Your Business, Your Book

How to plan, write, and promote the book that puts you in the spotlight

Ginny Carter

• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788601290
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

*WINNER OF THE BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS 2020!*

If you're a coach, consultant, or speaker who makes a living from yourexpertise, this is for you. It's the guide you need to help you plan, write, and promote the book that elevates your authority, increases your visibility, and gets moreclients saying 'yes'. Because creating such a book is a challenge. Where do youstart? How do you keep going until the end? And what do you do when you'vefinished? Don't let your book stay in your head – allow it to come to life and makea positive difference to both you and your readers by following the guidanceyou'll find in here.

· Section 1: Plan. Learn how to create astrategic plan and outline for your book, so it both supports your business andhelps the people you want to reach.

· Section 2: Write. Master the art of craftingyour work so it engages, inspires, and educates your readers.

· Section 3: Promote. Discover how to market yourbook so it sells to a ready-made audience. This is the final step in building areputation as the go-to expert in your field.

I
PLAN

Chapter 1

Your head space

Why you can write a book, even if you think it’s beyond you

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.
Warren Buffet, one of the world’s
most successful investors

As the then US Secretary of State for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously once said, ‘There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.’¹

Although he was lampooned for it at the time, if you read his words carefully you’ll find they make sense because we don’t always realise what we don’t know. In your case this can take the form of a set of unrecognised, and therefore unchallenged, assumptions about what it means to write a book. If you’ve been putting off making a start for some time, or if you’ve completed your first few chapters only to grind to a halt, you can be pretty sure that one or more of these beliefs is what’s stopping you.

In this chapter you’ll learn how to reveal the invisible barriers to you proceeding with your book, a bit like a radiologist exposes your hidden parts in an x-ray. Then you’ll be able to deal with them.

Why haven’t you written a book already?

There’s a gremlin who loves to sit on the shoulders of all budding authors whispering,‘What’cha gonna do about me? I’m your book. I’ve been here a while, haven’t I? In fact, it’s been a couple of years. Strange how you’ve never done anything about me so far, apart from buy a book about writing a book (although it’s a brilliant one). Maybe you’re not cut out for it. Better give up now before you waste even more time.’

If that gremlin sounds familiar, you’re not alone. I once asked a number of respected business experts why it was they’d not yet written a book. They gave me a whole bunch of reasons, which boil down to nine main obstacles. The good news is, none of them is real.

Warning: my thoughts on this may get you started on your book!

I don’t have enough time to write a book

Which is really the same as…

My book isn’t a priority

It would take so long, I feel like giving up before I start.

I’ve got too much client work to carve out the time.

Or my favourite:

I need three months on a desert island to write a book.

There’s no getting around it: writing a quality business book is a sizeable undertaking because it’s supposed to be. That’s why authors have a special status – they know enough about their subject to write something that has the potential to transform their readers’ businesses and lives. It was never going to be an assignment they could knock out in a couple of weeks, and that’s fine because it’s not always the easy achievements that make the difference.

As bestselling author and business thinker Seth Godin succinctly put it: ‘The book that will most change your life, is the book you write.’ If you feel strongly about writing one, find a way to make time. How do you prioritise your most important work right now? Do you plan it in your calendar, incentivise yourself to finish it, or just assume it will be done and magically it happens? There’s no reason why your book should receive a different treatment.

If that doesn’t work, try this. How would you feel if you discovered in six months’ time that your arch-competitor had just published the book that’s currently sitting in your head?

I’m worried my book will have flaws

I sympathise with this. As a recovering perfectionist, I understand how easy it is to stop myself before I start because I’m worried I might produce something that contains mistakes or oversights.

What if there are spelling errors?

What if I realise after it’s published that I left out something important?

What if I get something wrong?

These are common fears, but that’s all they are. As Elizabeth Gilbert phrased it in her wonderful book about creativity and writing, Big Magic: ‘I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified.’²Of course your book doesn’t have to be perfect. What is?

I don’t know where to start

That old chestnut. When we’re faced with substantial tasks it’s normal to feel daunted. What should the book be about? Who would want to read it? How to outline it so it makes sense for our readers? We ask ourselves so many questions that we can run out of steam and give up. There are various ways to approach your book outline and none of them is rocket science; you just need some simple ground rules to get you going. I’ll give you a clue as to where you’ll find those guidelines: in the book you’re holding right now.

I hate writing and I’m no good at it

There’s no getting away from the fact that some people find writing easier and more enjoyable than others, but let’s unpack this. Disliking an activity is not the same as being bad at it, and yet we think that if it doesn’t ‘feel right’ someone on high (who?) has decreed we shouldn’t be doing it. This is a story we’ve made up for ourselves, and it can be handy when we’re looking for an excuse to throw in the towel.

Another way to look at this is as a matter of unfamiliarity. When you were at school you weren’t taught how to write a book, so it’s natural to feel daunted by the idea. But if you think of it as writing a short story that happens to get longer, or as a series of related blog posts, you’ll realise you’ve accomplished something like it many times before.

On a more practical note, if you really don’t think you’re any good at writing it’s likely this is a problem a good editor or even a ghostwriter can sort out. And don’t worry too much about grammar and spelling; that’s what copy editors and proof readers are for.

I don’t know enough to write a book

Let’s consider this for a moment. Do you help people through your work? Do you have happy clients? Have you been working in your field for a while and gained a heap of knowledge along the way? Set your stopwatch for 20 minutes and scribble down the things you know about your specialist area. And I mean all of them. It’s so easy to take for granted what we do every day and I’d be amazed if you weren’t able to fill a fair few pages with what you know, believe, have experienced, and learned during the course of doing your work.

No one would read it

How do you know? Have you asked everyone? Seriously though, this is a good time to do some research on your topic because it’s true, some people do write books that few want to read. That’s not necessarily because they don’t have anything worth writing, it’s because there wasn’t a demand for what they had to say in the first place (more on how to avoid that later). Ask your past and present clients if they would value a book about your field, or survey your email list. It’s worth proving to yourself that your book is in a readable niche, both for your own confidence and because it makes business sense.

There’s too much competition

How many cookery books are on your kitchen shelf? If you’re into a hobby, how many do you own on that? Try searching Amazon for books on photography, for example – there are thousands, many of which have decent sales to their name. In fact, if you see competition in your field it proves it’s a fertile area because when people want to know about a topic they often buy more than one book on it.

I have over 50 books on my Kindle on the craft of writing, and more on my bookshelf. Yet I’m still writing a book about writing a business book because I trust I have something valuable to contribute. Plus, you have your own unique take on your subject, which means that your book can never be a copy of someone else’s. Nobody has the final word on any subject.

People might not like it

I remember coaching a speaker who was writing her book with me. She’d been an academic in her previous career and was now a well-respected consultant to finance professionals (not an academic in sight). She was concerned that her erstwhile co-workers would look down on her newly non-academic writing style and privately criticise her for it; she could almost see their eyebrows arch and lips purse as they read. This was blocking her from progressing. When I reminded her that she wasn’t writing for them, and that they’d be unlikely to spend their spare time reading a book that had little to do with their interests in any case, she relaxed and her book flowed once more. Ironically, after it was published she discovered it had been placed on student reading lists due to its helpful content and accessible style.

If you’re feeling self-conscious as you write, turn around. Who’s there? While I’m writing I can find myself accompanied by a crowd of frowning onlookers, but I try not to let them stop me. I love this comment from one of my all-time favourite business and self-help book authors, Robert Cialdini, who said that prior to writing his first mainstream book Influence he’d been in the habit of writing with an academic audience ‘on his shoulder’. Once he realised this, he swapped it for a mental image of one of his neighbours who symbolised his new target reader.³

Who am I to write a book?

What all these reasons lead to is the ultimate question: ‘Who am I to write a book? I’m not wise/special/famous/clever enough to do that’ (delete as appropriate). Even if you don’t feel like this now – and I hope you don’t – there may come a point in your journey when self...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The first page Why write a business book?
• Part I: Plan
• Part II: Write
• Part III: Promote
• The final chapter Make the most of your new author status
• The author
• Further resources
• Acknowledgements