Even if you aren’t financing the costs yourself—as you would if you were self-publishing—you’re spending thousands of hours creating something that might not sell. That time is not free—you could be spending it doing any number of other things that will be making you money.

That’s why Kickstarter is such an appealing option to authors. You can get paid for your book while you’re still writing it, removing some uncertainty from the process.

Our very own Head of Author Marketing, Charlie Hoehn, recently ran a Kickstarter for his book Play for a Living: A Coffee-Table Book for Your Inner Genius that generated $35,936—over 3.5x his $10,000 goal.

After watching him and other authors successfully execute profitable Kickstarter campaigns, and after seeing even more authors crash and burn with their Kickstarters, we decided to put together this guide.

If you want to launch a Kickstarter to sell copies of your book—whether you’ve finished writing it or not—this is the place to start.

We’re going to go through the most important lessons we’ve learned, the things that separate successes from failures, but first, we’re going to break down exactly what a Kickstarter is.

What a Kickstarter Is and Isn’t Good For

First, let’s start with a list of things a Kickstarter isn’t.

A Kickstarter is not:

• A good way to validate your idea.
• Crowd-sourced angel investing.
• An easy way to raise $1,000,000.

A lot of authors have the misguided notion that Kickstarter is a place where you collect funds for a project before you start it. When it comes to books, this is wrong.

If you start a Kickstarter for your book, and you do not finish or publish your book, you have to refund all the money you raised.

Every person who “backs” your Kickstarter is buying a copy of your book. Just like any other retail experience, if you can’t give them what they paid for, you have to give their money back.

Also, if you want to run a successful Kickstarter, you’re going to have to hustle super hard. Even if your idea is brilliant, raising $1,000,000 is incredibly difficult—no book has ever done it.

So, what is a Kickstarter good for?

A book Kickstarter is good for two things:

• Making money from your book ahead of publishing it.
• Building a fanatic audience.

Each buyer becomes more than a person who bought your book. They’re a person who funded your project—and if they bought a higher package, they’re someone who owns something you made exclusively for a small group of people.

If you already have a book that you’re writing or have finished writing, a Kickstarter can be a great way to quickly monetize your writing prior and build a fanbase.

If you want to do it well, you need to know these key lessons.

1. Know Your Numbers

One of the first things Charlie did when he decided to run a Kickstarter was he sat down and spent hours living in an Excel spreadsheet.

Why’d he do that?

Because launching a “successful” Kickstarter without knowing your number can actually lose you money—like this man who raised over $70,000 for a board game, and then lost his house trying to cover shipping costs.

So Charlie broke down every expense he would have to deal with:

• Printing costs – Charlie spent hours on the phone with his printer to get an exact quote and service breakdown for his book. He also made sure he had a printer that handled shipping.
• Shipping costs – Shipping to the US is a different cost than shipping to Canada, which is different than shipping to Europe, which is different than shipping to Australia, etc.

• Kickstarter commissions and credit card fees – Combined, you can expect to lose 10% of the funds you raise to Kickstarter and credit card fees.

• The cost of higher packages – Anything physical you offer in a higher package comes with it’s own shipping and production costs.
• Marketing costs – If you want your Kickstarter to succeed, you’re going to need to outsource (or do) some design/video work. That’s not free.

Before Charlie even began, he had an exact quote from his printer, Bang Printing:

Knowing exactly how much this campaign was going to cost him allowed him to set his prices at a margin that made him money.

If you don’t get these numbers ahead of time and assume everything will work out, you might end up losing money just to afford shipping out your book.

2. Set A Fundraising Goal That Covers Just Enough

Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls, one of the most successful book Kickstarter campaigns in history, raised $675,614—but their initial goal was only $40,000.

The reasoning for this is really simple.

On Kickstarter (unlike competitors like IndieGoGo), if you raise less than your goal, you don’t get any of the money. It all goes back to the supporters.

Don’t set your target for the ideal amount you’d like to raise. Instead, set it for the amount you’d need to raise to make the project worth doing. If $40,000 is all it takes for you to break even, then that’s the amount you need to raise to make this project not be a loss. Anything over that number is profit.

You also need to be confident you can raise half of your goal in the first few days of your launch.

Every Kickstarter has two periods where funding spikes:

• The first few days of a campaign.
• The final day of a campaign.

It’s basic buyer psychology. Some people want to be the first in line, some people scramble at the last second because they’re scared of missing out.

It’s remarkable how profound this effect is when you look at the numbers. For example, here’s a graph of Charlie’s fundraising over the course of his campaign:

Almost all of the funding came either in the first day, or in the last day. The people who bought it between those dates—so-called “casual buyers”—are very rare.

3. Choose Packages That Makes Sense For You

A major mistake you’ll see Kickstarters make is offer something that seems cheap and noncommittal in their lower packages—only to lose all their money trying to fulfil it.

Offering a t-shirt in your cheaper packages is a classic example.

Let’s say your second lowest package covers the cost of production and shipping your book, plus $20 extra. If you promise a t-shirt in that order, just the cost of shipping it internationally can eat your entire margin and lose you money.

In Charlie’s Kickstarter, he didn’t offer any physical bonuses beyond his book for packages that were under $250.

This doesn’t mean his packages weren’t awesome—they were loaded with high value add-ons—but he didn’t have to pay to physically ship them.

Get creative and think of high value, low cost additions you can offer to backers for lower packages.

4. Invest In Professional Media and Design

If your Kickstarter product is something no one has seen before but everyone wants—like a hoverboard—then you don’t have to show the greatest prototype in the world.

If you’re trying to sell a book, something people have seen millions of before, you better make it pretty damn appealing. And nothing is more appealing than a great video.

John Lee Dumas raised $453,803 for his book, The Freedom Journal, which promises to help you achieve whatever the #1 goal in your life is in 100 days. A big part of his success can be chalked up to a great video:

The video does several things well:

• It introduces who John is and what he’s about.
• It tells you exactly why the book is right for you.
• It shows real footage of the book and people reading it.
• It has professional quality video and audio.

This is nothing new in the book world. Authors have always benefitted from high quality book trailers. One of the most famous examples is Tim Ferriss’ trailer for The 4 Hour Chef, which is the most viewed trailer for a nonfiction book of all time and helped propel the book to bestseller status:

But it’s more than just video.

Good Kickstarter campaigns also feature still-image excerpts from the book, compelling sales copy, and are laid out well top-to-bottom.

Unless you have a design background, working with a professional is the best way to do this.

5. Teach Your Audience How To Buy Your Book

You need to walk people through the Kickstarter process, either in your video or in your copy—ideally, both.

Most people have never backed a Kickstarter before. They don’t know what it really means to back a project or how Kickstarter works. In your video, you need to explain:

• That they are buying a copy of your book with whatever package they buy.
• That they can buy with a credit card, with Apple Pay, or even the Kickstarter app.
• How they can get a copy of your book even if they can’t back your Kickstarter.

It sounds pedantic, but it’s not. You need to remove every possible point of friction from the process, ensuring that everyone who wants to back your project does.

The last point is especially important.

Often times, you’ll have to limit shipping to certain countries. If you have fans in those countries who want to buy your book, but can’t do it through Kickstarter, you have to give them an option.

This image is taken from The Aviary Cocktail Book’s Kickstarter, which is already one of the most well-funded book Kickstarter’s ever (and is—as of this publication—still growing).

Because they cannot offer their book to most countries through Kickstarter due to shipping costs, they give international customers an easy way to preorder their book.

6. Don’t Worry About Going Viral—Email Your Friends

There’s this myth that in order for your crowdfunding project to succeed, it needs to go viral. You need to amass a big social media following, and get them all to share it.

This is wrong.

Generally speaking, email is over three times as likely to convince someone to spend money compared to social media.

On top of this, it’s really rare that a book Kickstarter goes viral.

People tend to share physical products—especially tabletop games, for some reason—on social media far more than any other Kickstarters. Tabletop games like Conan, for example, are 9.6 times more likely to go viral.

People with millions of followers shared Charlie’s Kickstarter, which generated some funding for him, but around 90% of his funds were raised through emailing his network.

Not through major media placements, Facebook advertising, or some crazy PR stunt—basic email to people he already knew.

One month before Charlie’s Kickstarter launched, he reached out to his network. His message was simple:

• He let them know he’d be launching a Kickstarter in a month.
• He offered them a discounted copy when he launched, if they responded “Yes.”

Below are screenshots from the email Charlie sent:

Hundreds of people responded yes.

Once someone has openly stated intent, they are far more likely to actually convert. The bulk of Charlie’s initial traction came from this one email blast.

What if you don’t have a big email list?

LinkedIn.

In our guide to launching an Amazon bestseller, we broke down step-by-step how you can export the email addresses of every LinkedIn connection you have, and then email them in bulk.

7. Cross-Promote With Related Kickstarters

There are thousands of projects on Kickstarter, many of which will appeal to the same people as your book.

For example, Charlie’s book was specifically for people dealing with anxiety. While his campaign was running, another campaign aimed at helping people with anxiety was also running.

The Gravity blanket is an incredible success—it’s raised over 4 million dollars—and its audience is exactly the same as Charlie’s book.

So Charlie reached out to John Florentino, inventor of Gravity, with this pitch:

Obviously, Charlie was offering a ton of value. John took him up on it, and as a result, they were both able to benefit each other by promoting their non-competitive, but overlapping products to their respective audiences.

Who on Kickstarter is running a project that dovetails with yours? Figure out who those people are, and how you can collaborate with them to reach more backers.

8. Make It Easy To Buy Your Book After Your Campaign Ends

If you sell thousands of books through your Kickstarter, but don’t have directions for how to buy your book in the future, you Kickstarter becomes a memorial page.

People can see how successful you were, but can’t engage with you now.

That’s not ideal. You want the momentum from your successful Kickstarter to carry over into book sales for years.

The easiest way to do this is to change your page after the campaign ends, like Rafael Araujo:

As soon as you land on this Kickstarter page—one of the most successful book Kickstarters ever—you see that this book was so good 8,297 people ordered it just through Kickstarter.

You’re also able to pre-order through Amazon by simply clicking the button that Rafael added to the center of his page when his campaign ended.

His book’s Amazon listing currently has over 275 reviews, almost all of which are 5 star, meaning his Kickstarter page is still driving book sales today.

Successful Book Marketing Doesn’t End With A Kickstarter

No matter what your goals for your book are—if you want to be a bestseller, use your book to generate leads, or become the expert in your space—your marketing has to go above and beyond a Kickstarter campaign.

You should be going on podcasts, writing articles that speak to your audience, being featured in major publications, possibly even doing speaking gigs.

If you’re ready to start charting your book marketing course, click here to schedule a free consultation with one of our author strategists. Even if we don’t work together, we love helping authors in any way we can.

The post 8 Lessons For Launching Your Book With A Kickstarter (And Raising $25,000+) appeared first on Book in a Box.

You just don’t know how.

And you’re not alone. Countless professionals-turned-authors find themselves in the same position. They know a book can drive leads, they just don’t know how to do it.

The answer is to use your book as a lead magnet.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of using a book to drive leads for your business, I want to explain a central premise behind lead magnets that most people misunderstand.

What Everyone Gets Wrong About Lead Magnets

If you research lead magnets, they’re always described as something you “giveaway in exchange for an email address.” In a very simple sense, this is correct, but it exposes a bigger issue in the traditional marketing mindset.

Understanding your lead magnet as something you exchange for an email address forces you to frame your relationship to your leads as purely transactional. This is wrong.

When someone signs up to get your lead magnet, they shouldn’t feel like they’ve given something up in exchange for your magnet. They should feel excited to have joined your tribe.

If a person feels extorted by your opt-in—they didn’t want to sign up for your email list, but they needed the information in your lead magnet—they are way more likely to immediately unsubscribe from your list and never interact with you again.

When someone is excited to join your tribe, you’ve built an actual relationship. You’re providing real value to them instead of manipulating them, and as a result they will be happier, speak more highly of you, and engage more with your content.

Using a lead magnet to create this kind of relationship requires you to do two things:

• Offer incredible value. Your lead magnet needs to clearly have extreme value to your audience—which isn’t much of a concern when your lead magnet is a book.
• Meet your audience where they are. Different types of lead magnets are right for different situations. A book is often a great magnet, but not always.

The second point is key to understanding how a book can generate leads for your business.

When It’s Right To Use A Book As A Lead Magnet

The right lead magnet for any situation is the one your prospect needs most at that exact moment.

For example, if you have a very specific need—let’s say you’re an email marketer who wants to increase their email open rates by 5%—you probably don’t need a book titled “Email Marketing 101.” You need something that you can use right now to boost your open rate by 5%.

Over at the Sumo blog, you can see this exact scenario play out with their complete guide to email open rates. Instead of offering a book as their lead magnet, they offer something the reader can use right now: a kit containing templates and tools to immediately improve email open rates.

This is often the case with low-cost, low-commitment businesses.

So when is a book the perfect lead magnet?

When you need to earn the trust of your prospective customer, especially if you’re selling something someone complex or nuanced that they don’t fully understand.

For example, if you’re a consultant, coach, or advisor, the nature of your job is that people come to you when they need answers. They have to trust you to know what they don’t.

You see this a lot with branding and marketing.

Business owners know a ton about their product, their financials, and their internal operations, but they don’t have any idea of where to start with branding.

Not only is a book on branding appealing to these people as a way to learn what they don’t know, but hiring a branding agency is a decision totally based on trust. Reading a book written by the CEO of a branding agency is a great way to build that trust, which is exactly why Sol Marketing uses their CEO’s book, Branding Is Sex, as their lead magnet:

When a prospective customer reads Deb’s book, they no longer feel overwhelmed by how little they know about branding. She has simplified things in a fun, easy-to-understand way, and they have taken an important step forward in fixing their brand.

This is a huge benefit to Deb’s business. She will forever be the person who taught them about branding—the de facto expert on the topic. Which means that when they’re ready to hire an expert, she will be their first choice.

A book positions you as the expert in the field, gives your audience the information they need to feel knowledgeable, and, most importantly, gives you a chance to share the way you approach your work so that those who connect with it can further the relationship.

3 Strategies For Using Your Book As A Lead Magnet

Now, the question is how do you actually use a book as a lead magnet?

There are three main approaches to turning your book into a lead magnet:

1. A content-driven approach.
2. A social media focused approach.
3. A paid advertising approach.

Let’s start with content.

1. Make Your Book An Opt-in on Your Content

This strategy requires more writing on your part, but it is incredibly effective.

The strategy is simple in premise:

1. Create content your audience wants to read.
2. Embed a form that offers to email them your book.
3. Collect emails and build relationships.

I’m not going to go too in-depth on actually creating content—that’s a big enough topic for an entire course—but I will say this:

Your content must target the same people who want to read your book.

If you’re giving away a book on investing, it doesn’t make sense to write reviews of new movies, even if you think it will lead to traffic. No one reading that content will need your book.

The easiest way to set your book up as a lead magnet on your content is to use Sumo.com, a free suite of tools that helps build your email list.

Instead of manually coding a form into your site that offers the book, and then integrating an email platform, you can just use use any of Sumo’s built-in form embeds.

Those embeds includes the little boxes that appear in the corner of your screen as you scroll down a page, like on Sumo’s own blog:

Pop up forms that appear in the center of the page, like on Giftology author John Ruhlin’s blog:

And those full page dropdown forms, like on Finding Success in Failure author Lucas Carlson’s blog:

SumoMe will integrate easily with whatever email platform you decide to use, allowing you to start using your book as a lead magnet immediately.

2. Give Free Copies To Your Followers

If you don’t have a blog or don’t want to invest the time in creating content, social media is a great place to engage your audience and offer your book as a lead magnet.

The easiest way to do this is to create a simple landing page for your book and share it on your social media platforms.

Whatever email platform you’re using to store and engage with leads almost certainly has built-in templates for landing pages, and if yours doesn’t, you should consider switching to a platform like ConvertKit.

Just like writing content, designing a landing page is a topic worthy of an entire article, so if you don’t want to use the templates provided by your email platform, I’d suggest using a platform like Unbounce to build your page.

Once you have your page set up, simply share on Facebook and Twitter, and “pin” it to the top of your profiles, like author Geoff Blades:

As you engage new followers, anyone who visits your page will see a link to your landing page, and have the option to sign up for your book.

PRO TIP: You can also use software like Snip.ly to add your own opt-in to links you share on social media, like this New York Times article featuring an opt-in for our book, The Book in a Box Method:

3. Use Paid Traffic To Skyrocket Your Book’s Reach

It’s tricky to make the math work when you’re using paid advertising to sign up leads with a book.

With Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, the two most common pay-per-click advertising platforms, you pay for every person who clicks on your ad.

The cost can stack up quick, and unless those leads those leads are converting at really high rate, you’re essentially losing money to give your book away for free.

However, there is one strategy we see work extremely well for authors: a “Free + Shipping & Handling” ad campaign.

The basic premise is that in your ad, you offer your book for free plus 5 to 8 dollars to cover the cost of shipping and handling. The goal is to have the shipping and handling cost (plus some immediate upsells) cover the cost of the ads, so that you are generating new leads and sharing your book with a wider audience for free.

Once your ads are paying for themselves, you can increase their volume, and send copies of your book to thousands of potential customers.

Ryan Levesque is a great example of this. His bestselling book Ask was run through one of the most successful free + shipping and handling campaigns in history, and is still available:

Running this sort of campaign is very involved—if you don’t know anything about PPC advertising, I’d advise against it—but if you want a step-by-step guide to a free + shipping and handling campaign, check out this guide by Ricky Baldasso.

For a Great Lead Magnet, You Need to Write a Great Book

Underlying all of these strategies is the assumption that your book is good enough to convince people to buy from you.

Just “writing a book” isn’t enough for any of these strategies to be effective. What makes them work is the connection they create with prospective customers once they’ve engaged with your ideas.

If you don’t have a book yet, or if your book isn’t good enough, you’re getting ahead of yourself. First, focus on creating an amazing book that will convert leads to customers before you worry about turning it into a lead magnet.

If you’re interested in writing your book yourself, click here to get a free copy of our bestseller The Book in a Box Method. It breaks down our original system for turning the wisdom in your head into a published book using a structured interview process.

If you need some help writing your book, check out our homepage to see we’re a fit to work together.

The post How To Use Your Book As A Lead Magnet appeared first on Book in a Box.

“If my book just changes one person’s life, I’ll be happy.”

This is a beautiful sentiment. And it’s almost always a lie.

After slaving away at their books for hundreds or thousands of hours, every author wants their book to reach an audience.

To make matters worse, book marketing can be incredibly complicated. For most authors (especially the busy professionals we work with at Book In A Box), the time and effort necessary to understand the nuances of book marketing just isn’t worth it.

As a result, we created a detailed playbook for turning a great book into an Amazon Bestseller, without ANY of the assets a professional marketer has.

After refining this process with hundreds of authors (you can read about some of their results here) we’ve decided to publish it as a free guide for anyone who wants to turn their book into an Amazon Bestseller.

Before we dive in, however, you need to be clear on why you want to be #1 in your Amazon category.

We have an entire article on why bestseller lists are bullshit when it comes to measuring book sales. You can sell a ton of books and not hit a bestseller list, and you can sell a modest number of books and dominate your category. It all depends on how your particular bestseller list measures sales.

However, the unfortunate reality is that being a bestseller matters. It leads to people taking your book more seriously and seeing you as more of an authority.

If you want to use your book to build authority and influence, hitting the top of your Amazon category is a great place to start.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have everything you need—step-by-step instructions, templates, promotional services, etc.—to run an Amazon Bestseller Campaign and hit #1 in your category.

A Quick Overview of Your Amazon Bestseller Campaign

Your Amazon Bestseller campaign is going to be broken down into two time periods:

1. The Pre-Launch Period. This is where you’ll put together your book assets, gather your assets, and schedule your promotions..
2. The Book Launch. This is the week when you’ll execute all of your big promotional pushes and try to sell as many books as possible.

The goal here is to condense the bulk of your book sales into a small window. Why?

Because Amazon measures sales on a rolling basis. To be a bestseller, this means your goal isn’t to outsell other books overall, but to outsell other books within a specific window.

For example, if you sold 10 books a day over the course of a month, you’d have sold 300 books overall, but probably wouldn’t hit the bestseller list.

If you only sold 150 books total, but you sold them all in one day, you’d almost definitely hit the bestseller lists for your category.

If you follow this guide to the letter, you’re going to spend a few weeks hustling to get everything set up—The Pre-Launch Period—and then something amazing will happen:

You’ll start your launch week, and you’ll have a published book with dozens of reviews. Your book will be emailed out to 1,000 of your friends. Your book will be included on email lists that have thousands of subscribers. Popular influencers will share their book with their audience.

All of a sudden, you’ll have sold 100+ copies in a couple days, be listed as an Amazon Bestseller, and you’ll feel as if it happened effortlessly.

But first, you have to learn the steps, starting with The Pre-Launch Period.

Pre-Launch: How To Prep For Your Bestseller Campaign

You need to put several things in place before you make your big push for the bestseller list.

This time period can be incredibly frustrating, because your book is finished and you’re justifiably eager to start selling it. However, if you try to sell copies of your book before making sure your book is positioned right and your promotions are scheduled, you’ll wind up shooting yourself in the foot.

Like we talked about earlier, Amazon measures sales on a rolling basis. If 30 people who would have bought your book during your Launch Week wind up buying it early, all at different times, you lose those 30 people from your big push—making it harder to crack the list.

There are four things you need to do in this period.

1. Make Sure Your Cover Is Amazing

I cannot overstate the importance of a good cover. The old adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is either wrong, or the single most often ignored piece of good advice in history. We have a whole article on how people actually judge your book (hint: it’s not the writing.)

A cover does more than tell you what a book is about, it signals its quality. A beautiful, classy, and engaging cover piques your audience’s curiosity. A cover that is poorly designed at best has no effect on a reader’s opinion of your book, but more likely, leaves them confused and uninterested.

Let me give you an example. What would you say this book is about, judging by its cover alone?

It’s about…construction? It sort of looks like a robot giving another robot a ring? Robot marriage proposals?

If you don’t recognize that title or author, grab the nearest English major. That’s one of the most celebrated novellas ever written. Since its first publication in the 1890s, it’s been republished again and again, adapted into movies, even made into an opera.

Convincing people to read this book should be easy, but this cover actually makes people dismiss it.

This book by Bridgette Mayer, however, was an Amazon Bestseller, and it’s easy to see why when you look at its cover:

It’s clean, tells you what it’s about, and its design doesn’t say “low quality.” It invites you to read it.

If you want to go more in-depth on this, we actually have an entire guide to getting a great cover.

Once you have your cover in place, you can start building the relationships you’ll need to promote your book.

2. Reach Out To Key Influencers In Your Book’s Niche

Influencers within your niche are incredibly important for two reasons:

1. They can give you feedback about your book and your positioning.
2. They have massive audiences they can promote your book to.

However, you will get neither of these things from them if you don’t have an actual relationship.

Once you decide which influencers you want to connect with, you should simply reach out and give them a free copy of your book. Let them know it hasn’t come out yet, and that you’d just love to share it with them. DON’T ASK THEM FOR ANYTHING.

Seriously, you cannot ask for anything at this point. You’re just trying to build a connection between them and your book.

Hey *Influencer Name*!

This is sort of random, but I just wanted to thank you.

I’ve been working on a book for a long time, and I’ve just finished it, and I’m going back to thank all the people who were big influences on me while I wrote it. So thanks!

It’s called *Title* and it’s about *Topic*. I can send you a copy—no strings attached—just let me know if you prefer Kindle or PDF.

I think you might like it, because [INSERT AUTHENTIC REASON THEY WILL CARE ABOUT].

If you’re too busy, I totally understand. Just wanted to reach out and thank you for everything you’ve shared.

Best,

*Your Name*

See? You’re not asking for anything, you’re just sharing your book for a reason you think they will care about. They’re going to have a much more positive reaction to this and will be more willing to read your book.

Also, by asking what format they’d prefer the book in, you’ve made it more awkward for them to say no.

Your entire goal in this interaction is to open the door to more interactions.

3. Engage The Communities That Will Care About Your Book

Once you have connections with key influencers, it’s time to start engaging a broader audience. The first question you need to ask is: where can I engage my audience online?

For most authors, we’ve found the following online social groups to be the most rewarding:

1. Subreddits
2. LinkedIn Groups
3. Facebook Groups

Make a list of key online groups you want to promote your book to, and start engaging them regularly.

For example, if you’re writing a book on fitness, it’s a good idea to start posting in r/Fitness, a Reddit community with millions of people, and building up some real reputation and connections there.

Once you’ve built up those relationships, you can post a thread announcing that you’re going to be releasing a book, and ask for feedback.

The important thing is that you’re building trust with your audience by interacting with them before you try and sell to them. So many people fail to do this, and then are shocked when people don’t care about their book.

Once you have the attention of your audience, it’s time to publish your book.

4. Publish Your Book To Amazon

Publish my book? But I haven’t finished the bestseller campaign!

A lot of authors think that to be a bestseller, you have to sell copies starting the second your book is released. That’s just not the case.

Again, the only thing that matters in becoming an Amazon bestseller is how many copies you sell within a single window of time. If your book has been out 15 days without selling any copies, but then sells 1,000 on its 16th day, you’re still a bestseller.

The only caveat to this is that you want to finish your bestseller campaign within one month of publishing your book, so that your book still qualifies for Amazon’s “Hot New Releases” list.

We’re not going to get into the nitty gritty details of publishing an eBook to Amazon, because Amazon already has a great guide that will walk you through the process here of publishing a book and creating an Amazon Author Profile here.

Follow that guide to publish your book, and don’t worry about your book’s price or category yet, you’ll handle all of that when we get to your actual book launch.

5. Gather Reviews For Your Book

You need to already have many reviews for your book before its big launch so that when you push your book to those huge audiences, it looks legitimate.

Seeing that a product has been reviewed many times is a massive trust signal. It says that it’s quality, that other people have enjoyed it, and that there’s nothing fishy going on with its marketing.

There are a few ways to get reviews early, and the fastest is to simply ask people you know.

Here’s a template you can use for this:

Hey *Friend’s Name*,

So this is going to come out of nowhere but…I wrote a book! And it’s published!

I need to ask you a favor. I just haven’t really done any promotion for the book yet, which means no one has reviewed it—and it’s hard to get strangers to buy a copy if they don’t see any reviews.

If I you could write a review, I would be incredibly thankful (and of course you get a free review copy so you can read it).

You can download a PDF version of the book *here*, and go over to the Amazon page to leave a review *here*.

Thank you so much; this is really great of you to do.

Talk soon,

*Your Name*

If you want to make it as easy as possible for them, you can actually pre-write several reviews, and then send them to friends you are extremely close with. When I say extremely close, I mean the kinds of friends who would do something (like copy and paste an Amazon review) just to help you out, no questions asked.

Unless you have really terrible friends, you should be able to get 15 to 25 reviews this way, which will give your book the social proof it needs for people to take it seriously.

6. Place Your Book on Big Giveaway Lists

Now we’re talking. At this point, you’ve been laying the groundwork for your marketing, gathering the relationships and social proof you need to execute effective promotions.

Now you get to schedule those big promotions.

There are two reasons this step comes near the end:

1. You need to have a date in mind. Scheduling promotions means picking a launch date, and it’s hard to pick a date before everything that came before this step is in place.
2. These promotional services are selective. Some of these services can email your book to 100,000+ people, but they won’t just email any book. They need proof that your book legit. Fortunately, you have a beautifully designed book with lots of reviews.

The most approachable and effective promotion tactic we’ve seen authors use is paid email placement.

These are services that have giant emails lists of subscribers. Their subscribers sign up to get access to discounted books. The services in turn offer the giant lists to authors, in exchange for payment, and for the author discounting their book.

The key here is to set your book’s price fairly high, somewhere around $9.99 (Remember, you don’t care about sales yet) and then apply to these services, offering to discount your book to $0.99 for them.

You’re going to be selling your book for $0.99 during your Launch Period anyway (more on that later), so the discount you’re offering isn’t costing you anything.

You want all of your promotional emails to launch on the same day—the first day of your Launch Period—in order to maximize their effect.

The three services we recommend are as follows:

1. Riffle. Selective, but very dependable. Their most expensive package is $100 while their cheapest is $25. See their site for full list of criteria.
2. Buck Books. They will only promote books that are discounted to $0.99. They are typically selective, but if you purchased your cover through 100Covers, you’re guaranteed a spot on their email blast.
3. BookBub. The most selective of the three, but they have an incredible list of subscribers. For example, here’s a chart breaking down their fees and average sales based on genre, subscriber list, and discount:

Those are the three we prefer to use, but there are tons of eBook promotional services you can use, which have been thoroughly documented by sites like Kindlepreneur.

7. Create A Facebook Event For Your Book Launch

Now that you have an actual launch day, you can start telling people when your book is coming.

The easiest way to tell everyone about your launch—and remind them on the day of the launch—is to create a Facebook Event and invite everyone you’re connected with.

You can find your event page under the “More” tab on your Facebook page:

Once you click “Create Event,” you’ll be able to set your event up. Remember to set your event to public so that people you don’t know can find it. The more the merrier.

Next, set your Event Photo to be a picture of your book, and add a fun title like below:

In your Event Description, make sure everyone knows why they’re invited and what’s going to happen. Also, choose some keywords that relate to your book, so that random Facebookers can happen across it more easily.

Then, create your event and invite everyone you know to it. When your book is discounted to $0.99, you’ll post on the Event Page letting everyone know and sharing a link to the Amazon page. That way, everyone invited to Event will get a notification and be reminded to go buy your book.

Now that you have everything set up for your launch, you can put your foot on the gas and start The Launch Period.

The Launch Period: Getting To Bestseller Status

This is the big sprint. You’ve spent a long time building relationships, scheduling promotions, and building the trust of your audience.

If you’ve done it right, you’ve built a powerful book-selling engine, and all you have to do now is put your foot on the gas.

But first, you need to position your book for success.

8. Update Your Prices And Categories Before The Launch

At least 12 hours before your book launch, you need to update your price to $0.99 so everything is all right for your promotions.

If you agreed to price your book at $0.99 for a promotional service, but didn’t, they won’t promote your book and will probably never work with you again.

Updating your price is easy:

1. Login to kdp.amazon.com
2. From the dashboard, select “Edit eBook Pricing” from the options next to your book
3. Change the price to $0.99

DO NOT HIT SAVE YET.

You also need to SIMULTANEOUSLY update your book’s categories so that you can rank in the right places. This has to be done at the same time as the price change, because any changes to price or category will lock the system for a period of time, making it impossible for you to update anything else.

Under the section titled “3. Target Your Book to Customers” you can decide your categories. In order to pick categories, go to the Kindle Bestseller Listings and find two potential categories for the book.

The rules to decide are as follows:

• Choose at least one category where the top book has a bestseller rank worse than 5,000, ideally as low as 10,000.
• Choose categories you would be happy to be in, and make sense for the book. If you said you were a bestseller in x, would it make sense?

One thing to note is that you will likely come across specific subcategories that can’t be selected manually.

For example, even though “Business & Money/Education & Reference/MBA” is a category, you can’t explicitly choose it.

Those niche categories are selected according to the specific keywords a book targets. You can select these categories by selecting the right combination of general category and keyword. For example, you can target “Business & Money/Education & Reference/MBA,” you can select the “Business & Money” section, and target the keyword “MBA.” This tells Amazon which subcategory to put it in.

For a full breakdown of what keyword and category combinations are necessary to unlock specific subcategories, use this list hosted by Amazon.

Once all of this is completed, you can scroll to the bottom of the page and tick “Save and Publish.”

Now, it’s time to cash in on everything you set up in The Pre-Launch Period.

9. Reach Back Out To Those Key Influencers

A lot of what happens on the first day of your launch actually only takes minimal work for you. For example, the following will happen without your help:

1. Your paid placements are being emailed out.
2. Your Facebook Event will alert your invitees.

However, there are still things you need to do manually.

First among those is cashing in on those relationships you built with influencers.

Reach back out to all of those major influencers you interacted with before with an email like this:

Hey *Influencer Name*!

I just wanted to reach out and let you know that the book is officially live! *Link “live!” to Amazon Page*

We’re at *X* reviews and ranking *X*!

I just wanted to thank you for the feedback and for responding to me at all when I first reached out. It means a lot that you were willing to give me your time when I was coming out of the blue and asking you for advice.

And now we’re here!

I’ve discounted the book to $0.99 for the first week to make downloading it a no-brainer. If you think your audience would be interested, it would be amazing if you could send a short tweet to share it with them. No pressure, of course, but after all the hard work I’ve put into the book, I’m confident it will add a lot of value for them.

If there’s ever anything I can do to make it up to you, just let me know.

Best,

*Your Name*

Just like before, you aren’t asking for anything. These are people who get pitched 1,000,000 times a day. They hate that shit.

Instead, you’re thanking them, and without giving them a choice, you’re pushing responsibility for the book on to them. It’s somehow their book too now.

This makes it way more likely that they’ll help you out by sharing the book, and even if they don’t, by asking what you can do for them you’ve opened the door to working together down the line.

10. Cold Email Your Professional Network

This is probably our favorite Bestseller hack.

Do you have a LinkedIn account? Of course you do. Every professional does.

Did you know that you can email—not LinkedIn Message—every person you’re connected to on LinkedIn at the email address they used to sign up for LinkedIn?

If you click this link, a window will popup containing the above site, from which you can literally with one click get the emails of everyone you’re connected to on LinkedIn.

If you click “Request archive,” an email will be sent to your inbox which directs you to a download page. On that page, you can download a Zip file that contains a spreadsheet titled “Connections.csv”

That file contains the email addresses of every LinkedIn contact you have.

Once you have the emails of all of your connections, the next step is to use a piece of software we recommend for all cold email situations, MailShake.

These connections aren’t people who have signed up for your email lists. You can’t add them to something MailChimp and email them every month, you’ll get flagged for spam.

However, MailShake isn’t designed for you to build a giant list and email them every week. It’s designed to run one campaign at a time on a list of cold emails, without saving them for later.

Plus, it only costs $9 per user per month, and comes with a 30-day money back guarantee.

One quick note about cold emailing. Different email providers have different limits on your daily email limits. For instance, free Gmail accounts have a limit of 500 sent emails per day, whereas paid G Suite email accounts have limits of 2,000 per day. If your list is bigger than your daily limit, divide your list into multiple days.

Back to MailShake.

Once you’re registered with MailShake, you can initiate a new campaign by clicking “New Campaign,” which will take you to this screen:

Once you name your campaign and decide which email account you want your emails to come from, you can upload the CSV of emails you exported from LinkedIn:

Once you’ve uploaded that list, MailShake will know exactly who to email. On top of that, MailShake will access to the other columns in the sheet, which includes each connection’s name and title.

You can use this information to customize your outreach automatically.

All you have to do now is enter your email template, and let MailShake reach out to everyone on your behalf.

Here’s a form email we use for this.

Hi *Name*,

Sorry to drop out of the blue like this, I’ve got exciting news and a quick favor to ask of you.

Exciting News: I wrote a book! It’s called *Title* and it’s about *Description*

I’m discounting the book to $0.99 for a couple days so that my friends can read it without paying full price.

If you’re interested, *here’s a link to the Amazon page.*

Obviously, please don’t feel obligated, I promise I will not hold it against you if you don’t have the time to. More than anything, I just want to share my excitement with my friends!

Best,

*Your Name*

With that, you should generate even more buys and shares.

11. Promote Your Book To Your Communities

If you’ve spent time engaging audiences like you’re supposed to, you’ll be able to post to all the communities you’ve engaged and share your new book.

For example, one of our authors, Furious Pete, used his relationships with the fitness community on r/Fitness to do an Ask-Me-Anything, which over 100,000 people saw:

Now, he has some celebrity status, so you might not be able to garner the exact same results, but you can still cash in on all that goodwill you’ve built up.

This also extends to any Facebook and LinkedIn Groups you joined along the way. Jump in and post about your new book, inviting people to buy at its $0.99 price, and asking for feedback.

12. Wait, and Say Thank You

At this point, all you really have to do is wait for your promotions to fizzle out over the several days.

The last day of your launch week is more or less spent sending thank you notes.

Seriously, send thank you notes. You’ve spent the last week blasting the hell out of the internet because it was a momentous event in your life, but to everyone else, it was just another week.

Anyone who took time out of their day to purchase your book is either:

1. A great friend.
2. A real member of your audience.
3. Both.

You need to engage those people, and let them know you’re grateful.

We’re actually not going to include a template for this one. Gotta come from the heart sometimes

Congratulations, You’re (Probably) an Amazon Bestseller Now

If you followed this guide to the letter (and there were A LOT of letters in it), you most likely have an Amazon Bestseller on your hands.

For the rest of your life, every time you’re featured in the press, every time you’re introduced as a keynote speaker, every time you launch a personal website—you will have “Bestseller” next to your name.

There are a TON of doors that open for you when you have a popular book, and for a complete guide to benefiting from your newfound success, check out this guide.

If you read this guide and found yourself overwhelmed, don’t worry about it. We find it overwhelming too, that’s why we built an entire company around doing it for you.

Feel free to get in touch with us through the form on the homepage to discuss whether we’re the right fit to help you write, publish, and market your book.

If you follow the advice in this guide and launch an Amazon Bestseller, we’d LOVE to hear your story. Let us know by email at hello@bookinabox.com, and we might just show your book some love on our social media.

The post The Non-Marketer’s Guide To Launching An Amazon Best Seller appeared first on Book in a Box.

However, unlike other college students, John saw an opportunity. Instead of selling the knives one-at-a-time, door-to-door, like the rest of the team, he met with business leaders and worked with them to send hundreds of knives out as a way of showing gratitude to their employees, their vendors, and their customers.

This worked, and he flourished. What started out as John’s clever idea quickly became Cutco’s largest distributor in the history of the company.

The more he worked in corporate gifting, the more he realized how poorly people were doing it

John intuitively understood that the best gifts were the ones that made the recipient happiest, not the ones that shamelessly promoted the giver’s brand or felt like an obligation.

“Gifting matters because relationships matter. There’s something about tangible and personal gifts that really makes the recipient feel how important they are to you. And, if it’s something that lasts, they’re reminded of that caring over and over. Everyone wants to be cared about.”

Looking at the companies who buy employees a pen set after 50 years of dedicated service, and knew he had to do something to help.

His clients thrived giving gift after gift that blew the recipient away, but when people asked John for advice on giving gifts like he did, he didn’t know where to point them. Their mindset was fundamentally wrong.

He took it upon himself to help business people give better gifts

Over the years, John gave 1-on-1 advice to hundreds of business people. He saw the impact that his advice had on the way the businesses thought about their partners, but it was exhausting.

More importantly, it still didn’t allow his ideas to reach the scale he wanted. Across the country, business people were still giving gifts with the total wrong mindset, and John knew he could never change that one person at a time.

He saw that writing a book was the way to spread his message. It would allow anyone with $10 to spend to learn directly from John.

Even after he was retired, the ideas that he was sharing one person at a time would be able to live on and help people. Finally, he’d be able to scale his wisdom.

After failed attempts to write the book, John decided to hire Book In A Box to help make it a reality

At first, John wanted to write a book the traditional way. But without structure or guidance, he struggled to get his ideas represented on the page.

“I would write one paragraph or get one story down, or worse, just stare at a blank screen. It was beyond frustrating.”

John is not a bad writer. In fact, his writing is very good. But the daunting task of organizing 60,000 words was overwhelming. He had no confidence in his ability to organize a book, and he had no sounding board that he trusted to discuss ideas with, and so he floundered.

“Truthfully, I didn’t even know if I had enough good stuff to put together a book. It seems crazy now, but without someone to work with, I wasn’t sure.”

Finally, after an introduction from Cameron Herold, John decided to hire Book In A Box to help him. He was surrounded by a professional publishing team to work on his ideas with, and six months later, Giftology was born.

The book elevated John’s status as “the gifting guy” and helped him reach new audiences

Everyone who knew John before the book knew him as the guy to turn to for all things gifting, but no one else knew that about him. He was known in his circle, but not beyond it.

After the book came out, all that changed. He was able to land major podcasts (like Lewis Howes), major media (like Yahoo! Finance) and major speaking gigs (like Vistage Global).

His book led to huge opportunities to spread his message, and he was able to share the ideas in the book not just with his immediate network, but with the wider world.

The book generated an immediate ROI from speaking and book sales

John did not write the book primarily for business reasons, but it definitely helped his business. He doubled his speaking fees from $7,500 to $15,000, and was able to secure over 15 paid gigs to discuss the ideas in the book within the first year.

Because the Book In A Box model takes no royalties on book sales, the copies that were quickly selling from all this attention also netted John substantial revenue.

“Within three months, we’d recouped the cost of the Book In A Box process, plus all the costs of PR and marketing we did, just in book sales and speaking fees. That doesn’t even include the boost to our business from new clients who came through the book.”

More importantly, the increased attention led to new clients for Ruhlin Group

With all this attention, Ruhlin Group also prospered. Clients are finding John and approaching him for help with gifting with no intentional marketing effort.

“People who we are distantly connected to on LinkedIn or Facebook, or those who have read the book, come to us and become clients. It’s amazing to have this flow of interest happening passively because of the work we did last year.”

Not only are more prospects emerging, but they are higher quality too.

“Clients are taking us more seriously. They know we are the experts in the space.”

The book has become the ultimate tool for word of mouth. Previously, John would speak to business owners and their minds would be blown by his ideas. But, after the conversation, his name would rarely come up. Now that he has a book, readers have a way to talk about him and put him in front of other people who could benefit from his ideas.

“My favorite thing about having a book is that it gives readers who are excited about the ideas a tool to continue spreading the word.”

Giftology has become the movement that John always hoped it would be

Bigger than the immediate ROI and the business growth, though, is the impact the book is having.

“I’ve had people reach out from Vietnam, telling me about how their marriage has improved because of the book. It’s incredible to see the impact something like this can have.”

Organizations who resonate with John’s message are taking it upon themselves to reach out and help promote the ideas.

Recently, Scott Harrison from Charity:Water was given the book and ended up reaching out to John. He wants to buy copies for his whole team to help them build the right mindset around generosity, and wants to partner based on the book.

Hundreds of other organizations have reached out to John to let him know how the book impacted them. From paying for weekly apartment cleans for employees, to sending custom surfboards to customers who love surfing, John is watching the world become a kinder, more giving place thanks to his influence.

“You start doing the ripple effect of this… I kind of shudder to think about what the impact is.”

The post How John Ruhlin Created a Movement and Became “The Gifting Guy” appeared first on Book in a Box.

We all know that the non-stop news cycle and round-the-clock social media have sped up our consumption habits. But do these same habits translate to books?

We decided to find out.

We gathered a list of every New York Times #1 Non-Fiction Bestseller for the past 7 years and analyzed how the average length has evolved.

The answer was clear: our collective cultural ADD is impacting our reading habits.

The Average Bestseller Length Is Falling Fast

Since 2011, the average length of a bestseller has dropped steadily from year to year.

As recently as 2011, the average #1 non-fiction bestseller was 467 pages. By 2017, however, that number has dropped to 273 pages.

The average #1 bestselling book length has fallen by 42% in just 7 years.

And this doesn’t seem to be an anomaly. The drop comes as part of a larger downward trend:

• In 2011, the list’s average length peaked at 467 pages.
• In 2012, that average fell to 410.
• In 2013, it fell further to 367.
• In 2014, it recovered slightly to 382 on the back of three 600+ page books.
• In 2015, the drop resumed as the average fell to 345.
• In 2016, the drop lessened, falling only to 342.
• In 2017, the downward trend has continued, with an average book length of 273 pages.

This isn’t to say that long books are no longer succeeding. In 2016’s list, Ron Chernow’s 816-page Alexander Hamilton managed to crack the top spot.

However, the drop in the overall average length of bestsellers over the last 7 years points to a marked trend in the overall preferences of the average reader.

#1 Bestsellers Have A Wide Range, But A Narrow Average

Since the New York Times Non-Fiction Bestseller List began in 2000, books of all sizes have claimed the top spot.

The shortest book to hit the #1 spot was Harry Frankfurt’s 80-page On Bullshit.

The longest? Robert Caro’s 1232-page tome, Master of the Senate.

Looking at this, a hopeful author might believe that length plays no role in the likelihood of a book becoming a bestseller. But while books of all sizes have cracked the list at one point or another, the vast majority of #1 bestsellers fall into a much smaller range.

Over 64% of the #1 bestsellers since the list began have fallen in the 200 to 400 page range.

In recent years (2015-2017), the trend has become even more pronounced, with over 50% of #1 bestsellers falling into the narrower 250-350 page range:

Shockingly, the 450+ page length that held the average book length just 7 short years ago, now makes up just 13% of the books in the top spot.

How to explain this dramatic shift, and whether the trend will continue, remains to be seen.   

The post How Long Should My Book Be? We Analyzed 272 #1 Bestsellers to Find Out appeared first on Book in a Box.

But Stephan saw a problem. He was working more than he needed to.

He’d carried over his corporate habits to his start-up. He worked from 9 to 5, whether he had anything to do or not, because that’s how he was trained to work.

He asked himself a simple question:

“Could I get the same results while working less?”

The answer was yes. He found that if there wasn’t a need to put in his hours or impress his boss, he was only driven by results. Working this way, his efficiency went through the roof.

His results-driven mindset allowed Stephan to grow his company quickly, but with one catch: He was working less, but his team was still grinding out a 9 to 5. He asked himself:

“How do I get the entire company to work the way I am? How can I help them have better balance in their lives, but also get more done?”

What it came down to, he realized, was pressure. As an entrepreneur, he was always under pressure to get things done faster. He measured himself by results, not effort.

He decided it would be an interesting experiment to create the same incentives for his team, and teach them to work the way he works.

“We all expected that this would be an interesting thing to try out for a summer, and then go back to the normal eight-hour workdays.”

But that isn’t what happened. That summer was the most productive in Tower’s history. Employees had more fun, spent more time on the water, and most importantly, got MORE work done in less time!

There was no turning back, and the five hour workday was born at Tower Paddle Boards.

Stephan decided to share this with the world, to help other people do the same thing

As the five hour workday propelled Tower Paddle Boards to more and more success, Stephan felt compelled to share what he was learning.

“The fact that millions of companies were operating on the old model, which was less effective and worse for employees, drove me crazy.

We wanted to create a lighthouse for business owners showing them there’s another way to do things. We wanted to impact the way that companies do business.”

Since online advertising had been so great for Tower Paddle Boards, Stephan started with online publications to share his message.

He piqued everyone’s curiosity. Tens of thousands of people were sharing his articles, asking how this could possibly work. Was he paying less? Would this work in other industries?

“That showed me this idea mattered. It proved that it resonated with people.”

Having an idea that matters, however, is not what mainstream media cares about. They care about expertise, and even though Stephan was living proof that his methods work, major outlets wouldn’t give him the time of day.

Why? Because he didn’t have the one credential you have to have to breakthrough to mainstream media: A book.

Stephan wanted to take his idea to the next level, and have a place to point people to learn more. He realized a book was the only way to do it.

“We wanted to be authentic to our brand and show people that they could live this extraordinary life, but we also needed to have a comprehensive resource to really show people. We wanted to write the book to share that message.”

Stephan teamed up with Book In A Box to create an incredible book

Although Stephan knew that a book was the way to spread the message, he didn’t know where to start.

“I’m not a great writer, so I knew there was no way I was going to do this on my own. But I had to get these ideas out there. It was too important.”

He heard about Book In A Box from a friend, and it immediately clicked. The ideas and knowledge were already in his head—he just needed someone to help him translate those ideas into book form.

“Within the first two phone calls, I realized ‘This is actually going to be an incredible book. [My Editor] was amazing. He really took ownership of moving the project forward and ensuring I had the best possible book. It was this amazing collaborative, back-and-forth process.

The book turned out so great, even I was honestly surprised. I’m so excited by the end result.”

The book has become the perfect vehicle to spread the message

Originally, Stephan has modest ambitions for the book. Although he knew the ideas were important, he would have been happy to ship a free copy to the 15,000 customers that Tower serves every year, and spread the ideas organically through their customer base.

That’s not what ended up happening.

As soon as the media caught wind of the book and Stephan’s ideas, they were all over it.

Within a few months of the book’s launch, Stephan and The Five Hour Workday were profiled in Inc, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Fast Company. Stephan was booked on a TV media circuit that included CNBC, CNN, and Fox. The book has even exploded internationally, being featured in the UK’s Daily Mail and hundreds of newspapers in Germany, Austria, Canada, India, and all across the globe.

Some highlights:

• Huffington Post created a Facebook video on the concept that went viral, getting over 4 million views and 38,000 shares.
• Fortune Magazine is doing a profile of Tower, sponsored by Chase
• In Germany’s largest newspaper, Stephan was named “World’s Best Boss”
• There are even talks with major networks to start a reality TV show based around the concept of having Stephan help businesses implement the five hour workday

“I knew the book would help us get press, but the degree to which this blew up totally surprised me. We were on Shark Tank four years ago and were able to grow the business rapidly on the press that gave us. It was great. I was all over every piece of press. Every time a link happened, I would go back to the editor and the writer and thank them, and ask for a link specifically in our article.”

“What we’ve done with the Five Hour Workday, it’s been 10x what happened on Shark Tank.”

“We’re all over the place to the point that I can’t even keep track of all the media we’re getting. This time around, I’ve completely given up on that. There’s just so many. It’s really snowballed into a life of it’s own.”

As the message has spread, Stephan’s business has grown

From a business perspective, Stephan hoped that the book’s message would help customers realize that Tower Paddle Boards practices what they preach.

“I was reading a lot of books on branding and the core thing that kept coming up over and over was that you have to live your brand, and you had to do that very publicly. I hoped that the book would show people what our brand was about, and that we were really living it.”

As a physical goods company, Tower sends out over 15,000 paddle boards a year, and Stephan figured that sending out a free copy of the book to all their customers would build brand loyalty. He didn’t expect the reach that this brand building would have beyond their customer base.

“I can’t even count the number of emails I’ve got from people who have read the book, or just read an article about The Five Hour Workday and said, ‘I love what you guys are doing. I love how you’re treating your employees. When I decide to buy a paddle board, I’m going to buy it from you guys.’”

“The book is helping us build loyalty by showing potential customers what we’re about.”

Most importantly, the book has begun to make the cultural impact Stephan hoped

Already, Stephan has begun to hear from companies that plan to implement the five hour workday for themselves.

“I’m having emails pouring in saying ‘I love what you guys are doing. It inspired me. We’re going to have to go do a test ourselves.’”

Stephan knew there were companies out there that this would appeal to, but the response has been even faster than he expected. Thinking about the businesses that will grow and the employees whose lives will improve, he’s blown away by the impact his ideas have made.

“The fact that this has opened people’s eyes to another way of doing things — a way that’s better for business and for employees — that’s what makes this all worthwhile to me.”

The post How Stephan Aarstol’s Book Created A Worldwide Phenomenon appeared first on Book in a Box.

Attention.

I don’t mean that in the narcissistic “everyone look at me” sense. When I say every entrepreneur wants more attention, what I mean is that attention is the key to everything else entrepreneurs want and need.

For example:

Need to sell more products or services? Start with getting people’s attention, then you can show them how your product/service benefits them, and then they buy it.

Want to attract the best talent to your company? You have to get their attention to show them why they want to join your company.

Want to raise money? Got to get attention from VC’s, angels, and PE funds to pitch them.

Want media coverage? Media coverage itself is about attention, but the paradox is you can’t get any without getting the media’s attention first.

Want to speak at conferences or create authority for your product or company? How will anyone know they should listen, if you haven’t gotten their attention about what it is you have to say yet?

There are many, many ways to get attention, but in my experience, writing and publishing a book is not only one of the best way to get attention, it’s one of the most under-utilized by entrepreneurs.

How Does A Book Get You Attention?

A book is great for getting attention because it’s a multi-purpose marketing tool with unique and special abilities to create attention that you can turn into almost anything else you want; sales, media, word of mouth, authority, etc.

So how does a book get you attention? There are 4 main ways:

1. A Book Gives You Authority, Credibility and Expertise

A lot of people like to say that “a book is the new business card.” I disagree, because everyone has a business card. You can go to Office Depot and get business cards, but you can’t go to Office Depot and author a book.

What I like to say is that “a book is the new college degree.” It used to be, about forty years ago, only about 10% of people had college degrees. If you had one, it was a major signal of credibility and authority. It meant something. But, now that everyone goes to college, it doesn’t signal as much credibility.

So what is a signal of credibility and authority now, one that’s reliable and rare?

Writing and publishing a book.

A book also sets you up to be judged. It’s really easy to skirt by and get a college degree. You can’t really fake your way into writing a good book. Either you know what you’re talking about or you don’t.

And a book shows you can commit to something and follow through. It shows you get things done; things that are hard and prestigious and require a lot of skills.

Yes, being judged is risky, but that’s why you get so much credit for a good book. A book puts you in a place that most people are unwilling to go–being judged–and it usually requires a lot of work to do so.

It requires you to actually know something, and requires that you show that knowledge to the world. If you write a book that’s stupid, people are going to think you’re stupid. But if it’s good, people are going to say, “Oh, wow. This person’s really smart.”

Most people are NOT willing to take that risk, set themselves up to be judged, and show the world what they know.

At my book publishing company, this is why we won’t just work with anyone who throws money at us. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you can’t just vomit out nonsense, call it a book, and get all the benefits. You have to write a GOOD BOOK to gain credibility and authority, and a good book is defined by how interesting and valuable other people find it.

2. A Book Raises Your Visibility And Gets Media Coverage

When a media outlet wants a comment on something, who do they go to? The expert, right? And how do they know someone is an expert?

Because they wrote the book (see #1). The experts are the ones who wrote the books. Commentators write blog posts.

Once you have a book, media coverage is 10x easier to get. And, this isn’t just for the media. “Has a new book” is a standard, and often required, box to tick for the gatekeepers who control access to the areas you most want to enter: lecture halls, television studios, boardrooms, media pages, special events, people’s minds. Charlie Rose doesn’t say, “My next guest has just posted a cat video.”

How many people in your field have you seen get a lot of attention simply because they wrote a book? Even if you knew more than them, they got the attention that you didn’t, only because of the book.

If you want visibility in your field and media coverage, being an authority and expert is key to this, and the way you do that is to write a book.

3. A Book Helps People Find You

The #1 search engine is Google. #2 is YouTube. You know what #3 is?

Amazon. And even more relevant to entrepreneurs, it’s the #1 search engine when looking for products and services (with 44% of searches for products and services starting there).

This goes beyond just attention. An ad can get attention, but no one goes searching for ads to make a decision about buying a product or a service.

When people look for buying information, they turn to experts or authorities. And what’s the first thing they think about in order to find information from an expert? Same as the media–they look at the person who literally “wrote the book” on the topic.

Having a great book brings people to you, lets people know exactly who you are, and shows them how you can help them. It’s the best marketing tool you could ever use to not just build your brand, but actually attract clients.

Example: When we started my company, Book In A Box, we realized we had a rocket ship that we didn’t know how to drive. We needed to learn how to scale our company. What did I do? I went to Amazon to read books on the subject.

Turns out, there’s not a lot of great books out there about how to professionally manage and scale a fast growing company. The best I could find was written by Cameron Herold (it’s called Double Double, and he has another one called Meetings Suck). I read the book, and thought, “This is genius. But I need more. I need this guy to coach me directly.”

I reached out to Cameron, and he now advises our company (and owns a piece of it). That’s how valuable he’s been.

And it all came about because he had a really good book that led me to him. There are probably five hundred other people out there who could have taught me the same things, but Cameron is the only one that had a great book that I could read and use to determine that he was the guy to teach me.

I never would have listened to a sales pitch or paid attention to an ad. I had to see proof, and his book was it, and it caused me to come to him.

4. A Book Helps People Talk About You

There is no better marketing than word of mouth. When someone you trust tells you to use something, you listen and then you use it.

Anything that helps other people talk about you and your business is the best marketing tool possible, and a book enables word of mouth better than almost anything else.

This is because a book puts your story into people’s mouths in your words, so when they talk about you, they’re literally just saying what you want them to say. A good book causes people to repeat your terms, phrases, and ideas to other people.

We use this idea to help our authors position and frame their books. We say, “Imagine someone at a cocktail party who read your book, talking to someone else in your potential audience. What would they say? Imagine what you want them to say to the other person.”

Once you understand that, once you can picture that conversation naturally happening between two people, you can almost construct the positioning and narrative of your book from that conversation.

This is exactly what Cameron’s book has done to me. Whenever I meet entrepreneurs who need help scaling their business, I tell them how I solved the problem, and I tell them the things I learned from his book, and even if I don’t directly refer them, they end up reaching out to Cameron.

If you can write a book that is valuable to people, they will WANT to talk about your book to someone else who has that problem.

Why? Because that makes them look better. That’s how word of mouth works. I look good to people when I tell them about Cameron’s book, because it’s a great book, and it makes me look good to provide valuable knowledge to other people.

Books Turn Attention Into Money

Attention is great, but most entrepreneurs don’t just want attention and nothing else. The reason entrepreneurs want attention is because they can turn it into money.

Remember what I said earlier, that a book is a multi-purpose marketing tool that creates attention that you can turn into almost anything else you want? I’m going to make this concept even simpler:

Book = Attention = Money

There are so many ways for entrepreneurs to leverage the attention from a book into money. I’ll run through the most common ways to do this, with examples for each:

1. A book can launch consulting & coaching companies:

At Book In A Box, our largest client base is made up of consultants. Once they reach a certain level of success–enough to afford us–they can’t really go much higher without a book. In fact, it is often the book that takes them from small time and a few clients to building an actual business.

You might be thinking something like, “But if I write a book talking about what I know, why will people hire me to be a consultant for them?”

Well, like I said, the book is HOW people find you. A great example of this is Dorie Clark. In only a few years, she went from an out of work journalist, to such a well respected marketing and branding consultant that she is now a professor at Duke, and speaks to such groups as the World Bank and the IMF. How’d she do that? Well, a lot of hard work of course, but she attributes most of her success to her two books, and how they really put her on the map.

And I already talked about how I found Cameron Herold–his book made me want to hire him MORE. Most of what Cameron teaches me on a day to day basis is in his book. I’m basically paying him to help me apply it to my situation, and maybe for the ten percent of weird one-offs that aren’t in his book.

This entrepreneur’s book doubled the size of her business. She wrote the first book on pop-up retail, making every retail media outlet want to interview her, and the book led to clients seeing her in totally different ways.

Her book positioned her as the expert in a hot new field. She put a ton of what she knew in her book, and it was the ONLY reason she got hired by major retailers. They wanted to know what she knew BEFORE they hired her.

But that’s the point: people who hire consultants and coaches are hiring them to teach them and their team and to implement their knowledge; they’re often not looking to learn the knowledge in the book.

The book is how you show them why they should hire you.

2. A book can sell a physical product:

Another very profitable way to monetize a book is by using it to promote a physical product.

Go search on Amazon under books for “lose weight” or “eat paleo.” You’ll see thousands of books, and a lot of them are essentially buyer’s guides for physical products, like supplements, food companies, or one off products.

Take Mark Sisson for example, who started Primal Blueprint. He’s published nearly a dozen books about his version of the paleo diet. They’re great books. He sells them on Amazon, and even gives many of them away on his site.

Not only do they help people eat right, but Mark also has a complete line of Primal Blueprint supplements and food that people can buy. They don’t have to buy them, but it’s there, and easy to do, and the books and product dovetail perfectly.

Think about it–would you respond to an ad about supplements? Probably not.

But what about a book that teaches you what supplements to take, when, and why? If you trust the book, you’ll trust the supplement recommendations.

Because Mark has great books (and a great site) on eating that you trust, you automatically give his supplement recommendations more credibility, and even buy his brand.

3. A book can sell a software/saas Product:

A book is a great way for a company to sell software, especially SaaS software.

The best example is HubSpot. That company invented inbound marketing, so what did they do to promote it? Among other things, they wrote a book called Inbound Marketing.

The book doesn’t even pitch HubSpot very much. The book is essentially a massive advertisement for their method of marketing (inbound marketing), and guess what?

Using their software is the easiest way to actually do inbound marketing, so not only does the book provide real value to the reader, it ends up converting a lot of readers to customers.

4. A book can sell a video course/information product:

Using your book as the marketing tool and lead generation for a video course is such a good way to make money from a book.

Basically, if your book teaches something for which there is a high ROI for the reader, you can create what amounts to an advanced version that is delivered as a video course, and charge much more money for it.

One of the main benefits is that while people will not pay more than about $25 for a book, they will often pay $500 or more for a video course of the EXACT SAME material. This actually is rational, because many people learn more easily from video and audio than they do from books.

But whether it’s rational or not doesn’t matter–what matters is that creating a book and using it to sell similar material as a video course is a great way to make money.

A great example of this is Josh Turner. He is a client who did a book with us called Connect. His book is about how to use LinkedIn to drive sales for your company, and the book, while very good, ends up driving many people to his advanced video course.

5. A book can recruit employees to work for your company:

This is overlooked, but for entrepreneurs and C-level executives alike, there is almost no better way to get great people to work with you than by laying your vision for your company out in a book.

The best example of this is, of course, Zappos. Not only did Tony Shieh write his own book, but they also wrote a different book about their culture that they give away on their site for free as a way to get people to come work for them. To this day, the book is still the main lead gen for recruiting at Zappos.

6. A book can promote “Done for you” services:

Book In A Box is a great example. We developed a new and innovative way to turn your ideas into a book, something no one else was doing…and then we proceeded to write a book that explained our entire process.

I mean, literally the whole process, including the templates we use with authors, everything. Why the hell would we do that? It’s the same logic you’ve heard me say over and over again:

Our book shows potential authors our process so they can understand it and see how great it is. Saying our process is great is totally different than proving it in detail.

We’ve had so many clients who were skeptical of us, read the book, and were like, “This is genius, I’m going to do it myself.” Then, even though they loved the process, many realized that their time was too valuable, so they just came back to us as full clients.

The people who can’t afford us, no problem. Go do it yourself. We’re not losing a client by telling them how do it themselves.

In fact, the more people who use our method, the better–they’ll talk about us and our process, creating word of mouth.

7. A book can help draw clients to almost a creative agency

Especially if you sell B2B services, like marketing or advertising or things like that, a book is a HUGE asset in drawing and closing clients.

Just ask Mitch Joel. He started and runs Mirum Digital Agency, which does a ton of business almost exclusively with big brands and companies. When he walks in a room to pitch a CMO, he can bring copies of his books with him to reinforce all the points he’s making. It’s 10x better than any brochures or anything else he could leave.

I mean–isn’t almost all of the media Gary Vaynerchuk does ultimately about getting clients for his huge agency?

8. A book can launch and promote paid community/mastermind groups:

There’s so many people who have paid Masterminds, and so many of their clients find out about them and want to join their group because they’ve written books that show everyone how much they know.

A great example is Jayson Gaignard. He has a group called Master Mind Talks, and a book called Mastermind Dinners. His book explains exactly how he built and runs his mastermind group, and how he is such a successful networker and connector, which in turn ends up driving a lot of sign-ups for his group, which is a paid community and meet-up group.

Another example is James Maskell. He runs the Evolution of Medicine Summit and mastermind group, where tens of thousands of health professionals meet and discuss topics, and is also doing a book with us that will end up creating many new members.

9. A book can launch workshops and group teaching:

Many consultants and speakers also do what is called “group workshops.” The point is that a business will bring you in to teach your method to their employees, and train them over a day or a series of days. It’s really easy to get relatively larger businesses to pay you to come in to teach a one-day workshop to their employees about what you know.

Why? Because so few people take the time to read all the way through a book.

If you read books, you are way ahead of the curve, but I know, as most employers know, if they pass a book out, their employees aren’t going to read it. If they get the person who wrote the book to come in and give a speech, and to answer questions for a day, they can really teach the stuff.

A great example is Mona Patel, who wrote the book Reframe. She now does workshops based on applying the book that routinely sells out, and both things reinforce each other. The book leads people to the workshop, and she sells copies of her book to people who come to the workshop.

10. A book can help you raise money

I would not recommend this for companies in the seed stage, but later stage companies that have traction can absolutely get a lot of results from a book.

A lot of entrepreneur’s write Medium posts to raise money. OK, fine, but someone with a good book is way better. Shane Mac used this strategy to raise money for his first start-up. His book was a deeply honest and engaging story about how he ran his company, and he would send it to VC’s before pitches (it’s also really helped him recruit talent to his new company, Assist).

One of the iconic examples is the book The Promise Of A Pencil. Though this is a charity and not a start-up, the principle is exactly the same–Adam Braun used the book to generate a ton of attention and money poured into his charity.

The point is to use the book as the pitch deck in advance–it tells your story so well, that you get VC’s coming to you asking to put money in.

11. A book can get you speaking appearances:

One of the major ways to get attention (and even make money) from a book is using it to become a speaker.

A book is a business card for a speaker. It’s kind of a necessity. A book is the way people know for sure you are qualified to speak to their group on your topic.

A great example of this is Kevin Kruse. His blog Author Journey to 100k details how he made money in his first year as an author, and while he did 70k in book sales, he made 170k in speaking fees.

12. A book can promote a conference:

Books are a very underexploited marketing avenue for conferences. We’ve been working with a conference called the LDV Summit, which is about vision technology, and pairs venture capitalists in that space with the inventors and thought leaders.

What we do is record the entire conference, turn it into a book, and then what the conference host does is two things:

– He sends copies of the book to his LP’s or potential entrepreneurs, and he gets all the benefits of doing a book without having to be the one who actually writes it, and,
– He includes a copy of the book when he mails out the physical applications for each year’s conference. It’s tripled his re-up rate.

By spending $5 to mail a nice book to past participants, he gets them to spend $500+ on a conference that is more than 6 months away. Pretty good deal.

Not to mention, TED does this. They even have their own publishing imprint.

13. A book can save you taxes through write-offs

This is a GREAT way to make money that way too few business owners use.

If you are using your book as a legitimate marketing tool to promote a business, the costs of production are 100% deductible. That means everything you spend money on that is part of creating the book can be deducted. For example:

– The book cover
– The layout
– The printing costs
– The proofreading
– Any professional services you use to create it
– The books you buy to teach you how to write your book
– The software you buy to help you write the book
– Etc, etc, etc.

It’s all 100% deductible as a business marketing expense. Just like you can deduct what you spend on Facebook ads and website designers, a book falls into the same category.

Here’s the rub with that: YOUR TIME IS NOT deductible.

If you spend 500 hours at a computer typing away, you are totally out of luck. You cannot deduct the opportunity cost of your time from your taxes, even though that 500 hours is stopping you from making money doing other things.

For example if you are a coach and people pay you $200 an hour for coaching, spending 500 hours writing a book (instead of charging for coaching) costs you $100,000 in forgone income.

You absolutely CANNOT deduct that, even though it is a very real cost to you.

BUT if you hire someone to help you write your book, then you absolutely CAN deduct that cost.

This is another reason why so many people use our service, even if they can write the book themselves. If they pay us to help them author their book, not only is that cost fully deductible, but they save HUNDREDS (or oftentimes thousands) of hours–and can spend that time working in their business, doing what they do best.

When you figure in the tax savings, plus the time savings, it’s almost like getting the book for free for most of our authors–and that is BEFORE they get any of the attention and ROI from the book.

NOTE: I am talking about tax laws in America. Though this is what my CPA and many other tax lawyers have told me, you should never take legal advice from someone on the internet who does not know the laws of your specific jurisdiction. And not only that, I live in Texas–it’s legal to shoot wild hogs with machine guns from helicopters here. We’re different.

IMPORTANT FINAL NOTE: DO NOT focus on book sales

I’m going to tell you something counterintuitive: entrepreneurs should NOT focus on making money directly from book sales.

Why? Because this is a fact of the book publishing business: it’s nearly impossible to sell a lot of copies of a book, at least enough to make it worth your time as a business owner.

Last year, there were more than 300,000 new books published in America. BookScan, the company that measures all book sales, says that only about 200 books per year sell 100,000 copies. The number of books that reached 1 million sold last year is even fewer, probably close to 10 (and almost all of those were novels). And virtually no book does more than that. The list of books that have sold 10 million copies in history is so small there’s a Wikipedia page about them.

What’s even worse is that you can’t charge enough for books to generate good revenue from them. The highest you can charge is about $25, give or take. The greatest book ever written, if it costs more than that, won’t get bought. People have a low limit on their perceived value for books.

There is only one group of people who must focus on how many copies they sell: professional writers (like novelists, fiction writers, etc). They need to worry about selling copies of books because book sales are the only way they can make money! They don’t have anything else to sell but a copy of the book. But this is not true for an entrepreneur.

Focusing on direct sales creates bad decisions for entrepreneurs, because they try to write a broad book in an attempt to speak to a large audience, instead of focusing on a niche that would get the best results for their business.

But, if you look at your book as a marketing tool for driving attention to something that does make money, then everything changes. Your book is essentially a different form of paid marketing, that looks and acts in it’s own unique ways.

Conclusion

If you won’t believe me, then at least listen to James Altucher:

“Every entrepreneur should self-publish a book, because having a book is the new business card. If you want to stand out, you need to show your expertise. Publishing a book is not just putting your thoughts on a blog post. It’s an event. It shows your best curated thoughts and it shows customers, clients, investors, friends and lovers what the most important things on your mind are right now.”

For most entrepreneurs, a book is the very best multi-purpose marketing they can have. The only thing left is to start the process.

The post Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write a Book appeared first on Book in a Box.

The book publishing landscape is very confusing. This is for many reasons; the most relevant to you is that the business of book publishing has changed dramatically over the past decade, and most of the advice people give is dated and wrong.

Furthermore, most of the guides to book publishing are geared towards writers, novelists, or hobbyists. Entrepreneurs, business owners, executives and other professionals should look at book publishing through a completely different lens than writers.

This piece will examine the three book publishing options commonly available, explain the pros and cons of each, and help you understand exactly which one you should select.

Just some background on me, so you know why I’m qualified to write this: I’ve been in the book and publishing industry for almost two decades, have authored three #1 New York Times Bestsellers, have started and exited multiple publishing companies, and am the co-founder and chairman of an innovative new company that is completely changing the way books are written and published.

NOTE: In this piece, I am talking pretty much exclusively about non-fiction books. Fiction books have a different calculus, and I would recommend you read this and this if you are looking for publishing advice for novels.

Understanding Modern Publishing

There are three major activities required to publish a book, and one that is optional:

• Write
• Publish
• Distribute
• Market (optional)

There are three modern publishing models to accomplish these tasks: traditional, self and hybrid.

I’ll dive deeper into each publishing option, what the basic facts are, and the questions you need to ask for each, so you can decide which one to use.

Traditional Publishing Model:

Summary: In the traditional publishing model, an author must find and retain a book agent, and then pitch a large book publishing company (which are almost all based in New York City, such as HarperCollins or Simon & Schuster) with their book idea. If the pitch is successful and they offer the author a deal, the publishing company purchases the ownership of the print license from the author in return for an advance on royalties (that the author does not have to pay back). The author is on their own to write the book, sometimes with editorial help from the publisher, sometimes not. The publisher then manages and controls the whole publishing and distribution process (the second and third steps). Traditional publishing is what most people think of when they say “book publishing.”

Ownership & Rights: The publishing company always owns the print license, the author always owns the copyright. All other rights (movie, excerpt, etc) are negotiable.

Royalty Rate: 15% hardcover, 7.5% trade paperback, 5% mass market

Advance: Yes, but the amount varies greatly depending on the author.

Writing: Very little help, limited to some editing and copyediting.

Publishing Services: Yes, they do everything, though quality varies greatly.

Distribution: Yes, they do everything.

Marketing: Very little marketing help, depends on the publisher, and can often inhibit marketing (explained below).

Prestige & Perception: Usually the highest of the three models, but fading and irrelevent to readers.

Time To Publish: 18-36 months.

Advantages include:

1. Monetary advance before publishing
2. Potential for traditional media coverage
3. Social signaling/Feeling of acceptance

Drawbacks include:

1. Very hard to get a deal
2. Huge time investment
3. Loss of ownership
4. Loss of marketing control
5. Loss of creative and content control
6. Limited financial upside

Can you even get a traditional publishing deal?

When considering traditional publishing, the first and MOST important question you need to ask yourself is: can you even get a publishing deal from a traditional publisher?

Most authors cannot, so there’s no reason to waste time trying. To get a publishing deal from a traditional publisher, you must go through these steps:

1. Find a book agent willing to represent you and your book idea to a publisher (this is very hard, most agents get 1000’s of inbound requests a week).
2. Write a book proposal (this is such a big task, authors often pay freelance writers 10k or more to do this for them).
3. Shop the book proposal around to publishers (through the agent).
4. Have a publisher make you an offer based on your proposal and pitch.
5. Negotiate and accept that offer.

That seems like a lot, but in some cases, it can be easy. A book publisher’s decision hinges on one simple fact:

Do you have an existing audience that you can guarantee will buy a lot of your book?

If you do have a big audience–people who already follow you in some form, like an email list, or social media, or something like that–most of that will be doable, if not easy.

If you do not have an existing audience, then it is nearly impossible to get a traditional book deal.

The reason for this is because traditional publishers are terrible at selling and marketing books, and they now rely almost exclusively on authors to do this for them. I’m not just saying this. Book agent Byrd Leavell says this (he’s repped several #1 New York Times bestselling authors who have sold more than 10 million non-fiction books):

“Publishers aren’t buying anything that doesn’t come with a built in audience that will buy it. They don’t take risks anymore, they don’t gamble on authors, they only want sure things. I won’t even take an author out unless they have an audience they can guarantee 10k pre-sales to.”

If you do have a built in audience, then you absolutely have a shot to get a deal, and should go on to the next question.

If you can get a traditional publishing deal, should you take it?

As recently as 20 years ago, this was a no-brainer: of course you took the deal, because you didn’t really have any other options to get a book into the hands of readers.

However, the game has changed since then. In the modern world of book publishing, traditional publishers are no longer the gatekeepers, as they provide very little prestige or access relative to other options, and the other options are, in most cases, better than traditional publishers for most authors.

In 2016, there are really only three reasons for an author to sign with a traditional publisher:

1. You need the advance that they will pay you:

If you already have a big audience, then a publishing company will probably give you a big advance. A “big” advance can range from $100,000 to $1 million (or much more in rare cases), but the advance is directly tied to the expected book sales.

This is not charity; they will do this because they expect to make a lot of money when you sell your books to your audience. And if you do not have a big audience, your chance of getting an advance in this range is essentially zero (unless there is some other angle that makes the publisher confident you will sell many books).

The cool thing is that even if your book does not sell, you don’t have to pay this advance back. It’s yours. But make no mistake–you are paying for this money in other ways. You no longer own the print license for the book, which means you cannot do anything with this content other than have it in the book. It’s not yours to use anymore, and if the book is a major hit, you only get a small fraction of the profits. You are selling the potential upside to the publisher.

2. You must have mainstream media attention for the book:

If you absolutely NEED a lot of mainstream media attention for your book to be a success, then going with a traditional publisher really helps. When I say mainstream, I mean like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, media outlets like that.

The types of people who fall into this category tend to be celebrities, politicians, etc. They are the type of people whose time is extremely valuable, and they generally tend to be very, very rich. By the way, they have to pay for PR to get media as well. They do the whole song and dance, mainly because they are famous and do NOT have their own platform.

To be very clear: doing a book with a traditional publisher does not mean it will be covered in those outlets. In fact, the odds are small, even if you do get a traditional publishing deal. Each publisher puts out tens of thousands of books a year, and bookstores and retailers do not have the shelf space for all of them,

But the reason it helps is because even though no book reader cares who the publisher is, the only group of people who still look at the publisher as a signal of credibility are journalists who work for major media companies.

3. You want the social signal and feeling of acceptance that comes from being “picked” by a traditional publishing house:

Let’s be honest–this is the primary reason most people want a deal from a traditional publisher. They want to feel like they were “picked,” that this selection is an unassailable signal of their importance and relevance.

I have gotten publishing deals from several major publishing companies (Simon & Schuster and Little, Brown), so I wish so much that this was true–that these deals meant I am now unquestionably important. It doesn’t.

Here’s a great example: a Ferrari is a cool car. But what do you think of the old guy who bought one? Compensating, right? It can work the same with traditional publishers. Having a “fancy” publisher’s name on the spine doesn’t make you important. In the modern world, no reader notices or cares who publishes the book.

In fact, in many circles (especially entrepreneurs and forward thinkers), traditional publishing is starting to be seen as a negative signal. Self-publishing used to be seen as “vanity publishing” because the assumption was that you could not get “picked” by a traditional publisher. But in the modern book world, controlling the rights and usage of your book is now seen as much more important by most authors, and in fact, traditional publishing is now the new “vanity” publishing–because authors with traditional deals are looking for that ego boost and external validation rather than “picking” themselves, and owning their book.

Are the tradeoffs of traditional publishing worth it?

So even if you can get a traditional publishing deal, AND you fall into one of the three reasons to publish it, the tradeoffs of doing so may still make it a bad choice for you. These are the major trade-offs with traditional publishing:

1. No ownership of rights and profits

You are literally selling them not only the upside profits of the book, but more importantly, you are selling them control of your intellectual property. Once they own the book, they ONLY care about selling copies. You can no longer do anything with that book that doesn’t involve paying THEM for copies of it, because that is how publishing companies make money.

2. Loss of creative and content control

Make no mistake about this: once you take a deal from a publisher, they OWN the book and all the content in it, so they get to decide EVERYTHING that goes in the book. They get final say over every word, the book cover, the author bio, everything.

I can tell you from my experience, as a group, publishers tend to make terrible aesthetic decisions. This is for many reasons, but the biggest is what I call “adverse selection.” Though some people who work in publishing are deeply skilled and thoughtful editors whose work makes books much better, those people are rare, and tend to only work with the biggest authors. Most of the people working at publishing companies are doing that because they were not good enough to make a living as a writer. I don’t say that as a put-down, but simply so you understand that someone who didn’t make good enough decisions on their own about their writing is now in a position to hold final decision-making power over your book.

Furthermore, their incentives do not always align with yours. Publishers ONLY care about selling books; they don’t care about any of your other goals, and they will force creative decisions on you that you don’t want. This most often plays out in marketing (below).

3. Loss of marketing control (and no support)

Publishers do no marketing. I cannot emphasize this enough–publishers expect YOU to do all the work of selling the book for THEM. They don’t have a plan to sell 10k copies your book. That’s YOUR job.

[The only exceptions are, again, for the biggest authors, like Malcolm Gladwell or JK Rowling.]

This might be OK for a novelist, but if you are someone like the authors my company works with, and you want your book to promote you or your business, a traditional publisher greatly restricts your options.

Creatively, if you want to position yourself as an expert in something, what happens if they don’t think your book topic appeals to enough people? They don’t care about your business, they only care about selling copies of books, so they’ll make you go broader with your topic, which means the book won’t be as appealing to the specific audience you are trying to reach.

But even worse, because the ONLY way they make money is to sell copies of the book, you can’t give copies away for free, you can’t give the PDF away for free, you can’t use your content in other places as a lead gen for your company. They now are going to force you to put all your promotion efforts on selling copies, which does not always help you reach as many people as possible.

Also, they give you ZERO price control, so your ability to make marketing deals with any number of people is none. This type of flexibility is critically important for so much marketing, and they won’t do it.

4. Huge time investment

Even if you get a traditional book deal, it’s a huge amount of effort to put it all together. You have to find an agent to represent you to a traditional publisher, you have to do a book proposal that will appeal to a publisher, and then you have to shop the book deal.

From the start of the process all the way to publishing, it’s usually 24 months, often 36 months. That’s two to three YEARS, which is an incredibly long time in the modern media world, especially for a non-fiction author.

Self-Publishing Model

Summary: In the self-publishing model, the author retains ownership of their book and manages and controls the whole process. Self publishing has many different forms, but at its core, the author does the publishing work (or manages freelancers or a publishing services company who do the work for a fee). There is no acceptance needed, no advance, and the author retains all rights.

Ownership & Rights: Author retains all rights.

Royalty Rate: Variable, usually between 70% and 100%, depending on sales channel.

Advance: No.

Writing: Author must manage. Many variations of help exist, but all paid.

Publishing Services: Author must manage. Many variations of help exist, but all paid.

Distribution: Author must manage. Many variations of help exist, but all paid.

Marketing: Author must manage. Many variations of help exist, but all paid.

Prestige & Perception: Variable; almost totally depends on quality of the book.

Time To Publish: As fast as you can manage.

Advantages include:

1. Full ownership of rights and royalties
2. Completely customizable in all aspects
3. Fast to market
4. Total marketing control
5. Total creative control
6. Total freedom
7. You answer to no one for anything

Drawbacks include:

1. It is a lot of work to get it right
2. If it’s unprofessional, will result in poor quality and low status
3. Time consuming to learn and manage the process yourself
4. If you hire excellent professionals to help you, it’s expensive

Can you do a professional job with your self-published book?

This is the absolutely crucial question for self-publishing, one that trumps every other. If you can get a professional job done, then self-publishing is almost always the best bet for most authors. If you cannot get a professional job done, then you may either not want to self-publish, or you may not want to publish a book at all.

The reason this is so crucial is because readers judge a book, and judge the author, not by who published it, but by how professional and credible it is.

The saying is right: everyone judges a book by it’s cover. But not just the cover: The title, the book description, the author photo, the blurbs, even the author bio. All of these tell a story about how credible and authoritative that book and author are.

Whereas, a book that has a cover that looks like a child designed it, or a book that has a description with spelling and grammar errors, a poorly lit photo, or a bragging or incomplete bio, all look bad.

It used to be that traditional publishers were the only ones who had the expertise and access to the talented people necessary to make books that looked professional. That was true 30 years ago, but not anymore. In fact, almost all of the best talent out there is freelance and can be hired for reasonable rates. Just in my company alone, we use writers, editors, proofreaders, copywriters and book cover designers who all either used to work for traditional publishers and left to freelance, or we use the same freelancers that the traditional publishers use.

Some people think there is still a stigma to self-publishing. Well, the data appears to say otherwise. Hugh Howey (self-published his novel “Wool”, which has sold millions of copies and is being made into a movie directed by Ridley Scott) did a study on 200,000 titles and showed that the self-published books on Amazon had, on average, a higher star ranking than traditionally published books.

This all boils down to the fact that if you’re willing to put in the work to make sure your self-published book is super professional, then you’re going to be well off. But if not, then your book, and you, will suffer.

What is the major tradeoff of self-publishing?

There is really one major tradeoff with self-publishing:

Professionally self-publishing a book requires you to put in either time or money (or both).

It’s not hard to do all the steps necessary to make a professional book. We wrote a book that lays out every single thing you have to do. It just takes time. The way around that is to hire great people, or even better, hire a publishing services firm to manage the whole process for you. That takes money.

It’s a pretty simple calculation: if you have money, spend it to save time.

If you don’t have money, then your time isn’t your most expensive asset, so use it to learn how to professionally publish your book, and execute it (hint: best bet is to start here).

Hybrid Publishing

Summary: In the hybrid model, the ownership of rights varies depending on the publishing company the author works with, but the basic idea is that they try to look like a traditional publishing company, but pay little to no advance, yet still take most of the royalties, still control a lot of the process, and still do some part of the publishing work.

Ownership & Rights: Variable

Royalty Rate: Variable, usually 15-25%, but can be as high as 50%

Advance: Usually not, but sometimes very small

Writing: No help

Publishing Services: Yes, usually

Distribution: Yes, almost always

Marketing: Variable, but usually not much if any help

Prestige & Perception: Varies widely

Time To Publish: 6 to 18 months

Why pick hybrid over the other two?

Quite honestly, there is almost no reason to go with a hybrid model publisher. It’s very much a case of either lane of a road working, but standing in the middle gets  you killed.

Here’s what you have to understand about the hybrid model: it kind of doesn’t exist. It’s a made-up word for publishing companies that use a variation of the traditional model, but don’t want to say they do. They’re trying to capture the best of both worlds–give authors the illusion of status from being “picked” by a publisher, and getting the author to do most of the work, and owning the rights, and still getting the upside–all while NOT paying an advance!

Most authors should use self-publishing. There is definitely a set of authors for whom traditional publishers make sense. There are very few authors for whom hybrid publishers are the best bet.

This is because you are getting the restrictions of traditional publishers, without the advance or the status, while you are doing most of the work of self-publishing, without the ownership, control, or upside.  

The other problem is that in hybrid publishing, oftentimes the publishing company will try to retain copyright or other rights. One of the main attributes of old traditional publishing companies is that they ALWAYS reserve copyright to the author, and almost always leave all other rights to the author (movie, TV, etc). They only care about the rights involved around profiting from the printed word and related rights.

Hybrid publishers recognize the potential value of the rights in other fields, and often try to capture those. Wiley is notorious for this, and some book agencies are looking to get into this as well. Be very, very careful dealing with any publishing company that does not reserve all rights aside from the print license to the author.

Common Questions To Help You Pick Your Publishing Method

“I want my book to establish my authority and credibility in my field. Which option do I pick?”

Most people would tell you traditional publishing. That is true if you are a celebrity, an athlete, a musician, or someone else who is already big, and you want to maintain that.

If you are NOT already big, I would actually recommend you self-publish (again, assuming you can do it professionally). This is because the best way to establish credibility and authority is to write a niche book that establishes you as THE authority to a small group, instead of trying to compete with other people in broad categories.

“I want my book to be in bookstores. Which option do I pick?”

Most people will tell you that traditional is the only way to do this. That’s not true. First off, traditional publishers will NOT place you in bookstores (other than major cities) unless they have already given you a solid six figure-plus advance. Second, many hybrid publishers can get you into bookstores, though it is much harder for them. Third, it is very easy to have a self-published book available for order from a bookstore, though to get it stocked is not easy.

That being said, being in a bookstore is, at this point in history, almost purely an ego play.

“I want my book to promote my business. Which option do I pick?”

There really is only one pick here: self-publishing gives you the flexibility to position your book exactly how you want to, and use the content in any way you want to achieve your end. Publishers only care about selling copies of your books, not promoting your business. Explained here in depth.

“I want a bestseller. Which option do I pick?”

If this is your goal, read this piece, as it explains everything about best sellers.

The post How To Pick The Right Book Publishing Option appeared first on Book in a Box.

As a 23 year old running a construction business, he was working 12-hour days and stressing out as he tried to build his reputation in the industry.

The diagnosis hit him hard. After trying every medication, diet, or exercise regime he could find, Ari realized that there was one cause he hadn’t addressed: stress.

He decided to make a change: he needed to cut back his hours. To do this, he developed systems and tools to help him get his work done in less time. He called the system Less Doing, More Living.

It started as a blog, and evolved into teaching classes, consulting, and speaking. Since then, Ari has taught thousands of individuals and companies the practices he learned to spend more time doing the things that truly matter.

“I love to see the impact that it has on people’s lives and businesses,” Meisel said. “It’s funny for me, having worked in green construction for a long time, where everyone is talking about making the world a better place. I’ve never felt the same kind of impact on people’s lives as I do helping them save time and live better.”

Ari wrote a traditionally published book, but it didn’t have the impact he wanted

In 2014, Ari crafted the content based on his seminars, and put out Less Doing, More Living. It was published by Tarcher, a division of Random House.

Although he was excited about the content and happy to be published, he was disappointed by the process.

He was underwhelmed with the publisher’s marketing efforts and overwhelmed with the enormous percentage of revenues they took, but what bothered him most were their restrictions on his ability to promote it himself.

Ari wanted to give away copies, but they made him pay over $10 a copy for his own book. He wanted to create a Spanish version, but they weren’t interested and wouldn’t allow him to have the rights to do it himself. He wanted to revise the book to meet reader feedback, but they weren’t willing to help.

Ari needed a different publishing option; one that would give him freedom to promote it and help him get the book right

While his first book was very well received and got excellent feedback, the negative feedback was consistent. The book was too tactical — focused on tools and apps that might be useful in one context, but not teaching the way of thinking to apply the principles in other contexts.

Non-US readers were disappointed. CEOs in unrelated industries didn’t get as much out of the book as they should have. And it didn’t inspire readers to dive deeper into Ari’s work.

“People kept telling me ‘You should really write another book,’” Meisel said. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I tried a few times, but I just couldn’t make it come out of me.”

Ari knew he wanted to stay away from the traditional publishing system for his second book, so he figured he would self-publish. But, working on his own, he was struggling to develop his ideas in the ways that he wanted.

“When you’re deeply ingrained in your own material, it’s really hard to see from another person’s perspective how that information comes across. So every time I tried to write the second book, I felt like I was writing the same tactical book over again. I couldn’t pull myself up out of that.”

The Book In A Box process helped Ari capture the philosophy behind his ideas

When Ari discovered Book In A Box, he knew it was what he’d been looking for.

“It was just the perfect timing and perfect solution to the problems I was having,” he explained.

Ari was struggling with something a lot of writers struggle with. He knew the concepts that he wanted in his book, and he knew his material cold, but he was so deep in the weeds that he couldn’t get the perspective he needed to write the book he wanted to write.

“I couldn’t have even hired a ghostwriter, because no one else could have written my book. That was the thing.”

It was only through his conversations with Mark Chait, his Book Developer on the Book In A Box team (and an ex-Executive Editor from HarperCollins), that Ari was able to get his his ideas into the structure they needed.

From there, the process was smooth. Ari worked with his professional publishing team at Book In A Box (his Publisher, editor, cover designer, interior layout designer) to create the exact book he wanted, and launch that book to the world in the way he knew would work best for him.

It worked, and the book turned out incredibly (and changed lives)

Sending out advanced copies of the book to reviewers, Ari knew he’d created something special when he started to get responses like:

• Tony Robbins: “Ari is… helping thousands of people focus on what truly matters in their lives, clearing the path to a truly abundant life.”  
• Joe Polish: “If you want to live the life you want to live and spend your time and energy on things you care about, read this book.”
• Daymond John: “If you are serious about having more time – our most valuable resource – Ari is your guy.”

But Ari’s goal wasn’t just to create a great book, it was to get it into readers’ hands.

Ari used a Thunderclap campaign to get major influencers to promote the books. The Thunderclap promotion was a huge success, and the book reached over 2.3 million people in the process.

The attention drove a flood of book sales, and the book catapulted to the top of the Amazon sales charts.

More importantly, Ari was thrilled with the responses from readers. It’s always hard to know when you’re in the depth of your own content how people will react, and the 5-star reviews and enthusiastic emails showed Ari he’d accomplished his goal of creating a book that truly changed lives.

One reader even told Ari that, thanks to the book, he’d been able to free up enough time and flexibility to move to Spain for 6 months with his family while stilling running his company.

Finally, this was the impact on readers’ lives that he’d been wanting all along.

The book has dramatically helped his business

Although Ari’s first book got a great response from readers, it never did much to improve his business.

However, because of the accessible, actionable nature of The Art of Less Doing and Ari’s ability to promote it any way he wants, the response for his business has been substantial.

First, Ari saw a spike in attention:

• The month the book came out, Ari’s podcast listenership went up by over 30%, adding more than 10,000 average downloads per episode.
• His email list, which had slowly grown to 8,000 people over the past 7 years, quickly jumped up over 11,000.

And that attention has now turned into real business.

Almost half of the new leads to his business are people who read the new book, which is his biggest source of traffic. Not only is it sending new clients to the business, but they’re the best kinds of clients — educated on what he does and ready to take the next step.

Not only has it led to a boost in Ari’s core business, but it’s skyrocketed his coaching. Ari offers a super high end coaching certification program focused on people who want to learn all of his tools and become Less Doing coaches on their own.

Over the past two years, he’s had 12 people willing to make the large investment in the coaching certification. Since the book has come out, more than 20 people have signed up for the next session.

“This is one of the proudest parts, for me,” Ari explained. “It means people are reading the book and saying ‘This is important. I get it. I want to take this seriously and invest in it.’ That means the message really got across.”

Even his mom is having to deal with all the attention

Ari expected the book to reach the entrepreneurship world that’s focused on automating and outsourcing, but he never considered how far it might go.

He elaborates, “My mom told me that she went to take her dog to be groomed and the woman working at the dog groomer recognized her last name. When she found out she was related to me, she told my mom she’d read the book, and raved about how much she loved it.”

The next book is on its way

Ari has had so many further questions from readers as they applied the ideas in his book that he decided to publish a third book, which profiles the tools, processes, and techniques that he is using as he starts his new company (published September 2016).

His hope is that, now that The Art of Less Doing has thousands of readers who understand the philosophy behind his ideas, his new book will allow them to see how they can apply those ideas effectively in a business setting.

The post How Ari Meisel Created a Best-Selling Book (and Changed Lives in the Process) appeared first on Book in a Box.

Probably because the process for writing a book takes too much time and is needlessly complicated. You can’t justify spending hundreds of hours over a year or more away from your business to do it.

Doesn’t this seem wrong to you? The process for writing a book is almost the same as it was 50 years ago, except you type on a computer instead of a typewriter now. How could this be?

Other creative fields that used to be incredibly time consuming have been simplified and democratized, but not book writing. Photography, for example (expensive complicated cameras replaced by simple iPhones), and music (Pro-tools and cheap mics replaced expensive studio equipment) have been unleashed because of amazing new tools that made production easy and simple.

Why not book writing? Why can’t that be made 10x easier, like photography and music?

The answer from writers has always been, “The only way to write a book is to sit down and type for as long as it takes.” I’m a writer and I used to say that. Entrepreneurs with great book ideas would ask me sincere questions about how they could make the book writing process quicker and effective, and I would pretentiously lecture them about hard work.

Well, there’s finally a better way. An entrepreneur called me out and inspired me to develop a better way for a smart, busy person to turn their ideas into a book, in their words and their voice. That conversation turned into a completely new way to write a book. We detailed this process in our book, The Book In A Box Method, and we created a company that does this for people as a service.

Entrepreneur Magazine asked me to detail our method exactly in this post, so that you can do it yourself at home, and finally finish the book you know you need to write.

This process is perfect for entrepreneurs, because it only works for the types of books that entrepreneurs write: non-fiction, informational, how-to books that involve some personal storytelling to display their knowledge.

This post will walk you through each step of this method, in detail, so your book will not only be finished quicker, but also will be better.

What Is The Book In A Box Method?: A Quick Introduction

[This introduction to the process is skippable. If you just want to start, go to Step 1 below.]

There are two simple principles that make this method so efficient and effective:

1. Speaking Replaces (most) Writing: We replace most of the typing in the standard process with talking. This makes the process much easier by drastically reducing the amount of time you spend at a keyboard writing, but still ensures that it’s your words and your voice. You’re still going to spend time at a keyboard typing, but it’s about 10x less than the normal book writing process, and it’s mostly editing and rewriting.
2. Certainty Of Process: You never have to figure out on your own what to do next. Each step is a clear action for you to take, and if you take them all, you will finish your book. You will never face a blank page, and I’ll never tell you to “just write.”

The act of writing is very hard for most people, but not because people are stupid or lazy or unskilled. It’s because the way we tell people to write makes it an unusual cognitive task that requires a deep, specialized skill. The writing skill is a totally different skill from having ideas and wisdom to share in a book.

Just think about it. How many really intelligent and accomplished people do you know who have great ideas, but hate writing?

Writing is a specific cognitive skill that is totally distinct from thinking and wisdom. The best example of this is dyslexia. Some of the smartest, most accomplished people on earth—Richard Branson, for example—can barely write an email. Richard is not stupid, nor is anyone else with dyslexia. It’s just that human brains are not optimized to read or write text, and those with dyslexia are never able to efficiently develop those functions.

We replace writing with talking in the book writing process because talking is the natural way to communicate ideas and information between humans.

Humans have been talking for at least 200,000 years, but we’ve only been writing for about 10,000 years (at most).

This is not actually a new idea. Here’s a very short list of people whose words still move the world, yet they never wrote anything down themselves:

Socrates…never wrote anything down; Plato recorded his words.

Jesus Christ…never wrote down a word; his apostles did.

Buddha…never wrote down any of his teachings; his disciples did that as well.

Marco Polo…told his cellmate about his travels while they were in jail, and his cellmate (who was a scribe) wrote them down.

Winston Churchill…dictated most of his books to his secretary.

Malcolm X…dictated his iconic autobiography to journalist Alex Haley.

For thousands of years, writing was a specific job, different from thinking. People who did the writing were called “scribes,” and they were not themselves the esteemed thinkers and influencers of their era (what we would now call a “thought leader”). In fact, they were considered artisans with a skill, like a lawyer or a mechanic. It was the thinker, not the scribe, who was celebrated.

Take one of the most prolific authors of the Roman age, Julius Caesar. He used scribes to record almost every single line in all of his letters and books.

Why did he use scribes instead of writing it himself?

For the obvious reason: his time was too valuable to be spent mastering the skill of writing words so they read properly on the page.

He spent his time thinking and doing things, not writing.

He had scribes record his thoughts as he spoke them out loud, and then he signed his name to it. His volumes of letters and correspondence are all rightly authored by him, yet he “wrote” none of the actual words down.

The Book In A Box Method uses the exact same principles, and updates them with modern technology and storytelling techniques, to enable you to write your book much faster than the “normal” process.

Step 1: Position Your Book

The first place to start with your book is the positioning. Generally speaking, positioning is figuring out where in the market the book fits–what the book is about, who the book is for, and what result you want from the book.

For traditional publishing companies, the only positioning they care about is what a reader would buy. In essence, publishers only care about books that have the potential to sell a lot of copies, because that’s the only way they make money.

But that’s not true for entrepreneurs. Now, most books are published outside of the old traditional models, and most non-fiction books are not monetized directly. In fact, quite the opposite; most entrepreneurs and business owners don’t make their money from book sales, they make money from other things their book gets them.

For entrepreneurs and business owners, a book can be used to get you:

• Attention, authority, and visibility
  
• Leads for your business
  
• Paid speaking gigs
• Consulting jobs
• Coaching clients

For the Book In A Box Method, we’ve adapted the positioning process so that instead of serving the needs of the publishing company, it serves your needs.

To position your book, you must answer these three questions:

• Why are you writing this book? In essence, what result are you looking for the book to produce for you?
• Who will care? In essence, what audience must you reach for the book to achieve your results?
• Why will they care? In essence, what will your book say that’s interesting and valuable to that audience?

I’ll walk you through each one:

Question 1: Why Are You Writing This Book?

You probably aren’t writing your book just to write it. You are writing a book because you expect it to get something for you.

Thus, your book topic is wholly dependent on what you want it to get for you.

For example, if your goal for the book is to help you keynote speeches at major HR conferences, then the requirements for your book are very different than if your goal is to write a book that establishes your credibility and authority in a specific field so you can build a consulting business.

By knowing specifically what you want the book to accomplish, you won’t get bogged down by trying to be everything to everyone, and you can then focus on a specific plan of action that will get you what you want.

This is not a small point, and in fact, this is possibly the most crucial part of this process:

You MUST be honest with yourself about what results are important to you, or your book will fail—commercially, personally, or both.

Part of the problem here is that some results are things people feel uncomfortable admitting to. It might feel embarrassing or weird to say you’re writing a book to be recognized for your contributions to a field. But you’ll never get that if you don’t acknowledge it first.

A key point to understand (before you get discouraged) is that there is almost no such thing as a wrong or bad goal. There is only a wrong or bad book for certain specific goals.

If you’re unsure about what your goal for the book is, read this piece about the mistakes that authors make when framing the results they are looking for, and how to better frame them.

Answer These Questions To Know Why You are Writing Your Book:

Why do I want to write a book?

It is easy to fool yourself here, so be careful. You can list more than one reason, but make sure you are listing the reasons you’re writing the book, not wishes you have that it will create.

What specific result(s) must I have to make this book a success for me?

This question forces you to nail down a specific, definable result you want from the book, one that will make it worth your time to write. Often you’ll have many different results you are looking for, and some take a while to come out. The more you are clear about the specific results you are looking for—business leads, client consulting gigs, attention—the more you can guide the book to get that result.

The Double Check Question: Create a worst-case scenario.

A good way to really nail yourself to a specific result is to create a scenario that meets your stated goals, but fails in all other regards.

For example, if you say your goal is to just have a book that you can put on your résumé and maybe sell at your current speaking gigs, then a question you need to ask yourself is something like this:

“So if the book comes out, sells no copies, and gets no attention, but it looks very professional and I can sell it at speaking gigs and put it on my résumé, would I be happy with that result?”

If you can honestly say yes, great, you’re done.

If you hem and haw and equivocate, then you need to drill deeper and make sure you nail down precisely what other goals must be included in this scenario for you to be satisfied with the result.

Question 2: Who is the audience?

In order to get the results you want—no matter what they are—the book must find some sort of audience. The audience you need to reach is directly tied to the results you picked, and you can reverse engineer precisely who your audience is by understanding who literally needs to know about your book to make your results happen.

For example, if you want to speak at a major oil and gas conference, then your audience is the people who book the speakers for that specific conference (and possibly the attendees).

If you want clients for your CTO coaching business, then chief technology officers (and the people who know them) are your audience.

If you want your book to establish you as a thought leader, then your audience is the people who care about the issues relevant to your space or who are influencers in your space.

If you want to drive business to your consulting firm, then your audience is potential clients for your consulting firm.

If you want to develop a speaking career, then your audience is the people who book the events where you want to speak.

This process is not much more complicated than asking yourself a very basic question:

Who has to know about my book in order for it to get the results I want?

This might only be one group, or it might be a few related groups of people. But the answer to this question is generally pretty simple, assuming your goal is clear.

You can absolutely have multiple audiences that the book will appeal to, but generally speaking, the more audiences you try to reach, the worse your book will be.

A focused book that is very appealing to a small audience is usually much more valuable to an entrepreneur than a broad subject book that is only marginally appealing to a lot of audiences.

This is because broad subjects, like general life advice, tend to not only be well-covered already, but also tend to not be very actionable for people.

Most people read non-fiction because they expect it to provide a positive impact or ROI in their lives. It is clear who the audience for a book about how to set up a pop-up retail experience is. Even though it’s a small audience, the audience is very interested in it.

Compare this to a book about a broad, general topic, like “how to be happy.” You might think everyone cares about being happy, and that is true to some extent, but unless you are really knowledgeable and already an expert about this subject AND you have an angle that has never been explored, it will be very hard to convince people that your book about happiness—as opposed to the seventy already out there by experts—is the one to read.

Also, please do not think that “everyone” is your audience. That is never an answer to this question; no book idea appeals to everyone, not even Harry Potter or The Bible. You must be specific.  

Question 3: Why will your audience care?

Once you know what you want from your book, and who the audience for your book is, you can determine precisely what your book has to be about in order to both reach your audience and thus get to your results.

What you know that your audience will find interesting and take value from is what determines the content of your book.

Think about yourself as you decide to buy a book. Do you ever think about the author’s concerns? Of course you don’t. You think about why buying this book might help you.

Well, that’s precisely what your audience is going to do when they see your book on a shelf or Amazon or their friend’s Facebook page. So you had better be able to answer that question:

Why does your book matter to them?

Answer These Questions To Know Why Your Audience Will Care About Your Book:

What are the main points you want the audience to take away from your book?

This should get all the main points you want to make in your book out of  your head and onto a list (from this list, you will later organize and create the book outline).

What, specifically, will your audience get by reading your book? How does your book help your audience achieve their goals?

Push yourself to focus on specific statements of value that the book will deliver to your specific audience, not broad, oblique wishes. The answer to your questions should be something clear and definable, not ambiguous.

You have to remember that your book is competing with an infinite amount of other media, much of it free. To overcome that, you must appeal to the self-interest of your potential reader, and identify what about your book will interest them.

What does this mean your book should be about?

This should be a very short statement that summarizes the book subject at its core. This should be no longer than a sentence or two.

The Double Check Question: How will people describe this book to their friends?

We use this when an author will insist on a certain angle or idea that we know will not work. Instead of arguing with them, the best way to get them to understand is to ask them this question:

“Picture your ideal reader describing your book to their friends at a party? What do they say? How do they talk about it?”

We’ve found that this question helps the author see the content in the book from the reader’s perspective, and not just their own, and thus helps the author to position the book in a way that serves the interests of the reader.

 Generally speaking, people actively share books (or anything) if:

1. The book makes them look smart, successful, or high status, and / or
2. They took a lot of value from the book, and / or
3. In some way they associate the book with an identity they desire, and want to broadcast to the world.

For example, if the book has a whole new take on an old industry, sharing it with their friends will make them look smart, educated, and well-read.

If the book helped them lose fifty pounds, they’ll talk about it because people will praise them for losing all that weight, and sharing this information will raise their status among their friends.

On the other hand, people actively do not share things that:

1. Make them feel stupid, and / or
2. Make them look low status to their friends, and / or
3. Are hard to explain.

Think about how people will talk about it, and position it so that they will be not only likely, but eager to do it.

Step 1: Conclusion

Do NOT proceed to the next steps until you have the answers to these three questions:

1.    What result must the book produce to make it a success for you?

Answer:

2.    What audience must you reach for the book to achieve this result?

Answer:

3.    What will your book say that is interesting and valuable to that audience?

Answer:

Step 2: Create Your Book Outline

The next stage in the process is organizing your book positioning into an outline. The more effort you put into the outline, the less the reader is going to notice or be conscious of the organization of the book, which is what you want.

First, I’ll show you an example outline, then explain each section and what needs to go in it so you can apply it to your own book, and then link a template you can use.

This is an example outline. That’s a real outline of a real book that we did for one of our clients.

And here is the Book In A Box Outline Template. It’s a simple Google Doc that has a complete outline template. This doc is not editable, but you can copy and paste that template as many times as you want and put it anywhere.

Outline Explanation

This explains each section of the outline, the purpose it serves, and how best to set it up.   

The Promise / Value Proposition / Quick Summary

This is the answer to the third question, which is what you say that is interesting and valuable to your audience, and why someone in your audience would want to read this book.

Author Goal(s)

This is the answer to the first question; the results you want from the book.

Anticipated Audience(s) (And Their Benefit From Reading The Book)

This is the answer to the second question; the specific audience you want to reach.

Table Of Contents

Having a table of contents in the outline helps you organize your thoughts and see the progression of the ideas easily.

Introduction

Self-explanatory.

Divide Into Chapters, Subpoints And Prompts

This is where the outline starts to really take form. Chapters divide your information and wisdom into digestible chunks for people.

Each chapter needs to be broken down into subpoints, questions / stories, and (optional) support. This makes it simple for you to talk through your ideas in the interview part, and provide the content for your book. Here is the organizing concept for understanding what a chapter is:

If you were teaching the ideas in your book to someone else, what would the major steps be?

That’s all a chapter is; a singular, distinct point you are making.

Subpoints

On the outline, the chapter will include all the discussion and explanation you need for that point, divided into subpoints and stories you want to make about that specific point.

The subpoints are the pieces of explanation and support for the point you are making.

There are two standard ways we create the subpoints:

1. Obvious subpoints of the chapter: If the chapter covers some set of separate but related ideas, like Ten Ways Doing Handstands Improves Your Health, then the subpoints are those ten reasons. Oftentimes, it’s not quite this obvious, but when the purpose of a chapter is to make a point, the subpoints are usually the support for that point.
2. The sentences that make up the logical flow of the argument: This one is a little trickier, but it works really well. If the purpose of the chapter is to make a more subtle argument, the easiest way to arrive at the subpoints is to write up a short paragraph that explains that argument. By breaking up that paragraph into its constituent sentences, you’re left with the ideas that must be explained and proved in order to make that argument—which are the subpoints.

Note: These arguments do NOT need to be complicated. Often, they are only about two to three points, but when each is broken down, they make the point effectively.  

Question / Story Prompts

Simply put, the questions and story prompts are what you put in to prompt the interviewer to ask you the right questions, to make sure you can talk about your topic.

This is VERY different from most outlines. For most outlines, nothing about questions is mentioned. The reason we tell you to structure your main points below the chapters as questions is because this is how you will create the rough draft of your book through talking instead of typing. For each questions, ask yourself:

What questions need to be asked and answered in order to prove the point that the subpoint is making?

Often, these are focused on “Why is this true?” and “Why is this important?” It’ll also include any questions necessary to pull the relevant details.

Story prompts are much simpler. We use the syntax “Story: [INSERT PROMPT]” to indicate the appropriate place for a story. This is a prompt for you to tell a story that is relevant to that section.

Note: You should make sure the stories are specific and highly relevant. You are not looking for a generic story in these points; rather, this should be a story that fits precisely here and shows something you are trying to display.

To do this, you really need to talk about specific times something happened. For example:

What’s the best time you ever [insert topic]?

What’s the worst example of [insert topic]?

What’s the first time you did [insert topic], and what happened?

What’s the most scared / happy / etc. you ever felt doing [what your book is about]?

Make sure you tell your best stories, and sometimes you have to use specific modifiers to remember them. The more honest and emotionally intense the story, the better.

Once these are all plugged in, we should have the logical flow of the chapter.

What Is Support?

Support is just some fact or set of facts that helps you remember what it is you want to talk about in that section.

In many cases, everything you have above will be enough. This is why support is optional.

But in some cases, you may need a prompt in order to remember everything you want to say in response to a question. This is especially true for things that include lists, details, or very open-ended questions. In other words, support is useful when the answer isn’t something that you’d be comfortable explaining off the cuff. 

Conclusion

Here’s the thing about conclusions: not all books need them.

But you should have one.

A clear summary of your points is possibly the best thing you can do to not just deliver value to the reader, but also make the book memorable, which helps you sell more books (through creating value for the reader, which creates word of mouth).

That’s why we, as a general rule, want our author clients to restate the thesis from the introduction, and then summarize each main point in the clearest, most concise way possible. Give the reader an easy-to-understand and repeat summary of your book to leave with.

What Is A Call To Action, And Why Use It?

But with some books, you might want to go even further here and end the conclusion with a “call to action.”

With the call to action, the author usually adopts a different tone, not just more explicitly inspirational, but also framed as an imperative. The underlying message of the call to action is: now that you have all the tools, go out there and use them!

Some authors may feel uncomfortable including such a direct appeal to readers. The approach can be at odds with their usual professorial manner. A call to action doesn’t have to come across in a superficial pep-rally way. It can be whatever they want it to be; whatever feels natural. 

In fact, this is an appropriate place to direct readers to specific resources. Keep in mind, you don’t want to make it seem like the whole book was a lead-up to a self-serving pitch for the author’s own company or services. But you do want to take the opportunity to send off the reader in all the right directions and equipped with all the information they would need.

Step 3: Interview And Record Yourself

You’re finished with the hardest part (the outline process), and now you’re ready to start with the fun part: the interviewing.

Instead of sitting at a computer and typing, you will now be interviewed. Your interviewer will use the outline as a guide, and ask you questions about the content of your book. You’ll literally get interviewed, like you would for a news article, except it will take longer.

You will record this set of interviews, get it transcribed, and after some editing, that will end up becoming the rough draft of your manuscript.

Like I said before, laying down your first draft this way (instead of typing) has two benefits:

1. Much faster: A normal conversation is usually about 8k words an hour. Even very fast writers are lucky to get 500 usable words in an hour.
2. Much easier: A lot of people have writer’s block. No one has talkers block. Having a conversation about things you know is almost never a problem.

Ideally, Someone Else Should Interview You

You may think, “Why do I need someone else? Why can’t I just record myself talking?”

You can. It is possible. But it’s not easy to talk at length about your ideas in the best way possible.

Even the most long-winded among us are prone to mental shortcuts in our speech. We assume far too much knowledge on the part of the reader, and we oftentimes forget basics because we’ve been doing something so long. Having someone else interview you forces you to elaborate and explicate, and makes you calm down and talk more casually, which leads to a better book.

Think carefully about who you want to help you with this task. It’s preferable to call on someone who doesn’t know the subject matter in and out. You want an interviewer who is interested in the topic, but doesn’t already know too much about it.

That way, they’ll prod you and ask questions to make sure your words are clear for a layperson. In fact, even if your friend is a brainiac, you want them to “play dumb,” so to speak. The goal is for them to get more information out of you than they need.

What Do You Use To Record The Audio?

In terms of the recording process itself, technology these days makes it incredibly easy. There are nearly an infinite number of ways to record yourself, and a number of services you can use to get that recording transcribed.

Almost every smartphone enables you to record yourself talking. We recommend you use this method. It’s dead simple. You can just set the phone in front of you on a table, or put in the earbuds that came with it. Either work fine.

If this is not possible, we recommend using your internal microphone on your computer, and the software that came with it. Don’t make the recording more complicated than it needs to be. This is not a song, the audio does not need to be perfect.

Interview Best Practices

Here are some tips and ideas to keep in mind while interviewing. 

These instructions are intended for the INTERVIEWER, so have the person who’s asking your questions read this section. If you are interviewing yourself, then these same best practices apply, they’re just more difficult to implement:

Plan out multiple interviews ahead of time

You should break this up into multiple recording sessions. Do NOT think you can finish the recording in one long session. It will wear you out, and you’ll end up skipping things. Assume this will take between three to six sessions of no more than two hours each session.

Staying with the outline is crucial

Interviewing using the Book In A Box method is different than the way a journalist would interview a subject.

You’re interviewing to turn your spoken words into content, not just to get the information.

It’s crucial to try to stay in sync with the outline. If you stay with the outline as you ask questions, then your answers will generally be in order in the audio recording. This allows you to easily sync up the audio transcription and the outline, which will make editing substantially easier.

If you don’t stay with the outline, and just haphazardly jump from random thought to random thought, you might get great material out, but when it comes time to put it in the right order and into a book, it will be a mess.

Make sure you explain everything completely

If you were interviewing just to understand the point yourself, you could do it very quickly. But when it comes time for writing, you want a long transcript of explanation to work from, to give you more context. It makes things easier, and results in a better book.

Even if you’re capable of extrapolating the point of what you’re saying, it’s worth having it on the recording so that the detailed explanation comes through on the transcript. So be sure to ask “Why?” and “Can you explain what you mean by that?” or “Can you be more specific?” often.

Make it feel comfortable

The most important part of the interviewing is make it like a fun conversation. Remember:

1. There’s no pressure since all of this will be heavily edited, so don’t try to filter your thoughts.
2. More content is better than less, so it’s okay to be repetitive; just cover each answer thoroughly.
3. Feel free to explore any tangents you’re feeling (just come back to the outline if it gets off course).

Use simple questions (or pretend you’re an 8 year-old):

The best place to start is with questions that are very simple, open-ended ones. Questions like, “Why did you do it that way?”, or, “How exactly did you do that?”, or even, “What was the purpose of that?”, create great prompts. Yes, they are simplistic, but in all seriousness, simple questions work the best.

We found that pretending you are an eight-year-old is a great way to get in the mindset to ask these types of questions. Obviously you should not literally act like a child, but it’s crucial to get into what the Buddhists call “beginner’s mind” and forget all of your assumptions. When they are making assumptions, don’t be afraid to ask obvious and simple questions that a child would ask to get the right information out of them.

It is actually an empirical fact that when people are in the mindset of talking to a totally inexperienced audience (i.e., an eight-year-old), they give their best, clearest explanations.  

  If you feel like you’re being too obvious, always remember this quote by cartoonist, animator, and activist Nina Paley:

“Don’t be original; be obvious. When you state the obvious, you actually seem original.”

Get the best stories by asking about specific trigger events

Don’t be general. Tell specific stories. The best way to get specific stories out of people is to ask about specific events.

For example, don’t say “Why did you become an entrepreneur?” That will usually only get a broad, generic answer that doesn’t get into specifics.

By asking about specific events that triggered important changes (e.g., “tell me about the day you couldn’t pay your rent, and it caused you to sell your ideas on shirts”), you push to recount the specific incident that created the decision, not the rationalized story they have constructed afterwards.

That’s the way to get stories. Ask them about the one interaction, the day they had to stop, the worst, the first, the best, the one time. Questions that can get at specific stories:

Tell me about the time when….

Tell me about the day when….

Tell me about the moment you realized….

Tell me the story of….

When was the first time you ever [insert activity]? What happened?

What was the first / best / most memorable time that you [insert activity]?

Can you give me an example of a time that you [insert activity] that didn’t work?

What day did you decide to [insert activity]? What happened on that day?

Steer into difficult emotions, not away from them

Famed entrepreneur, radio journalist, and producer Alex Blumberg says it better than we can:

“When someone starts talking about something difficult, when they get unexpectedly emotional, your normal human reaction is to sort of comfort and steer away. To say, ‘Oh I’m sorry, let’s move on.’ What you need to do, if you want good tape, is to say, ‘Talk more about how you’re feeling right now.’ It feels like a horrible question to ask. It feels like you’re going against your every instinct as a decent human being to go toward the pain that this person is experiencing.”

Put yourself in the reader’s mind

At all times, you should think like a potential reader. What would they want to know next? What do they have to know in order for them to understand what your friend understands? What questions will they have, and are you asking them?

Make sure that everything makes sense. Don’t just smile, nod, and move on. This is wrong. If it doesn’t make sense to you, it won’t make sense to the reader, either. This is so, so important:

If you are confused at all, the reader will be too, so make sure you ask for more information, because they can’t.

Make small answers big and big answers small

People need to understand the big picture and they need examples. When your friend is talking in the clouds and very theoretically, ask for examples, especially personal ones. We emphasize this—ask for examples—several times, because it is very important.

When they’re just telling stories, or just giving you specifics about step by step processes, then pull back and ask about the bigger lessons, about how this fits in with the rest of the book and the lessons it’s teaching. Even if you already get it, ask them to make the connection explicitly.

Both high level theory and specific details are important to books, so make sure you get the author to provide both.

Use questions that elicit emotion and personal reflection

Again, mostly paraphrased from Alex Blumberg:

“You want answers that are real and authentic. To get these sort of answers, you need to ask questions that make people answer your questions using stories or emotion. Questions like:

How did that make you feel? (Sometimes you will need to encourage people here, especially if people aren’t used to talking about their emotions.)

If the old you could see the new you…. (The transition: What did it mean to them?)

If you had to describe the debate in your head, what would each side say? (This will give voice to the interior drama and break away from the “canned conversation” type answers.)

What do you make of that? (This is a question Ira Glass uses all the time.)

Example of a powerful question: Would you have loaned yourself the money?

Then shut up and let them answer the question.“

Transcribe the Audio

You can transcribe the audio yourself, but we do NOT recommend that. It defeats the whole purpose of saving time.

There are many services that transcribe audio. We recommend one service specifically, simply because they make everything so simple: Rev.com.

They actually have an app you can download on your smartphone. You simply open the app, start the recorder, talk into your phone, when you are done hit save, and then send it to be transcribed, all from your smartphone. The cost is $1 per minute (which is standard in the industry).

We’ve used them for two years and they do an incredible job.

Step 4: Creating Your Rough Draft

Once you get the transcript of your audio recording from the transcription service, then you will start the process of turning that audio transcript into readable book prose.

This is the closest thing you’ll do to conventional writing in the process, but it’s more like translating.

What’s great about doing it this way is that you’re not facing the “blank page” problem. You never have to sit down and figure out how to not only get your ideas down, but also structure them and refine them, all at once. This process allows you to break it out into easily achievable steps.

First, Get Organized

Now that you have your transcript, your first order of business is to take that master document and organize it into easily workable chunks.

You do this by cutting and pasting each part (or chapter) into its own separate Word file. The entire book is far too unwieldy at this point to try to do all in one place. You’ll feel overwhelmed. Usually, the individual transcriptions corresponding to each chapter should run anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 words. These are easily manageable chunks to put in one Word document.

You should know how many different documents you’ll need, using the outline as your guide. For example, if your book has an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, then you should end up with seven different files.

Follow these steps:

1. Open up all the new documents
2. Title each one with the title of the chapter
3. Copy and paste the outline sections from each at the top
4. Put in the entire audio transcript for each chapter below that

This way, you have the structure on the top to always remind you of what your basic point is, and the text below, so it makes it very easy for you to do the next step.

“Translate” This Audio Text Into Book Prose

Now that everything is organized, you’re going to turn your audio transcript into book prose.

There are a number of ways to do this, but there is one process that has tended to be most effective for us and our professional editors. It’s counterintuitive, but the trick is to go slowly in order to finish more quickly. These are the exact steps we recommend going through for each chapter:

1. Read through the outline for the chapter in order to refresh your memory about exactly the point the chapter is making.
2. Read through the transcript quickly, to recall exactly how you made all your points.
3. Go through one paragraph at a time, read it, and then rewrite the paragraph.

We recommend you go paragraph by paragraph, rewriting each one above (literally on top of) the transcription of the same passage.

Some people prefer to do it side-by-side, in two separate Word documents, which is fine too. The point is you need to physically type your new chapters, paragraph by paragraph, and not just edit the existing chunks of raw transcription.

Why not just edit the transcription directly?

Because the spoken word does not work well on the page, and trying to edit it actually makes it harder.

You’ll soon see that transcribed audio is not English. It’s very far from what you’ll wind up with ultimately. Attempting to edit it will drive you crazy. Transcription tends to jump schizophrenically from point to point, and it reads very differently than it sounds, so trying to bridge those gaps can be awkward.

It’s much better to read and absorb the spirit of what each paragraph of transcript is trying to say, and then start fresh with sentences that make sense on the page. Look for the points you are making, and rewrite the content based on those points.

Think of it this way: the purpose of the transcript was to lay out all the ideas in the right order, so you always know what to say next. The purpose was not to do the writing for you.

I know this seems really counter-intuitive, but we aren’t telling you the process that sounds best. We’re telling you the process that works best.

Again, don’t worry about being perfect as you’re going to come back and do a full edit later. This is just getting to the rough draft stage. Just get something down that you can come back to and perfect later.

Note: In some cases, this may include adding content that isn’t in the transcript. Some ideas require some expansion to connect properly, and you may need to add transitions or connections that aren’t part of the transcript. This is totally fine, of course. They’re your ideas, after all.

The special problem of the “introduction”

The meat of your book should be pretty easy to write, as it’s just you explaining things you know, telling stories, and talking about what you have talked about many times.

The hardest part of your book to write will be the introduction. We actually recommend that you do the introduction LAST, after you’ve done the rest. This will make it much easier to do the intro.

Most authors think the purpose of the introduction is to lay out and explain everything the author will talk about in the book. That is boring and wrong.

The actual purpose of a good introduction is to engage the reader and make them want to read the book. It should be framed more as an interesting sales pitch rather than an informational piece (though it does serve both purposes).

To achieve this goal, you need to generally do three things in the introduction:

1. Hook The Reader (what is interesting about the book?)
2. Show Them Pain and Pleasure (explain orientation material)
3. Tell Them What They’ll Learn (make thesis statement).

This is a simple formula, and virtually all the best books you’ve ever read have an introduction that follows this exact process. Here’s how you can do it:

Hook The Reader (Attention Material)

From the first sentence, the author should hook the reader into the book. This means literally beginning the book with a hook line, even if the reader doesn’t understand how the line is relevant to the book.

For example, in James Altucher’s bestselling book Choose Yourself, he begins with these lines:

“I was going to die. The market had crashed. The Internet had crashed. Nobody would return my calls. I had no friends. Either I would have a heart attack or I would simply kill myself.”

What does this have to do with the topic of the book (finding success)? And why does James want to kill himself? I have no idea, but after that beginning, I’m interested and I’m going to keep reading to see what he does.

Though the first sentence must be good, the rest of the page and initial story must do the same thing. Starting with an attention grabber—a short story, example, statistic, or historical context that introduces the subject in a way that is interesting and exciting—will engage the reader and compel them to read more, and help lead into the rest of the material.

How To Find Hook Material

Remember: it may not be easy to see what the hook should be.

If nothing jumps out, look through the clarification material and ask yourself a few questions:

What is the most interesting story or claim in this book?

What sentence or fact makes people sit up and take notice?

What is the intended audience going to care about the most, or be most interested in or shocked by?

Then, you need to find a way to start the introduction with any of those points, preferably in a way that is interesting, reverses some common idea, or makes the reader take notice in some way.

In fact, many authors wait until their book is at the rough draft stage to finalize what they will use as hook material. If you do this, look for sentences, stories, claims, or other statements that jump out at you. The attention material will probably be difficult to identify if you think about it directly, but you can see it by noticing when you personally react to something, or when you notice someone else reacting.

Show Their Pain And The Pleasure

Once you have the reader’s attention with hook material, the introduction should show why the information in the book matters to them and why they should be paying attention. You do this by orienting them to the material you are about to give them. This means you explain to them why they should care about what you are about to tell them in the book, and how it relates back to the emotions they felt from the hook.

But this is not about just giving the reader simple information. It’s not enough to list facts and figures. No one pays attention to that. People pay attention to stories, especially stories that resonate with their personal pain and conflicts, and solutions that provide relief and pleasure.

The orientation material should not just be factual, but also personal, and should start by showing the reader the massive pain that accrues from not taking the advice or lessons in this book. Pain induces action.

For example, if you were an author writing a book about how to drive traffic to a website, you need to ask yourself:

“What’s an example of how my business suffered when it didn’t have traffic to its site?”

Once you’ve established the pain, then the orientation material should show them pleasure that comes from taking the action. Show them why the results are so amazing and that the goal is worth the pain.

In the same example, you could ask yourself something like, “Tell me about something you can do now because you have so much traffic.”

Tell Them What They’ll Learn (Thesis Statement)

The introduction should end with a very clear and concise statement of what the reader is going to learn in the book. There are many authors who like to be subtle about this, or “bury the lede.”

DO NOT DO THIS.

Clarity is the key to non-fiction, and your job is to make sure your wisdom is clearly understood by the reader. Make sure that your thesis statement is so clear and simple that even a seventh grader could identify and understand it. You are telling the audience, here is how you are going to do this, I’m going to walk you through it, step by step by step, until you understand how to do it.

Another thing to watch out for is trying to accomplish too much with the introduction. Yes, you want it to achieve all of the goals outlined above. But you still want to keep it as concise and streamlined as possible. Nothing turns off a reader more than an introduction that never ends.

Once you get them excited about what they’re going to learn, which is the point of the introduction, your job is done. They want to dive in, so end the intro and start the book.

Step 5: Edit Your Book

It will feel amazing to get through the first rough draft. You should congratulate yourself, and should take some time to rest and relax.

When we say take some time to rest and relax, we’re actually very serious. Set the manuscript aside for at least a week, ideally two weeks. This will give you a fresh perspective when you come back and begin the final edits.

The Two Step Editing Method

We recommend a two step editing process:

1. Read Aloud: Read the manuscript out loud–preferably to another person.
   
2. Manually Edit: Make changes directly in the document.

We’ll explain both processes:

Read Aloud Editing

We start with an editing process that’s not commonly taught, but is a secret trick of numerous bestselling authors.

You read your manuscript out loud, and mark changes as you go.

This sounds crazy, but it works. Paul Graham explains very well why:

Written and spoken language are different. Does that make written language worse?

If you want people to read and understand what you write, yes. Written language is more complex, which makes it more work to read. It’s also more formal and distant, which gives the reader’s attention permission to drift.

If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you’ll be ahead of 95% of writers. And it’s so easy to do: just don’t let a sentence through unless it’s the way you’d say it to a friend.

The reason that reading your manuscript out loud works so well is because you will catch dozens of things you would have otherwise missed. Like Paul says, hearing yourself speak forces you to notice bad or strange phrasings–even if you don’t know why it’s off, you know it’s off.

Basically, if it’s something you would say out loud, then it usually reads clearly on the page. If it’s something you would never say to another person, it tends to not read as clearly.

How To Do Read Aloud Editing

We don’t recommend that you do this reading off your screen. We recommend you print out each chapter, and read it out loud, to another person, off of that page.

You (and the other person) will inevitably hear errors, phrasings you want to change, sentences that sound off that you want corrected, etc. Mark any clear mistakes you see, or places you want to possibly edit, with a pencil.

If you “feel” something is off, and you aren’t sure how to change it, that’s fine–just mark it the first time through. The first time reading it, you just want to hear the problems, so you can go back and fix them on the page later.

How to Do Manual Editing

Once you’ve read the manuscript out loud, marked the changes, and done one full revision pass, then stop thinking about it for a few days. Give yourself at least 2-3 days away from the manuscript to clear your mind.

We are serious about this; it makes a huge difference. If you obsess over the manuscript for days on end, without giving yourself time away, you won’t do as good a job at revisions.

How To Do Your Final Editing Pass

Now that you know it sounds good and reads well, you have one job:

Make sure the book says exactly what you want it to say.

As you read every sentence, ask yourself these basic questions:

What point am I trying to make in this sentence?

Is it clear?

Is it as simple as possible (without losing meaning)?

Is it as short as possible (without losing meaning)? (Note: You can break this down even further, with questions like Are there unnecessary words that could be eliminated without any effect? If so, there’s no reason for them to be there, so cut them. Are there phrases that serve no purpose other than to draw out the sentence, like, “in essence” and “basically”? If so, cut them.)

Did I leave out anything necessary to understanding my point?

Apply the same basic questions to the paragraphs. Then apply it to the chapters. We mean this literally—ask yourself these questions, each time.

Yes, this is tedious, but if you do this exercise, you’ll find that you can not only cut a lot of fluff out of your book, you can also make your book sharper and more refined, and you’ll be able to really hone in on what you are trying to say, and nail it.

Some other editing notes and things to keep in mind as you edit:

Openings matter: In the same way that the book’s introduction is vital, pay special attention to your chapter openings. Each chapter should have a clear goal that is stated directly for the reader (in the same way the overall book does in the introduction).

Transitions are key: Think of your writing like a mathematical proof. In math, there is no obscuring with pretty language. If you are attempting to make a mathematical statement, one theorem or axiom has to set up the next. In your manuscript, you want each chapter to connect to the following one, but you also want each section within a chapter to connect. Ultimately every paragraph, and even every sentence, should serve a purpose.

Rewriting Is OK: It’s OK if you need to rewrite certain passages again. That’s part of the editing process.

FINISH IT!

Always do one last read through of your manuscript, make your last minute changes, and then move on.

We see this all the time at Book In A Box. We finish the rough draft and give it to the author for their edits and feedback. And they spend six months with it, not really making substantive changes, but instead get lost in details, like fretting over very small word choices. We have to almost pry the book out of their hands so that we can finish it, even though they don’t really have anything left to change.

This can be driven by many different forces such as perfectionism, fear of publishing, fear of success, fear of failure, etc. There will always be more to work on, more to change, more to perfect. But that thinking will kill you.

What causes it doesn’t really matter. What matters at this point is that you stop editing and put the book out.

At least one person, and probably many more, want to learn what your book can teach them. You have an obligation to yourself and to your audience to stop editing and put the book out.

Get your book out, even if it’s not perfect. It can only help you, and your audience, if it’s published.

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