How To Write A Business Book That Matters

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1:13Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Chance and my guest today is Josh Bernoff. Bernoff. He's a bestselling author or ghostwriter of eight business books. He's contributed to 50 book projects that have generated over$20 million for their authors. He's formerly senior vice president of idea development at Forrester, where he spent 20 years analyzing technology and business. We're going to talk about his most recent book, Build a Better Business Book, How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters. So Josh, welcome to the show. So it's great to be on.

1:50Good to talk to you. So I'll just throw out like one really big question to start us off, and then we'll hone in on things. What are the essential elements that a business book needs to be good? How is that for a big question? No, that's exactly the right big question. And I'd say there are two things, one that everybody understands and one that people don't understand. The thing that everybody knows you need is an idea. That is, you need something that will solve a problem for a specific group of people, and it has to be a differentiated idea. That is an idea that hasn't been heard before. So that's what people know.

2:28What people don't recognize is that business books are made out of stories about people, stories about business people, about ordinary consumers, about people who have a problem, and you get insight from the way they solve that problem. And unless you've collected those stories and shared them in an interesting way, your book's going to be boring and it's not going to sell. Can a business book like, I mean, a fiction book, you know, has a narrative and a plot and characters and we get to the end, hopefully, and go, oh, that was amazing. Can a business book have a narrative similar to that? Or is it there just to do some nuts and bolts work?

3:03It has to have a narrative similar to that. Now, we understand this if you're reading a business book that's, say, a description of Elon Musk's life or how the Netflix was created as a company. But when you're talking about a business book that solves a problem, there's a natural order to it. In the first chapter, we have to scare the crap out of you by getting you to see that there's either a problem that you're going to have if you don't follow the book or some opportunity you're going to miss out on. That's the fear and greed options. And then after that, we describe the parts of the solution.

3:41We show you how to implement that. We might show you some more detail about how it applies in different situations. This is a natural progression from you have a problem to the solution to the problem to the details of the solution. And that's just as much a narrative as if you were reading a novel. All right. Some people learn better from the negative. Let's talk about some business books that are terrible. What is without naming names? What, what do they get wrong typically? So I don't know if your listeners have had this experience. I have many times of the business book where you read chapter two and you're like, gee, that sounds just like chapter one.

4:21And then you read chapter four and you're like, oh my gosh, it's just the same thing over and over again. Yeah. So there's a word for what that book ought to be, which is a blog post. so if what you have is a blog post write a blog post and you'll save us all a lot of trouble ideas that are worth writing a book about have to be big that is they need to affect a lot of people and they need to have consequences they need to have elements to them they need to have some subtlety to it that you need to figure out and unless you have the ability to do that you really should just write a blog post. There are two types of business books.

5:01I read lots and lots of business books, as I know you have as well. There are two types of business books that I really like. Some kind of stay in the big idea category. Seth Godin's books, I think, are a great example of always a great idea that he clearly believes in and that you can believe in, but not a whole lot of how-to in them. And then there are the prescriptive books, which are probably closer to what I write, which is literally a retelling of what I do in in a book. Are there different approaches that need to be taken for those two different kinds of books? And feel free to throw in, oh, no, there's four or five other categories too.

5:35Well, in the problem-solving kind of book, which is both of those are, the big idea books and the how-to books are basically problem-solving kind of books. I think it's a mistake to think of them as two different kinds. They're really two ends of a continuum. So for example, the book I just wrote, right? Build a Better Business book here. This is a how-to book. There's 24 chapters. There's a chapter on covers. There's a chapter on how to do research, right? These are all very specific things that you have to learn how to do. If you look at the first book I wrote with Charlene Lee, Groundswell, the posters behind me on the wall, that was a big idea book.

6:14And the big idea was that social media wasn't a toy anymore and people really need to learn how to take advantage of it. But even there, we had to say, okay, if you're going to use social media for research purposes, here are the steps involved in that. Or if you're going to use social media for marketing, here are the steps involved in that. And unless you have some kind of prescription, then all you're doing is basically throwing grenades and blowing things up. And while that can be entertaining, it's not that helpful to people. All right. So I'm going to go down the same path. There are two kinds of authors, I think.

6:47And I think a lot of times they fall into maybe business models or how they think about business models. There's obviously the Malcolm Gladwell giant big idea that's going to lead to giant big stages. Maybe I wrote my first book, don't tell my publisher this, but I wrote my first book to really be a platform for selling product and for, you know, bringing a licensing program to the world using that methodology. And that was really, the book was a piece, you know, as opposed to, in fact, for many years, I didn't even call myself an author necessarily. Well, if you wrote a book and you published it, you're an author.

7:21So please call yourself an author. But what people need, first of all, you're not Malcolm Gladwell. I'm not Malcolm Gladwell. Very few people are Malcolm Gladwell. In fact, I have a section in the first chapter of my book about why you're not Malcolm Gladwell. So for the rest of us, the success does not come from book sales, right? That might be a nice little source of income. You might even not suppose you reach a thousand people. Is that a failure? If those are the right thousand people, that could be an enormous success. So the question is, how will that benefit you? And of course, it should start by benefiting the people who read it, but then they're going to say, hey, I should hire this guy or, oh, this company is worth looking at, or this is a different way to look at the world, what vendors can help with it.

8:10Oh, look, he's got one of those vendors he's associated with. So there are lots of ways that you can benefit. I guess the simplest way to put it is a book is the largest possible lump of content marketing. And just like any other content marketing, it attracts attention by being useful, and then it translates into some sort of business for the author. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, you know, fortunately I was some sort of dumb luck. I actually sold a lot of copies of duct tape marketing as well as it being my kind of launching for a platform. So I kind of lucked into the best of both worlds, I guess. Let's talk about book proposals for a minute, you know, which is a typical organ that a lot of people would use to get a publisher interested in a book.

8:54Boy, that has changed in the last 20 years or so. Do publishers care about ideas or do they care about platform or do you have to have both? Well, you have to have both, but platform is more important. And that's a shocking thing to say. Right. But in the last 20 or 30 years, what I have seen is that some publishers like Wiley explicitly say, you have to prove to us that you can sell 10 or 12, 20 ,000 books on your own. and the other publishers don't say it quite so starkly but they believe the same thing yeah and that means and they're not going to help you very much with the selling you have to provide that yourself so you need to have a podcast or a blog or a regular appearance on cnn or a forbes you know column or whatever you need to have some sort of a platform to roll the book out now a person with a large platform and no ideas isn't really very interesting to publishers because someone has to get something out of the book.

9:53But they look at the platform first and the idea is second. Sadly, it's true. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's become more true, quite frankly. You know, you mentioned Wiley, for example. I've even seen some authors talk about, you know, they had to guarantee that they were going to sell that. Yes, it's true. It's X number. So, you know. I can't resist pointing out here that there are alternatives now. Sure. Well, there are hybrid publishers. You can pay a hybrid publisher to publish your book. This most recent book I did with a hybrid publisher, and I'm not saying that's the only model. My previous book was done with a traditional publisher.

10:31And you can even self-publish books on your own through the Amazon platform. And of course, that makes much less of an impact. But if you really got to get your book out, you don't need to go through a traditional publisher anymore. Well, I have a few folks that I know well that made a whole lot more money on their book by doing self-publishing because it sold really well and they kept 80%. Phil Jones. Phil Jones is the first one that came to mind. But it is hard to make your book catch fire if you're publishing it independently like that. The traditional publishers have a certain amount of clout and distribution and the hybrid publishers are helpful in that vein as well.

11:12Yeah. So my books are not heavily researched in the, you know, the idea that we had 3000 participants in some sort of study. I mean, my books are really kind of more. Here's my daily knowledge. I mean, here's what I've learned working with ex clients. Is there again, I don't think there's a better approach, but they're quite different, aren't they? I, you know what? You need something that proves that your book is right. yeah and i was sitting down and i thought of these ideas and i wrote them down is not sufficient that might work yeah and you know everyone does secondary research this is basically going on the internet and finding quotes and studies and stuff but you need some sort of primary research but what you said that the you know the survey kind of research or data look i worked at forrester I actually created the program that they use to collect consumer data.

12:10That was wonderful to have all of that data. But you can write a book that's based on anecdotes. And if you're telling the stories of, you know, Sarah that changed her marketing program or Alvin who figured out a better way to track attribution, those stories are quite sufficient as primary research. You don't necessarily need a huge amount of data. Yeah. I guess case studies would fall into that too. I mean, I know people love to see, oh, I'm a business kind of like that and they did that. Oh, okay. That will work for me. Case studies are essential. In fact, I would say when I work with authors and we're like at the beginning of the book process, the lack of case studies is the biggest problem that they have.

12:54So you want to be thinking right at the beginning, where am I going to get the stories I'm going to tell? Where am I going to find these interviews? If a book is, let's say, 14 chapters long, it should have 14 case studies in it. So you might even organize the book around what you got. Is that? Well, one way to organize the book is to start every chapter with a story. Yeah, yeah. It's actually pretty common to do that. In fact, they're known as Malcolm's after Malcolm Gladwell, right, who's like the master of this. and people love that because they read it and they're like oh yeah i'm having the same kind of problem that she had or oh man he's he found an interesting way to solve that i'm gonna learn from that and i'll tell you something once you tell one of those stories at the beginning of a chapter whatever you say in the next three sentences after that people will believe no matter what it is and now let's hear from a sponsor this episode is brought to you by business made simple hosted by donald miller and brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals.

13:59Hosted by Donald Miller, Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A New Manifesto for Teams. Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting? All you have to do is license our three-step process that's going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale, perhaps without adding overhead.

14:40And here's the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create, and you can have them today. Check it out at dtm.world slash certification. That's dtm.world slash certification. You have, as I noted in your intro, been a ghostwriter on some projects. What are some reasons somebody who has a good idea might use a ghostwriter? Well, it's always a question of time. It's also a question of talent. Some people just don't feel like they're good writers.

15:21but mostly it's people who could write but just don't have the time to do it. And in the cases where I have ghostwritten books, and I've done three now, they're all situations where they were senior executives, very busy people. They had really interesting ideas and sometimes a lot of detail behind it, but they just wanted to hire somebody who would assemble that into a useful book. and what you read there was written on spec based on what the author, the person whose name on the cover asked for. They just outsourced the writing just like you might outsource the graphics or, you know, a survey that you did.

16:00Let's talk about editors. I think the common belief was that an editor was going to make your book better, you know, certainly help you devise or get your ideas down. And I'm not talking about copy editing, but, you know, kind of big picture editing. It feels like, and this is coming from my experience, that the editor's role has been to acquire a book and that's about it. And that input in a business book, they're not qualified to really give much input. It's a question of how busy the people at these publishing houses are. So there's a quote in my book from Hollis Heimbach, who's a very well-known editor at Hartford Business, who says, look, we expect the manuscript to come in ready to publish.

16:41yeah um so they don't really have the resources to edit your book but that doesn't mean you don't need an editor most people who work on a good book will hire a developmental editor and that's someone whose job is to to do the work of helping you with the ideas the sequence the structure the language how the chapters are assembled everything just so that you have a high quality piece of work that's publishable. Yeah. This is going to be a hard question to have a definitive answer, but I'm certain you have an opinion on it. Yeah. What role does the design of the interior pages as well as the cover play in the success of a book?

17:24Well, let me divide those two. Yeah. Okay. Unless your book has got some sort of unusual elements to it, like, you know, a lot of sidebars or something like that. The interior design usually just is utilitarian and it doesn't make that much difference. People need to tell when things are a heading or a subheading, but most books are pretty much interchangeable from that perspective. I've seen some poor font. Oh, you can definitely make a mistake there. If your book, if the body text in your book is in sans serif, you're making a big mistake. That's a serious readability problem. And I can't resist mentioning here, too, that, you know, how do you tell when a book is poorly self-published?

18:12It's the margins. It's always the margins that are screwed up. You look at the book and you're like, this doesn't look, yes. So the margins are like the dead giveaway. But you mentioned the covers. The cover is important. You wouldn't go out and get married and just, like, grab a T-shirt off of the hanger. you're putting your best face forward there and a striking cover design together with a title that connects with it can really make a book much more recognizable but things are sort of backwards people don't buy a book because it has a great cover they remember a book because it has a great cover and then that becomes an iconic representation of how great that book was they read it and then they associate that with the cover that they're looking at.

19:03I know myself, I'm, you know, walking through a bookstore back when we used to do that, you know, a facing out, you know, book that had a compelling cover. It was a stopper. You know, it would be like, oh, I want to at least take a deeper look at that. Well, nowadays people are looking at the book on the screen and it's an inch tall. Yeah. So the subtle little details of the design don't become obvious until the person has had it shipped to their house. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very true. Let's talk about another thing that's become, I think, a must, audio. If you're going to write a book, count on doing audio or having audio done today, I would guess, huh?

19:41Yes. Audio, you cannot have a book that has a full measure of success unless there's an audio book to go along with it. And people love to consume business books on audio while they're exercising or commuting, you know, or on an airplane or whatever. So you really have to have that available to them. And in my book, I actually recommend that if the author has got any inclination at all, it's great if you, the author, can record the audio book because then your voice and your willingness to communicate the things that are important to you will come across effectively. And even if, you know, you have a scratchy voice or nasal voice or something, most people can do a good job with that.

20:26It's just, that's likely to take you 10 or 15 hours and not everybody's willing to put the time in to do that. Yeah. Well, and, and, and if your goal is to build a community, to build a business around a platform, a larger platform around, I know I find it all the time. People are like, Oh, now that I met you, you know, I can hear you in my head already, you know, because I listened to your book. So it really is, you know, I think it's a must for if you want to do other things with the book as well. Yeah. Okay. We have exactly 30 seconds left. Let's talk about promotion. I think a lot of writers write the book and go, okay, now how do I sell it?

21:00Promotion probably starts before that, doesn't it? Yes. You need to plan the promotion. And the biggest mistake that authors make is to write the book and assume that people will find it even if they don't promote it. And I got a five-step process, positioning, what's the question you answer? How are you going to get reach? How are you going to get people who like the book to spread it? And how are you going to get the timing focused right around the book launch? That's PQRST. Those are the five steps that I recommend people do to prepare for promotion in 30 seconds. You know, and I was somewhat being facetious because, I mean, I think a lot of people do realize that they think the hard part is writing the book, you know, but you know, what you just outlined in 30 seconds really is an effective way to think about a book plan.

21:45Like you would have a marketing plan for anything, obviously, but really the best time to start is maybe before you even start writing the book, you know, start building that platform. Yeah. Well, people don't realize, but in most book processes, there's a period of three to six months when the book is in some sort of production and printing process. And you as the author don't have too much to do. That's exactly when you work on the promotion planning, because the temptation is to sort of relax and say, oh, I'm done. And then the time comes to wrote and you're like, oh crap, I didn't put anything in place.

22:19I'd tell you during COVID, that was 12 to 18 months for some people to get the books out. And it's like, well, I don't even remember what I wrote. How am I going to promote it? Well, Josh, it was great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to invite people to connect with you and obviously where they can pick up the book. Okay. So if people want to reach me, you want to go to burnoff.com. That's my website, B-E-R-N-O-F-F.com. I post a blog post there every single weekday, mostly about authors and their issues. And if people are interested in getting the new book, Build a Better Business Book, you can go to burnoff.com slash books, or you can pick that up on Amazon or bookshop.org or wherever you're used to shopping for books.

23:04And by the time this goes live, the audio book will be available. It's already available in print and as an ebook. Awesome. You can tell how long somebody's been online by the fact that they have their last name as a website. I bought it from like a third cousin of mine in Chile, but that was a long time ago. I actually, when all my kids were born, I actually reserved the names, their names. I don't know if they've kept them or not, but yeah, you can tell how long somebody's been online. All right, Josh, again, great having you stop by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

23:40All right. It's been great to be here and thanks for giving me the chance to speak with your audience. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics. Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it at marketingassessment.co, not.com,.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That's just marketingassessment.co.

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