two people in a million, even now, that book just wouldn't sell the way it did then. There's too many other books.

There's too much other information. There's Netflix. You're competing on a totally different scale. So if you can focus on a group that we can access like band directors, real estate agents, divorce lawyers; if we can focus on a group that we can find, do your spiel on self-love for women in transition, because I can tell you everything in Lesley's book is all about self-love for band directors in transition. But if we can focus that information in a specific group we can reach, and you could be the best in the world in this blue ocean instead of a very, very bloody red ocean, then we can generate revenue.

Anna:

You used to do weekend retreats.

Angela:

Three Days to Done. So very interesting you should ask. I had a castle. The reason we got this castle, which we called the authors castle, was to do... All the rooms were themed. We had the Maya Angelou room and the Pablo Neruda room. All of the rooms had their own theme. And we would bring authors in every weekend, and over the weekend you would write your book. And then when COVID happened, we were like, well, no one's coming over to write their books at our house anymore, so much for that. So we left the castle, which we had a lease purchase agreement, so we kind of had to walk away from $2 million. It was a little bit sad, but we're like it's going to be a long time before someone wants to come over and do a writing retreat. So we paused. And then this year we got a bunch of beach houses in a little town on the Chesapeake Bay.

We now have those houses open to do Three Days to Done again starting in January. So I have my first one, the first week in January. You get a whole house with your weekend. You can take a friend, and we've got like three or four houses that are near each other in this tiny little beach town. So we meet up in the morning on the boardwalk. Everyone gets their assignments. We check in on Zoom during the day. Then we have dinner at night, but everyone's got their own COVID bubble to write in.

Anna:

If people are interested, what are the price points for all of these things?

Angela:

We have our virtual... We call it book week. So we have a virtual version of that, come to my beach house and sit with me and we'll get your book done in three days. So that is $500. Anyone can do it. We do it the last week of the month. It's 500 bucks. At the end of the week, your book will be done. And you don't even have to come in knowing what your book is about. You just have to have a business. If you have a business and you want more clients, come in on Monday, on Friday you will have a finished manuscript. Then if you want to work with us to do the editing and publishing and speaking and marketing, that is, I think it's like a 25K commitment for us to do all your editing, get you Amazon Best Seller status, do all your design, all your marketing, get you coached up to get speaking engagements, build your book funnel, get you out there.

That's a much longer engagement to do all that stuff. But if you just need your book written, 500 bucks, and then at the end of it, we'll tell you exactly how to do everything on your own. By the way, if you do it on your own, you're going to spend a lot more than $25,000 doing it on your own. It's a lot of work.

Anna:

If you want to do it right.

Angela:

If you want to do it right, yeah.

Anna:

You can do it wrong.

Angela:

You could do it wrong for less, for sure. But you'll probably get one editor, they'll flake out. They'll tell you things you don't want to hear. You'll have to get another editor. They'll ghost you. When we do it, it just gets done and we keep it on a timeline. Then our Three Days to Done, when you actually come and stay with us at the beach house and we feed you, and I literally sit next to you when you write your book, those are substantially more. So you pay 25K for the weekend. But at the end of the three days, your book is done, and that does include a round of editing.

Anna:

And you just stay in the beach house.

Angela:

And you have to stay in one of our beach houses and hang out, and hopefully eat crabs, since we're in Maryland, that's what we do here.

Anna:

So if people want to find you, what is the best way?

Angela:

The author incubator.com, and the trick with that is the article, T-H-E, the. If you go to author incubator.com, you won't find it. Although I do own that domain, and I should just set up a re-direct, but here's my take: if you can't figure it out, we weren't meant to work together. So, the author incubator.com. Then if you want to chat with me about your book, there's an application, which is really... It just keeps me organized, because I got a million things going on. So when you fill out the application, it drops you into like an automated funnel for me, telling me who you are and to follow up with you. That is the best way to get to me. A lot of times people DM me and be like, "Hey, I have a book idea. Can I talk to you?" I love you, whoever you are, just fill out the application, because then my team keeps me on track, and I get super disorganized. This will get you put on my calendar and everything will just happen the way it's supposed to.

Anna:

Do you charge for those calls?

Angela:

No. We'll talk about your book, and we'll see if it's a fit to work together and all that good stuff.

RELATED EPISODES

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Why to Write a Book Your Clients Won't Read with Angela Lauria

 

Dr. Angela E. Lauria is the founder of The Author Incubator and creator of the Difference Process for writing a book that matters. A Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of several books, she has helped over 1,000 authors write, publish and promote their books and her clients have been responsible for over $100 million in cumulative revenue.

In other words, she's a big believer in using your book to build and grow a business—a woman after my own heart!

In this episode (transcript below), we talked about when the publishing industry broke, how why she believes it's possible to write a book in a week and why the people who read your book are never the people who hire you.

TRANSCRIPT:

Anna:

I would love to have my listeners hear about your approach to books. I think you were very early in going, "Hey, book sales don't matter; it is really about what a book can do for your career." And I really liked that because in a way it was controversial.

Angela:

Oh yeah, it was super controversial. I started in the publishing industry in 1994. I was a senior in college, and one of my professors recommended me to work for this New York Times bestselling author, who was a investigative journalist. And then I worked with all the DC investigative journalists on like journalism e-books. That was the beginning of my career. And they all made money from writing books, and they all had big book contracts, which at the time for like a journalism book was like 500,000 to $2 million book advance. These were dudes, and they were all old white dudes that I worked with, just that's just who I worked with at the time. And these were dudes who had all made money on a salary from a newspaper. All the fancy publishers that I worked with, they would wine and dine the dudes that were producing the content that was making them money.

Angela:

It was very classy. I used to get to go to dinners at like Duke Zeibert's, which was like this CNBC place in Washington, DC, for all the investigative journalists. They were held on a pedestal in a very special way as published authors, like these were the best journalists. And now, instead of making a hundred-thousand dollars a year as a reporter, they were making $500,000 a year to write books. It was beautiful. It is not the way it works anymore, and it's not the way that it works for the coaching and consulting industry. When I started in publishing, there wasn't really an internet in it. There was America Online CD-ROMs. And so when you run into a bookstore, that was how you got books. You were not buying books online. People were afraid to put their credit cards in online. So when you walk into a bookstore, there's about 250,000 books, the average bookstore. When you pick a book from 250,000 books, that book has a very good chance. One out of 250,000 is actually really good compared to what happens now, which is we go to Amazon. There's about 25 million books to choose from with 250,000 books coming out every month. There are 250,000 books published every month. How do you stand out in that? Those numbers don't make sense anymore.

When David Wise, my first boss, was giving up 90% of his revenue to a publisher, he was giving up 90% of his revenue because how the fuck else was anyone going to find his books? We needed an intermediary to take a book from his hard drive and turn it into something and put it in bookstores. People think they're paying publishers for marketing. Publishers don't do marketing; they do B2B marketing to get your book in bookstores. They do printing and logistics. And most of us don't need that anymore. We don't need printing and logistics.

Anna:

I come from traditional publishing, too. And I sold my first book to Harper right when it broke, when everything changed, so I was like right on the cusp. It was 2005. They took me to lunch at Michael's. You know what I mean? That movie, Down with Love, did you ever see that?

Angela:

Yes.

Anna:

I was like, oh, this is my life. It's super glamorous. I'm very important to my publisher. And then I sold six more books to Harper and I just watched it dwindle away. And it kills me, because they never did anything. I'm a very slow learner. Even when I had a New York Times best seller, they did nothing because it wasn't like a number one.

Angela:

Yeah. You weren't Dan Brown.

Anna:

I wasn't Dan Brown. So I listen to people all the time go, oh, I want to go on a book tour. I was like, oh, good luck, good luck. I want that support that a publisher brings. And like, they just don't want to listen.

Angela:

Yeah. Because people have the fantasy. It's like an old fantasy. I remember coordinating David's book tour for a book called Nightmover that he had about a $1.5 million advance on. And they did a 25-city tour. They paid for hotels and flights and dinner. And I had to keep all the receipts, and I sent them in, and they got reimbursed, and then his next book came out and they said, we're going to... Which was '95, I think. Maybe it was '96, beginning of '96. And they're like, "We're going to do five cities for this book." And then by the next book, which I wasn't his assistant anymore, but by the next book, there was no book tour anymore. They were going to set up an AOL, Ask Me Anything, with AOL keyword book. So it's this old fantasy of the way the publishing... And I think the publishing industry even has that fantasy. I don't even think they know how much it's changed.

Anna:

So you have this realization, what year did you realize this is all broken?

Angela:

It was really 2014, and it happened by accident. I had been a ghostwriter, helping people write books, researcher, publicist, since 1994. Then in 2013, I launched The Author Incubator. And that was specifically with the goal of working on personal development books. So all my books before 2013 were espionage, politics, and then technology. Those were kind of my spaces, so I've ghostwritten a lot of books with Microsoft MVPs. Very exciting.

Anna:

Very.

Angela:

The books I would read, I would take the money from ghostwriting a book on Windows Server Backup. And I would take that money and I would go buy personal development books. I would go buy Marianne Williamson books. And all the books I bought were from Hay House. And I was like, why don't I do books like Hay House does? I want to have the next Hay House. I want all those authors.

Angela:

So I started working with those authors, and I realized something in that first year in business that changed everything for me, which was these personal development authors didn't have any fucking clue what they were doing. So everyone I had worked with before, they were like journalists and writers, and they had a strategy, and they were being paid by publishing companies, but that was their salary. And they worked, it was like a job. The only thing they did is they were a writer, and they would get up in the morning and they would go to their office and they would write and research and do interviews. They were journalists. Or I was working with these computer companies. These guys knew nothing. And they were like, "We are going to give you $50,000 to ghostwrite a book for us," and I'd make between 30 and $50,000 a book.

They're like, "We know nothing, you do it." They knew how to make money from software. They knew what they were doing. Personal development authors, I would do all the things I did with my other authors, and these people would change their topic five times, they didn't fucking finish their books. That first year I had 350 clients, maybe it was 250, 350. It was around 300 clients, which is great. Who gets 300 clients in their first year? One person finished her book, Jill Farmer, bless her heart. She like saved my soul I think that year. They didn't even know how to write books. They didn't even know what the fuck they wanted. They wanted to call me and talk about books.

Anna:

How did you find these people?

Angela:

I went to events for life coaches, and I would be like, "Hey, I've been in the publishing industry for 17 years. I'm a ghostwriter and a book coach and an editor," and everything I've been doing, "and a publicist. And if you need help with your book, I'll help you." I think I charged so many different, I didn't know what the hell I was doing either, but I don't know, $50 an hour I think is where I started. I was like, "I will help you with your book." And then I had this crazy idea that people would come to me with a book idea like all my other clients had ever hired me in 17 years. They're like, "I want to write a book about Windows Server Backup." And then six months later we had a book on Windows Server Backup. And I'm like, these people are fucking crazy. They just want to talk about writing a book. If you want to write a book, you'll have it done. It doesn't take that long. It's three to six months.

Anna:

I know. What takes a long time is, first of all, not knowing what you're doing when you're writing. And second of all, making a lot of excuses and claiming writer's block. That takes a lot of time. A lot of time.

Angela:

Oh, yeah. You can spend years on that. And nobody that's a real writer does. Like as a ghostwriter for 17 years, in 17 years I wrote 29 books. I also had a whole other career as an editor. That was my side hustle. In my free time, I wrote 29 books in 17 years.

Anna:

It doesn't take that long.

Angela:

It's really not that fucking hard.

Anna:

It's not. I'm with you. It's not that hard.

Angela:

You might need to do research, and that might take time. Like if you're doing a study over a year, you might need to put the study into the field and wait a year to gather, but writing up your findings, it takes three months to write a book. It's just not that fucking hard. And so I tried all these different things in my first year in business, and then I realized, oh, I'm asking the wrong question. The question isn't, do you want to write a book? The question is, do you have a business that would benefit from a book? Once I switched that question, then I had personal development professionals that had a business, and they were like, "I would like more clients for my fork-tuning sound healing business." I'm like, "Great. I can get you sound healing clients." Or "I do life coaching, and I would like life coaching clients," or "I do career coaching, I'd like career co- "

Angela:

Once I flipped the question and started with what's your business and do you need more clients? Then I went to, we now have a 99.6% completion rate. I think this year we have one person who didn't finish.

Anna:

How many books do you launch a year, and is it under your publishing company?

Angela:

Yeah. So that's a trick question because we did change that during COVID. Our biggest year we did 400 books. This year is definitely a slower year for us on purpose. I moved to the beach, half retired, and I've been much more selective about where I spend my time. I also have a teenager, but I think it will do about 200 books this year.

Anna:

Do they do all the writing and you guide them through it?

Angela:

Yeah. I find it's much faster and better to do your own writing, and I'll tell you why: as a ghostwriter for 17 years…when I write books for people, if you want me to write your book, I'll write it. It's a hundred-thousand dollars now and I'm happy to write your book for you. I don't think you should, though, and this is why. When you write your book, you change. Your brain just gets more organized. And you could think about this. If you ever had to put together a slide deck to pitch anyone anything, your potential clients or an investor or your mother, you have to organize your thoughts to do a slide deck or to write a proposal. And when you write your book, you become a better coach and you get more clients just from your own confident. You'll be like my shit's badass.

If I write it, you'll think I'm a badass. And luckily I already know I am, I don't need help with that. So it will change you and you could do it in less time and with less frustration, because when you work with a ghostwriter, you're going to tell them what you want in the chapter. That's going to take as long as it would take for you to just fucking write it, then I'm going to write it up slightly wrong and you're going to read it, and it's going to be like nails on a chalkboard. You're like, "Why does she say it takes two weeks? I told her it takes two months," but you actually misspoke and said two weeks and you don't remember that, but you would've caught it if it was your own thing. And so you're going to read it, you're going to be annoyed. And then you're just going to rewrite the chapter, or you're not going to read it, and you're going to say "That's good, publish it."

Anna:

I vehemently disagree, but we're all allowed as fellow bad asses!

Angela:

Tell me your perspective. That's just my experience after ghostwriting, I don't know, 50 books now I guess.

Anna:

Well I only ghostwrote one, but it did become a New York Times best seller. So I do think, I do know... And I'm a writer. I wrote for every magazine. I wrote for the New York Times. I majored in writing.

Angela:

Yeah, but did the person who came to you have a book contract?

Anna:

No, we sold it together. I got him the agent. He was a disaster. I don't ghost write at all. I won't do any, it was such a bad experience. I would never write another person's book. And the way I started my company is that so many people came to me and said, "Would you write my book?" And I said, "No, no, no." And finally someone said, "I don't care." So I said, "Look, I'll ask my friend to write it." And then that started the company. I believe if you don't write every day all day and you haven't for a decade, you're not going to write as good a book as someone who does

Angela:

Yeah, I get you on that. I get you on that, but I think that happens in the editing phase.

Anna:

I find it really hard. My team does the editing, I don't do it. I find that I watch them struggle - it's easier to start from scratch than to fix something that's broken.

Angela:

A hundred percent, a hundred percent. But I really feel like if the purpose is to get clients, then the quality of your book, not that it doesn't matter, but if your focus is on writing a really good book and not on attracting clients, then you're just doing something different, not better or worse,

Anna:

Fair enough.

Angela:

Just a different thing.

Anna:

I think that's a middle ground, too. I mean, I think it can be... Look, a lot of people not only don't care about quality, but they can't even tell the difference. They can't even tell-

Angela:

Most people can't tell the difference, and 16% of people read the books they buy. None of them are your clients. The way you know someone is going to buy from you is if they get your book and don't read it. Once they've read it, they're not a client.

Anna:

That's so interesting.

Angela:

Now after they become a client…

Anna:

Then they read it.

Angela:

They will then read your book, but people will read your book after they become a client.

Anna:

Basically, how does it work? People come to you and you say, "Go write the book and we'll help you with the cover, and we’ll launch”?

Angela:

No. We do an elaborate developmental editing process. We're developmental editing every single chapter. There's three months of work before they're allowed to write.

Anna:

Okay.

Angela:

We have to figure out what the fucking book is. Because most people's ideas are horrible, and they would never finish. So for each chapter, we design...We do this for the whole book first. And then we go chapter by chapter and we design a purpose statement, which is like a main topic sentence. And then we have a certain layout that we have them use, and then they come up with 10 slugs. The slugs are what's going to be included in the chapter. You don't have to include all of it. So when you go to sit down to write, I know everything that's going in that chapter. I might not know the order, and I can finesse the sentences, our editors can finesse the sentences, but we've crafted what is each chapter, what's in it, what's the purpose of the book, how do we want the reader to be different?

Once all that developmental editing is done, when you go to write the book, we do it as a timed test. We'll actually proctor it with you. You have two hours to write the chapter. And I want the shittiest job, if that's what it is, but it's just the best job you can do in two hours. I don't care how good it is or how bad it is, just give me something in two hours and no more. And then the editors take it over and we can turn it into good writing.

Anna:

When you say proctor, are you sitting on a Zoom call with them?

Angela:

Sitting on a Zoom call. Ready? Go. You got two hours. And then I do a little Tim from Project Runway and I say, "All right, you got 30 minutes.”

Anna:

Make it work.

Angela:

"Even if you haven't started writing, make it work, because this is your chapter." And then we pull it out of their hands and they can't look back at it until the whole book is done.

Anna:

And then you do copy editing, layout, launch?

Angela:

Yeah. We have three levels of edits. We do a high-level edit, and then we do line edits, which take about six weeks, and then we do a proofread.

Anna:

Yeah, and it's launched under your imprint?

Angela:

Yeah, you asked that before. We've done three things with this. I have an imprint, which is called Difference Press. We also have partnered with companies that have in-store distribution. So we put it out as a collaboration, a Difference Press collaboration with another partner that gets it in bookstores. When we do that, we give up 80% of the book revenue to get it into bookstores. And when COVID hit, I shut down all of those partnerships, because I'm like no one's buying books in bookstores, and they're not buying these books in bookstores. And they're definitely not buying these books in bookstores when the bookstores are shut down. So we canceled all those partnerships, which I had kind of wanted to do anyway, because I looked at how much money we were giving up and the percentage of sales online versus in stores, and it just didn't make sense.

Eight-five percent of our sales were happening online, but we were giving up 80% of the revenue. So we now teach self-publishing, and if people really want their books in bookstores, we can hook them up with partners, but then it's not a collaboration anymore. We make an introduction, and they put it under their publishing label. For most people, I don't see a good reason to put your book... That's not for everyone, but for most people we work with... If you want to make a quarter of a million dollars from your book in a year, don't work with a publisher. We have 76% of our authors make $250,000 in the first year from their book.

Anna:

Not from book sales.

Angela:

Not from book sales, not from book sales.

Anna:

Do you help them set up a system where they're going to get more clients? How does that work?

Angela:

Yeah. We build book funnels for our clients, teach them advertising, show them how to do what we call a thank-you video, so how to connect with their readers, how to build a list from your book. I teach something called the L.O.V.E. Sales Method, which is how to turn your readers into clients by just listening to their problem and offering to help solve it. The focus is get as many readers as possible. We have a really cool calculator. If you go to the author incubator.com/calculator, most of our authors can make $250,000 by giving away about 2000 books, between 2 and 3000 bucks.

Anna:

Who do they give them to?

Angela:

Prospects. We identify prospects. For instance, one of our clients, Lesley Moffat, wrote Keep the Job, Lose the Stress. And she works with teachers, stressed-out teachers. She now has a six-figure consulting business with teachers, and she specifically started with band leaders, high school band leaders. Turns out there are organizations of high school band leaders. Who fucking knew? She's in all those Facebook groups, all those groups. She speaks. We have a keynote speaking coach, as well, Nina Sossamon-Pogue, who trains all of our authors in how to use their book to get speaking gigs. She is the top speaker for high school band leaders. You find a high school band leader, they will know Lesley Moffat. She speaks at those events, and then she gets contracted by schools and teachers to work with them and has a six-figure business as the world's top coach for band directors. Who knew?

Anna:

You're a firm believer, I assume, in the riches are in the niches, like find your niche.

Angela:

Has to be. Has to be. If you do the kind of books that we loved growing up, like if you do the self-love for women in transition, generic books, those books that were successful, like my favorite book of all time from one of my best friends, Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love, that book changed my life and so many others, but it wouldn't sell now. If you are even as good of a writer as Marianne, which is like two people in a million, even now, that book just wouldn't sell the way it did then. There's too many other books.

There's too much other information. There's Netflix. You're competing on a totally different scale. So if you can focus on a group that we can access like band directors, real estate agents, divorce lawyers; if we can focus on a group that we can find, do your spiel on self-love for women in transition, because I can tell you everything in Lesley's book is all about self-love for band directors in transition. But if we can focus that information in a specific group we can reach, and you could be the best in the world in this blue ocean instead of a very, very bloody red ocean, then we can generate revenue.

Anna:

You used to do weekend retreats.

Angela:

Three Days to Done. So very interesting you should ask. I had a castle. The reason we got this castle, which we called the authors castle, was to do... All the rooms were themed. We had the Maya Angelou room and the Pablo Neruda room. All of the rooms had their own theme. And we would bring authors in every weekend, and over the weekend you would write your book. And then when COVID happened, we were like, well, no one's coming over to write their books at our house anymore, so much for that. So we left the castle, which we had a lease purchase agreement, so we kind of had to walk away from $2 million. It was a little bit sad, but we're like it's going to be a long time before someone wants to come over and do a writing retreat. So we paused. And then this year we got a bunch of beach houses in a little town on the Chesapeake Bay.

We now have those houses open to do Three Days to Done again starting in January. So I have my first one, the first week in January. You get a whole house with your weekend. You can take a friend, and we've got like three or four houses that are near each other in this tiny little beach town. So we meet up in the morning on the boardwalk. Everyone gets their assignments. We check in on Zoom during the day. Then we have dinner at night, but everyone's got their own COVID bubble to write in.

Anna:

If people are interested, what are the price points for all of these things?

Angela:

We have our virtual... We call it book week. So we have a virtual version of that, come to my beach house and sit with me and we'll get your book done in three days. So that is $500. Anyone can do it. We do it the last week of the month. It's 500 bucks. At the end of the week, your book will be done. And you don't even have to come in knowing what your book is about. You just have to have a business. If you have a business and you want more clients, come in on Monday, on Friday you will have a finished manuscript. Then if you want to work with us to do the editing and publishing and speaking and marketing, that is, I think it's like a 25K commitment for us to do all your editing, get you Amazon Best Seller status, do all your design, all your marketing, get you coached up to get speaking engagements, build your book funnel, get you out there.

That's a much longer engagement to do all that stuff. But if you just need your book written, 500 bucks, and then at the end of it, we'll tell you exactly how to do everything on your own. By the way, if you do it on your own, you're going to spend a lot more than $25,000 doing it on your own. It's a lot of work.

Anna:

If you want to do it right.

Angela:

If you want to do it right, yeah.

Anna:

You can do it wrong.

Angela:

You could do it wrong for less, for sure. But you'll probably get one editor, they'll flake out. They'll tell you things you don't want to hear. You'll have to get another editor. They'll ghost you. When we do it, it just gets done and we keep it on a timeline. Then our Three Days to Done, when you actually come and stay with us at the beach house and we feed you, and I literally sit next to you when you write your book, those are substantially more. So you pay 25K for the weekend. But at the end of the three days, your book is done, and that does include a round of editing.

Anna:

And you just stay in the beach house.

Angela:

And you have to stay in one of our beach houses and hang out, and hopefully eat crabs, since we're in Maryland, that's what we do here.

Anna:

So if people want to find you, what is the best way?

Angela:

The author incubator.com, and the trick with that is the article, T-H-E, the. If you go to author incubator.com, you won't find it. Although I do own that domain, and I should just set up a re-direct, but here's my take: if you can't figure it out, we weren't meant to work together. So, the author incubator.com. Then if you want to chat with me about your book, there's an application, which is really... It just keeps me organized, because I got a million things going on. So when you fill out the application, it drops you into like an automated funnel for me, telling me who you are and to follow up with you. That is the best way to get to me. A lot of times people DM me and be like, "Hey, I have a book idea. Can I talk to you?" I love you, whoever you are, just fill out the application, because then my team keeps me on track, and I get super disorganized. This will get you put on my calendar and everything will just happen the way it's supposed to.

Anna:

Do you charge for those calls?

Angela:

No. We'll talk about your book, and we'll see if it's a fit to work together and all that good stuff.

RELATED EPISODES

What Are The Exact Steps to Publishing a Book?

How Do I Avoid Hiring the Wrong Editor for my Book?

How Do I Figure Out the Core Audience for my Book?

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE OR CLICK HERE TO GET THE POD ON ANY PLATFORM

Can Being a Part of an Anthology Help Build My Business?

 

My First Time

The first anthology I was a part of was called Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys and it helped my career more than I could have even imagined. I had never been in a book before and a friend of mine was editing it. She asked if I had any stories about loving gay men. Turned out I had a doozy—the time I “converted” a gay guy straight. This was back in the glory days when publishers paid real money so I remember that I was paid $750 to do an essay it took me about a half hour to write.

But that wasn’t the best part. The best part is that the literary agency I’d just signed with submitted said essay to the New York Times “Modern Love” column and they accepted it. I had no idea what a big deal this was but it’s sort of a lottery ticket kind of thing.

The publishers arranged for a book tour and I was a part of the one that went to Marin County, San Francisco and Sonoma. AND the book was optioned and MADE into a reality show!

So you might say that I think being a part of an anthology is a must. 

But I really don’t know.

Then I Realized, Um, No

The third book I sold to HarperCollins was an anthology of essays about reality TV. My thinking was, unsophisticated people watch reality TV and sophisticated people are writers. (As someone who’s both, I had a great understanding, I thought, of both groups.) I believed if I did a book that was for both the sophisticated and unsophisticated, I would capture, well, the whole world.

So I gathered an amazing array of writers—among them James Frey, Neil Strauss and Jerry Stahl. I threw a party to end all parties—complete with a red carpet, all the press in the world and appearances by reality stars.

And all of nothing happened. Turns out reality TV fans don’t want to read books about reality TV so much as watch reality TV and readers don’t want to read books about reality TV. The book got reviewed widely, including by The New Yorker, and it even still pops up as a “best of” reality TV books. But, in the end, it was not what one could call a rewarding endeavor.

Not one to learn a lesson easily, I sold another anthology—this one based on a storytelling show I hosted at the time—a few years later. It was called True Tales of Lust and Love and it featured essays by everyone from Meghan Daum to GLOW staff writer Rachel Shukert. I hosted readings all over LA, did a lot of media and, well…nada.

But really it was my error for not having thought it through beforehand: I didn’t want to have a career based on talking about reality shows, lust or love and so those books COULDN’T have served a purpose in my career.

It was a time-consuming lesson to learn.

Then I Did an Anthology with a Purpose

In 2020, I got an idea: to put together an anthology of addiction essays that could help those with experiences with addiction establish their credibility. I published it through Launch Pad, which means that we charged people to be a part of it, and this one was quite rewarding.

One of the participants started getting new clients for her coaching business before the book came out, simply because she was a part of the book, while others found themselves starting social media accounts that helped establish themselves in the recovery field. Others have had their careers really take off as a result of being in the book.

The Kevin Harrington Model

I really got the idea from my friend, Kevin Harrington, the original “shark” on Shark Tank, who established an anthology model where they charge contributors and his partner’s team writes the essays; they guarantee it will be a bestseller.

He’s doing another one, called MindStirring Business Secrets, and in the promotion it breaks down why it’s valuable for business: how each person’s chapter can include a CTA and how native ads for business perform better than Google, Facebook and Instagram ads.

The contributors’ names all go on the cover. So while you could say it’s wrong of him (and me) to charge people to contribute, that’s missing the bigger picture—that it’s a much easier (and less expensive) way than launching an entire book for people to establish expertise.

But What About the Writing Experience?

You may notice that I’m talking here about everything but the writing. So here’s what I’ll say about that: I’ve contributed essays to other anthologies over the years, and I’ve found the writing to be rewarding. It’s basically the equivalent of the sort of piece most of us write and post online, not only for free but with very few eyeballs taking them in, and there’s something pretty cool about them being in a book along with some very well-known writers.

And I watched the members of my writing community, the Inner Circle, put together an anthology called The Epiphanies Project (I wrote the foreword).

Here’s what one of the editors, Beth Robinson, had to say: “Getting to know the writers on such a deep level and the pleasure of collaborating, both with Chris as co-curator and with each of the writers individually—it was such a strong sense of doing something really worthwhile on so many levels with a great group of people and building a connection that we'll all have forever.”

Strength in Numbers

When it came to The Epiphanies Project, they were really able to use the fact that there were so many contributors to do a massive launch; each of the writers agreed to recruit at least 10 readers and so they were able to launch to the number one spot in numerous categories and have an array of people posting about it. One of the contributors, Susan Zinn, even got the book mentioned on the Today show blog.

If you’re thinking you want to put together an anthology, here's advice Beth had:

Start with a budget and a timeline; build in time to chase down drafts
Make sure you see a hard copy before actually launching
Work with good editors; have a developmental editor, copy editor and a proof reader.

My advice, of course, is to figure out your goal: unless you just want to consider it service you do for the world, determine how it can help your contributors (and your) business. Know that (as of now), only 10 authors can be listed as authors on Amazon and giving someone an opportunity to have an author profile on Amazon is uber powerful. Plus, for a first-time author, having your name on the cover is undeniably cool.

Also be very intentional. Don’t let ANYONE contribute or the book will lack quality control and be very uneven. Have a screening process and talk to each contributor ahead of time about what they want the book to do for their career. Hire an amazing editor who can tell you—and them—honestly if what they’ve written won’t help them meet their goals.

And know, as while Beth’s co-editor Chris Joseph told me, corralling all the writers to something akin to “herding cats.”

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Writing (and Not Publishing) Four Books with Joe DeMaria

 

Joe DeMaria helps coaches, consultants and peak performers create online courses and group coaching programs to increase their impact, expand their product offerings and create new pillars of revenue in their businesses. He also started sitting on major boards when he was ridiculously young. He's also an expert in scaling businesses. Are you getting the idea that he's a genius? Well, you're right. And so it was time for me to do a "booktervention"—a word I just coined to describe my aggressive attempt to find out why in God's name someone who so clearly has a book (or several) in him hasn't published one yet.

This episode was recorded on the hot new app Wisdom so it was an entirely new way of doing a podcast: first off, there was an (admittedly small) audience listening. Secondly, I thought I had to talk for 10 minutes at a time (long story; once you listen it will make sense). And make sure you follow me on Wisdom!

For now, enjoy my conversation with the great Joe DeMaria on how he started his journey into entrepreneurship by hawking sodas to fellow nine-year-olds, how that evolved into doing work for the mob (seriously!) and the way he was able to parlay all of that into a massively successful career. And, of course, listen in on his attempt to answer the age-old question: why hasn't he published a book yet?

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Should I Hire a Company to Write and Publish My Book?

 

You could call this one self-promotional since this is exactly what my company does, but honestly it’s not. (I’ll get into that in a second.) Really, I’m asked about this so much that I decided it made sense to record a podcast episode about it.

First Things First 

If you use a company like Legacy Launch Pad, it is a paid service. We don’t provide introductions to agents or help aspiring authors sell their books to traditional publishers. And we don’t do one-off services—say, just ghostwriting or just marketing.

Our core business is writing and launching books for seven and eight figure entrepreneurs. But what does that mean?

It means that when a client comes to us, I partner them with one of my writers; I have a very small team for the very particular reason that I find that finding amazing writers is challenging. And I’m a writing snob. Our writers are WSJ and USA Today bestselling authors who write for publications like The Huffington Post and the NY Times.

The Relationship Between Writer and Client

The partnership and chemistry is so important; this is a person the client will be sharing their innermost feelings with and it becomes quite intimate.

The client and writer are not writing together. The client should never, in the ideal scenario, ever put proverbial pen to paper. The writer is essentially acting as the client’s personal documentarian, capturing their philosophies, experiences and thoughts into a compelling narrative.

Oftentimes clients will be concerned that working with a ghostwriter means the book won’t sound like them. To that, I say: seasoned writers have been trained in different voices. You could call it our core skill: being adapatable with our words. When I was a freelance journalist, one day I’d be doing a story for Cosmo and the next for Playboy and still the next for Vanity Fair. Each of those publications had a different “voice” and the editor assigning me the story knew that it was my job to make the story fit the publication’s.

The same goes for a client’s voice. The book uses their turns of phrases, their expressions and their jargon.

So Why Shouldn’t the Client Write the Damn Book?

To be clear, the client absolutely can and some absolutely do. We actually have a Publishing Only service for those people. But it’s not our core business and we only started offering it because so many people came to us wanting it.

Here’s why it’s not our core business: if someone doesn’t spend every day all day writing and hasn’t been doing that for at least a decade, they are not going to be able to write a book that’s as good as someone who does. The best writers are the ones who do it for a living and even if someone is often told they’re a great writer, if they do not do it for a living, the book is probably not going to read as professional without some serious editing.

And That’s Where It Gets Complicated

I can’t tell you the number of clients who come to us with “finished” books they believe are ready to publish. And they believe that because before finding us they hired an editor—often an editor who charged them a fortune—and that editor told them the book was “done.”

The problem is, my cat could call himself an editor and get hired. Well, not quite but while you and I can’t walk into a hospital and declare ourselves doctors (unless you yourself are a doctor to which I say, much respect), ANYONE can call him or herself an editor. And from what I’m seeing, many who are not qualified do.

Trust me, the last thing a Publishing Only client wants to hear after forking over moola for an editor is that the editor sucked or was lazy. The problem is we don’t know what we don’t know and most people looking around for book editors don’t even know there are all sorts of editors out there (I’ve gone deeper into that in other episodes).

So the real issue is the space between what the client thinks of as “finished” and what we do. And like I said, I’m a snob.

But Let’s Say We Have a Finished Manuscript

After getting feedback on the draft, the writer completes a second draft and then it goes through the editing process—developmental edit, copy editing and proofreading. Then it gets laid out in book form and is proofread again because no matter how many humans look at a book for errors, they are human and thus miss things. 

We simultaneously are working on the client’s cover. This starts with a client filling out our cover questionnaire and giving examples of book covers they like. We give them four different concepts and then dozens of each of those concepts.

And this is where the real stopgap can happen.

Let the Experts Decide 

The problem with book covers is it’s a somewhat subjective choice; people like certain fonts and colors. And then they ask their friends, who also like certain fonts and colors. And then we’ve got a whole lot of opinions from people who don’t necessarily understand that what people like and what they buy are different.

So this process can take months. We have a “customer is always right” philosophy so I’m sad to say that when a client is absolutely insistent on having a certain cover that we know doesn’t work as well as another one we’ve designed, at a certain point, we just have to let it go. And it sucks because while we don’t know about a lot—don’t try to get me to help you figure out the dinner tip—we know about publishing!

The same goes for titles. We put all potential titles through a massive brainstorming operation, taking in the latest research about works, keywords and the right combination of creativity. It’s a process that’s half art, half science and wholly works.

The Small Things That Are Actually Big

Based on what I see on Amazon, there are a lot of people out there who think just throwing a paragraph up on the book page will suffice. But HELLLLLLLL no. A book description is the difference between having someone purchase or dismiss. Do you know how hard it is to get someone to your Amazon page? Why would you not pull out every stop? So we do our book description and author bio magic.

You can have different descriptions for different places; Amazon prioritizes bullet points when it comes to searchability, whereas that may not work on the back spine of a paperback.

The Extras

I’ve already talked a lot about bestseller launches but that’s something professionals also do and traditional publishers for the most part don’t because they tend to be Amazon averse and thus not clear on the best methods. And we have clients that want all sorts of add ons, from introductions to Hollywood producers to VIP premieres to conversion of books into TEDx talks to marketing and placement in publications to consultations with publicists to websites to EPKs.

You’re Really Paying for the Knowledge

One of the biggest things a company like ours provides is the knowledge from decades in publishing. There’s a world of difference between pitching yourself to podcasts to promote your book and effectively pitching yourself so that you actually get booked. Ditto EVERYTHING else. People who are constantly researching the latest tools know about things that you couldn’t—how to get a book listed in 10 Amazon categories instead of the two Amazon requests, using Amazon A+ content, printing QR codes on bar codes to name a few.

In the end, if you’re going to do something as major as a book, do it right. The reason I want to be 100% clear that I’m not telling whoever is listening to hire us is that we serve a very specific sort of client (there’s way more about that on our website). We are not right for everyone, or even most people. And there are literally dozens of other companies out there that do this, some of them much bigger.

The reason there are so many companies out there that do this is crucial: there is literally no better tool to grow your business. The fact is we charge a lot of money for this service and we have a policy of not taking money from anyone we don’t think can earn back at least 10 times what they pay us. (There are exceptions; see below.)

You Should NOT Do a Paid Service If…

You don’t have a business connected to your book. UNLESS you are 100% fine spending the money. And we have had those people. Just be clear with yourself; you’re setting yourself up for disappointment if your expectations aren’t realistic.

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