Questions and Answers

Stuart: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the book More Show. We're back after a short break from Memorial Day weekend last week. So this week we have the promised Q and A session. So just me Today we've got nine or 10 questions that we've collected from group them together from the ones that have been sent in so far. So this should be a good show. There's gonna be a bit of a mix of high level subjects and then just some rapid fire ones on a couple of specific questions. So hopefully everyone's going to get a pretty good mix. Whether you've got a clear idea of what your book is already or whether you're just thinking about it as something you'd like to do but you're struggling with where to start. We should have a good hit of all the questions. Okay, so let's get started. So the first group of questions that we had come in were more on the fact of people saying, I know people that have written a book or it seems like a big job. They hated the process. Is this something I really want to get started with? So this is an interesting question, really. How big is big enough? I guess is the question that people are asking. It can seem a daunting task. I know certainly that a lot of feedback that you hear from people writing books in a traditional sense, it's very much a drudge. It's a job of work of getting through all of the content and the multiple edits and making sure that thematically it's together. So if you've been listening to the show for a while, you've heard us talk quite a lot about being specific, thinking of this as a book that does a specific job of work. Now most of the time we talk about lead generation because that's the easiest concept for people to think about. So when we think about how big is a book required for a single job of work, then it starts to become a little bit more manageable. So we're not trying to entertain people, but if it's entertaining, then that's a benefit. We're not trying to convince people of a particular big set of actions. This, as we've said before, is just a introductory piece. The aim is to make invisible leads visible and you can do that by answering one relatively specific subject. Even if it's not lead generation. We've had. We were working with Robin recently. He had a book that he was using to onboard staff members. So the culture of their organization. They own a number of convenience store, mini markets, grocery markets up in New York. So they onboard a number of staff across the various different locations. So this was more talking about the culture of the organization, helping people come together. So again, the key is, though, it's trying to do a single job of work, it's not trying to be all things to all people. So answering the question of how big is big enough, it really comes down to what's the objective, what you're trying to achieve. And the aim of your book can then be to start the conversation to give something valuable that answers that one question, knowing full well that there are other questions that aren't going to be answered by the book. But then you can start the conversation. So whether that turns out to be 50 pages or 150 pages may vary on the subject and what you're trying to achieve. But I think it's very easy to get carried away with too much content, trying to make it too big. If you're not very specific on the message or the outcome that you're trying to get to. It can become a little bit rambling and go around in circles. And every extra word that you put in the book is another extra word that needs to be edited or considered. Whether it should be in there in the first place. And the production cost go up on the book and the overhead goes up. So really as small as possible, but answering the question you're trying to answer in the most coherent way. Okay, so the next one then is kind of comes off the back of that we're talking about. The book should answer a single question. It should be fulfilling a single need. So a number of people asked, I have a number of ideas, but where do I start? So this is quite often the other problem. As business owners, we've got the visibility of the whole organization and it's very easy to see all of the questions that come in. And every time we try and answer a question, there's then five or six other contributing factors that are in our mind. We run the risk of trying to answer all of those things or address all of those things in the book. The key to remember is that that's not necessary. Again, going back to the job of work, we're trying to achieve one particular goal. So the best place to start, if you're overwhelmed with what it could be, is to think about who the audience is that you're trying to address, whether or not you end up. And there's another question about this shortly that we'll talk about. Whether or not you end up with multiple books further down the track, or whether you build on this first piece and make it into a larger book later because the market tells you, all, the customers tell you that that's worthwhile to start off with, much easier to start small and then go big, rather than trying to cover everything and put all of your ideas into this one tomb of a book and then just run into paralysis of not really getting anywhere. So the trick in deciding where to start is to pick who that best audience is. At the end of the day, you're writing a book for a reason. It's not just. You're not just trying to do it to fill some of your own time. The reason then should be as specific as you can make it to achieve that goal. So it may be that you've got several markets that your business addresses, or it may be that you're running a group. On the way to record this, I passed a billboard with a dance studio. Now, that dance studio could attract different types of dancers, different age groups of dancers, dancers that are looking to achieve different outcomes, whether it's to put kids into a class so they've got something to do, or whether it's couples getting married and wanting to learn to dance. All of these different groups could be a different book, could be a different subject, could be a different chapter. Deciding which one is the most valuable is probably the best way to start. Another element might be where is the biggest need. So perhaps one group of people ask the most questions. So a book would be a great way to engage with that audience that's. That's already there. It's already asking. So thinking about the outcome, thinking about the specific group that you're trying to target, deciding which group is the most valuable, which group you can answer the best. Perhaps it's a new product or a new service that you're looking to launch, and you're looking for this book to be part of the funnel that guides people towards that new product or service. So really, rather than thinking of the book as the outcome or the book as the purpose, the book is really just the mechanism to achieve that outcome. So thinking about who is he trying to target? What is it that they're most interested in finding out should really help you narrow down what the book should be about and where you should start once you've decided that. The only other thing that I'd suggest as a check and balance is just to make sure that there is enough to write about on that particular subject. So, as we'll talk about in a couple of questions, time the size of the audience just validate that the decisions that you make at every step, A, support the outcomes and B are a big enough target market to make it worthwhile. Okay, so the next question kind of ties into the first one of how big is big enough? And that is, I have a lot of other stuff that I want to include. Should I include all of this in the book? So quite often people will ask us, I want to include some images, I want to include some charts, I want to include data or testimonials. The balance with all of this is complexity versus being able to get it out there and being compelling. So every time you add something, it adds an overhead to the process. Whether that's just the time and effort you need to put in to make sure that you've got the right data, whether you need to make sure that you've got the correct permissions to use any images, whether you've got. Whether the data you've got kind of ties in thematically with what you're writing about at that point in time. So it depends on what you're trying to achieve. Usually what we'd say to people is, unless it's a very. Unless the point you're trying to make is very technical and detailed and a chart would be a valuable illustration for the point you're trying to make. So that old saying of a picture paints a thousand words. Unless it really is the case that that supporting information is needed for it to make sense, then the suggestion usually is, rather than put all of that supporting information in the book, why not have it as a follow up sequence? So lead generation is the easiest model to think about this, but it works across most use cases. For the book. The aim of what you're trying to do is engage a potential customer in a conversation to start that journey with them and add something valuable from the start so that they build a sense of reciprocity and you get a rapport going with them. If you include all of the supporting material in the book, two things tend to happen. First is it's a one shot deal. So the kind of kudos or credibility that you get for giving someone a valuable book, that's kind of one unit of benefit. If all of your information is included in that, then that's still just one unit of benefit. If you're able to deliver it to them in four or five steps afterwards. So package up those pieces of information as additional material, then you're effectively multiplying those units of benefit that you're getting by delivering something of value. So the book would be the first one. Then there might Be a free report, something a white paper, some more reading information. Then you could have an infographic displaying some of the content. You could have some additional charts or worksheets. All of those follow up pieces allow you to multiply the benefit. The benefit points are you getting by delivering people more and more value. The other element is that there's some figures out. I'll see if I can find it for the next show. But there's some figures out talking about the actual amount that people read of a book that they buy. The report that I'm thinking of was in terms of ebooks. It was talking about whether ebooks actually get consumed less of an ebook gets consumed because it's not physically sat on someone's shelf. But a bigger book tends to be read less because it takes more time. So having the main message in the small introductory piece and then allowing people to request more information if they want it is a great way of making sure that you're kind of drip feeding the content to them. And people are more likely to consume all of the content rather than buying a big book up front and then only getting to read 40% of it because life happens and they move on. So again, it depends which pieces should be included. I would definitely advise people to err on the side of simplicity. So it's very easy. Particularly we've seen a couple of financial books try and do this to include a lot of graphs and charts and detailed information. And being able to contextually share that on a page can be a challenge because the numbers just by themselves often don't mean anything. So you've then got the additional overhead of needing to explain what the charts do or what the data is displaying in words, which is then an additional overhead in writing the book and editing the book. So as you can see, simplicity is usually the best first start because it helps people in a very easy to get started way. Consumes part of the information that you're sharing, do in a way that doesn't seem exclusive or it's written from their point of view as much as possible and then deliver the information to them, deliver the additional information to them afterwards, then makes it more likely that it will be consumed just as I'm talking, just another point that I didn't have in the notes. But it's definitely of benefit. So the physical book that you have, the challenge with the physical book is that there isn't the opportunity usually to collect the details of the person that's got it. So if they're requesting a copy from Amazon or If you've got a relationship with a partner that's given the books out, or if you're at an event and giving the books out, the challenge is you're not necessarily going to know who's picked up a copy of it and who hasn't, having an opportunity to give people additional supporting information. So in the book, you could say for this particular chapter, we've grouped all of this information together into a white paper and we'd love to send you a copy of it. Just shoot me an email at such and such or request a copy from. This URL gives you the opportunity to collect the information of people who have physical copies of the book and not just relying on collecting the details of people who request the digital copy. Now, again, that's easy to think of in lead generation because you think of it in terms of funnel, but that might be just for audience participation. So your particular book may be targeting a known list of people you've got already. It may be customer that you've already got. In your chiropractice practice, maybe you want to share with them a new technique because this is where you want to pivot the business towards, or this is you're bringing on some new practitioners who are specialized in this area, sharing this information with people. You might want to give the book to all of your clients as part of a marketing campaign, but then you don't know which of them have expressed an interest in that information. So rather than delivering everything at once, having a way for people to opt in for more information does two things. Helps you collect the details of those who are interested. In an offline sense, reading the offline version. And even if you've got their details already. So even in the online funnel version, it also allows you to collect the details of those who are more interested than others. So 100 people request the book at the first stage, 50 people request the second piece of information, the follow on, and then of those 50, another 10 select a final or third piece of information. You know that those 10 who have engaged at three steps are probably the most engaged of all of those hundred. So when you then think about doing something, some execution with the book, you could try and execute with all hundred of them, but it makes much more sense. It's far more efficient to execute with the 10 first who have made it all the way through the funnel. Those are the ones who are the hottest prospects, the ones who are most likely to do want to be interested to do something. And then once you've engaged with those 10, then start engaging with the people further back up the funnel. Far more efficient use of the time rather than just being presented with a list of everyone that's requested something. Okay, that answer went a little longer than I expected, so let's move on. So a couple of quick fire ones. We had a couple of questions, people saying, I've seen books with colour interiors, books with black and white interiors. Should I pay for a colour interior? From our production cost, the printers that we use, the couple of printers we use that are similarly priced, colour printing usually triples the price of the book. So there's a very immediate cost benefit of sticking with black and white. Now again, as with every answer, it depends if you're marketing to a very high end audience, if your competition in that audience, the kind of baseline it comes from, a high production value, glossy prints, color interiors, bespoke graphics. If that's your marketplace, I'm thinking yacht brokers, high end real estate, high end fashion versus the other end of those markets, the kind of higher volume, low cost real estate or just more general fashion, then it may well be the case that that's just the cost of entry. You need to pay the extra because that's just what the market expects. And if you don't, you run the risk of falling below that threshold. In those industries, typically the average conversion of a client is again, lower volume but higher number. So the additional cost makes it worthwhile for the majority of other people. So probably the rest of the 90% out there, it's usually not worth it because by just tripling the production costs, let alone the additional costs of having to pay for better quality images, pay license fees for images, again, the overhead, like the previous question of the other stuff in the book, all of that means that you can address a smaller market because the costs are higher or your overall costs are going to go up. So usually I'd say to people it's a distraction. The purpose of this type of book, this type of engagement book, is to be the start of the conversation. Again, we see it time and time again, people fall in the trap. I was just talking to Kathleen yesterday about a similar subject. One of the benefits, the psychological benefits we have from creating a book is that people see that we're a published author, that we have a book and that has a certain amount of cache to it. The risk is or the challenge, the thing that we need to move past is that we fall into the same trap of everyone else. We hear the word book and we automatically think of a New York Times best seller or something printed by O'Reilly or a big thing that's got images and covers and cover jackets and all of these elements that are unnecessary, usually unnecessary in the context in which we're talking about it. So the aim here is to get the fastest, most efficient lead generation piece out there that helps identify invisible prospects and start a conversation with them. So unless the market demands that you have to do those other steps, it's very inefficient and costly to take unnecessary action. So if you can not do it unless the market demands it, I would. Or unless you've got an unlimited budget and it's really not an issue, then usually we'd suggest to people that it's not worth it. Stick with black and white. Put all of that extra effort into the follow up sequence. Dean talks a lot about does this effort make the boat go faster? Color vs black and white usually isn't going to make it go faster. And that extra thousand, five thousand, ten thousand dollars worth of effort that you've put in to get to that stage is usually better spent further down the funnel. Engaging people, helping them to self select to sift and sort themselves as more interested versus less interested. Okay, let's crack on to a couple more of these. This ties into one of the earlier questions as well. I mentioned it A few people asked how do I know whether my audience is too big or too small? So we talk quite a lot about targeting a single target market, making the book as relevant as possible to those people and not make it too broad because A it's more more effective in getting people to raise their hand in the context of a particular funnel and B it's just easier to write because you've got the discipline of self imposed discipline of being more specific. So a couple of things on whether it's too big or too small. The aim is to answer one question specifically as possible so the person who reads the book really gets value from it. And there's no kind of feeling of kind of a bait and switch type thing of you attract someone with a particular title. But then the content of the book is very generic and doesn't really answer anything. It's just a kind of puff piece on look how good I am. I'm going to blurb out a whole lot of things that I know and then come and come and work with me. The debate about whether the audience is too big or too small then comes down to kind of that cost analysis of okay, it's going to take me 100 units of effort to do this book Is that audience big enough to make it worthwhile? And really below that, you want to just be as specific as possible. So whether the audience is too big or too small really just comes down to the amount of effort that you need to put against doing it and the effectiveness of it. So too big would be where you've written a book, but where it's very difficult then to have a follow up funnel, because either it's a challenge to follow up with people because there might be too many groups of people, too many types of people. So going back to the dance studio example from earlier, if you write a generic book about dancing targeting everyone, the follow up sequence, then if you're talking about a particular style of dance or a particular group of people who are dancing, so men versus women or kids versus adults, or classical dancing versus flamenco or jazz dancing, if it's a generic book talking about all of it, that follow up sequence is difficult because you don't know who that target market is. So that's generally the context for is the audience too big? Is the audience too small? Is there the other end of the spectrum? So looking back at your customer set or doing some market research, and if you're trying to target a book at underwater cake decorating, to use one of Ed Dale's examples, underwater cake decorating for men over the age of 72, then obviously that target market is going to be absolutely tiny. So a bit of an extreme example. Let's illustrate the points. But it should only be too small, only be too targeted, if the group of people that you can address with it doesn't really make it worthwhile, it's too specific because then the cost of doing this exercise outweighs the benefits that you'll get from the potential audience that you come to. Okay, so let's move on to titles. Someone asked a great question saying, recently, I've seen a lot of one word titles, but we talk quite often about descriptive titles that state a problem. So which is better to be short or long? This is an interesting one and it's a little, not difficult to answer, but it takes a. It's a more broader copywriting concept. So there was a classic line that's quoted a lot and I'm going to do two things. One, misquote it and two, not attribute it because I can't remember who said it and I can't remember exactly what they said, but it was something along the lines of in a response to them, apologies for. The response says something like apologies for the length of this reply, I Didn't have the time to make it shorter. What that's saying is the aim is to be as brief and succinct as possible while still communicating a powerful message. And that's difficult to do very quickly. Often short titles that really hit the mark are often the results of a lot of thinking, a lot of back and forth to really dial in. So the length itself, the number of characters in the title, doesn't really matter that much. Apart from practical constraints. Obviously, what's important is the power of the words. So sounds obvious, but it's quite often missed. This is that old thinking of or the strategy versus tactics. A tactic might be that shorter titles have some power to them, but just a short title by themselves, by itself might not make sense. The strategy would be to have the fewest number of words that deliver the power of the message. So obviously that's more challenging to get to. At the end of the day, you're trying to target. The aim of the title is to get people to pay attention and then raise their hand and start that journey of. I have a challenge. This is something that's going to answer that challenge for me. Therefore, I want to request a copy of that now. If you can do it in fewer words, that's great. We were working with Fabian Fredriksen recently and started off with a slightly longer title, but ended up calling the book Leverage Now. Leverage really hit the nail on the book itself, the funnel in which she was promoting it through. So although that was just one word, the power isn't necessarily in the fact that it was one word. The power was in the fact that it was the right word. So it's very difficult to say yes or no, whether it should be longer or shorter, as long as it delivers the power of the message. As someone's looking through book titles in Amazon, as someone's reading the Facebook posts that you put out, as someone's reading an AdWords ad that you put out talking about the book, the thing that you want to do is hit an emotional trigger in that the heading and the subtitle allows them to raise their hand as interested because they resonate with that problem. So whether it's one word or whether it's five words, five words, it's sometimes easier to get that message across because you have to be. You can communicate more in five words than you can in one. But if there is one word that really hits the nail on the head, then that often is a good choice as well. The only warning that we've got there is don't Be, don't try and be too clever or be too glib about it. Inside jokes are only funny to insiders, and the risk of them is that you exclude everyone that's not on the inside. So you, you might come up with the cleverest title that you can think of, but if it doesn't mean anything to people who aren't your close audience, then it's a waste of time. You might give yourself a pat on the back, but it's not going to be as effective as something more descriptive. Okay, so we're running up on the 30 minutes now, so we're going to draw a line under it with one last quick question. And we've got a number more questions. And if there's anything that you're thinking of that we haven't answered today, then definitely shoot an email to us or hit us up on Twitter and we'll add this to the next session. The next Q and A session. I know Dean and I want to do one soon. We're just trying to schedule it with Susan as well and hit a bigger Q and A session. Probably do that next month. So if you do have any questions that we haven't covered already, then just send an email to either podcast it 90 minute books or or show@bookmoreshow.com and we'll get, we'll add that to the list. I'm, as always, Mr. Stewart Bell on Twitter, so feel free to hit a question up there and I'll save that for the next show. So I'm just going to quickly finish on a brief one, which we'll probably cover in a later show more in depth. But this one was something that someone had asked that I thought really kind of summed up all of the purpose of what we're trying to do. So they just asked, what will a book do for my business? I think the strap line that we use on the site for the work that we do is it makes invisible prospects visible or invisible leads visible. And I think that's really the key. Offering someone a compelling piece of information so that they can raise their hand as interested and allow you to start a conversation is really the key to a lot of what we do and one of the big benefits to your business. So in a very quick and easy way, you can create something that allows you to engage an audience that you may not come across otherwise. A book seems like a very low threat way of starting that conversation, both in terms of the individual person that requests it and also to kind of leverage it with other organizations. It Might be challenging for you to go to someone, a kind of complementary, non competing business, and say, hey, I'd like you to advertise my business. But it's a lot easier to go to them with a book that you've written and say, hey, I think this book is going to add value to your customers. I'd love to give you 100 copies for you to give to your clients because you're really adding value for them. You're making it very easy for them to put your message out there to help you start a conversation with their audience. Because you're starting from a position of giving rather than asking. So you're giving them value. You're helping this complementary organization deliver more value to their customers by sharing this book with them. And you have the added benefit, as we said before, if you have a way within the book to collect offline leads as well, or leads from an offline source, then it's very valuable. Rather than just asking for something first, asking to advertise your business, asking for someone to come into your office. The book is a great, low commitment, low threat way of starting a conversation and helping, making what were invisible leads or invisible prospects visible. So I think we'll go into it in more detail sometime in a future show. But I think that was a nice way to end this one to think about what it could do for you to think about how you can engage your potential audience, make those invisible prospects, invisible leads visible by giving something of value first before asking for something later. So there we go, guys. I hope that answered some of your questions as well. Again, if you have anything that we haven't, that we haven't covered in this show, then shoot us a message. We'll definitely get another show Q and A show in the can next month and looking forward to speaking to everyone next week. Take care.